I think we’re still, unfortunately, living in the fallout of things like Gamergate, where bad actors realized they could train people in a lot of subtle kinds of dog whistling and forms of bad faith interaction. We’re all unfortunately victims of a war to claim internet culture for the far right.

Steve Bannon was one of the earliest people to realize he could weaponize “Gamers” to try and influence the nature of discourse on the Internet, that’s sort of what Gamergate was all about; testing the waters for how young men could be converted into toxic edgelords and then essentially let loose.

The effectiveness comes with the fact that it’s a self-sustaining kind of behavior – once you equip someone with with toxic rhetorical tools and then reinforce the validity of that kind of thinking using insulated communities as sort of incubators, it just keeps spreading until being hostile and aggressive is normalized as the first response to anything. So much so that even people charged with moderating communities will hesitate to address it in direct way, instead operating under the philosophy “This is just the way things are, you can’t ban everyone”.

If you ever have the time and inclination, Innuendo Studios did a really insightful long-form analysis of the origins and tactics around Gamergate, and once you hear someone articulate it all and put it in a historic context it really helps clarify why, as you say, the Internet has seemed to becoming increasingly toxic as a default. It’s not all a direct result of Gamergate, but those events encapsulate so many concepts that are relevant even today, GG helped field test many of the crappy tactics we see online today, and then giant social media algorithms realized they could generate clicks by promoting that rage culture.