Oh, yeah, I don't necessarily think that every toxic site was specifically designed to be toxic, most were just designed in a way that people are drawn to. But when enough people flock to a place, it becomes toxic eventually. That just happens to coincide with the fact that when someone becomes wealthy from their website taking off, they often become corrupted by the attention and become the big figureheads we hate. They were probably assholes before, but now they're rich entitled assholes, which is much worse.

In the end the biggest issue with the internet is that too many people becoming easily connected to one another must also include toxic people easily connecting with one another, spreading the toxicity until it's inescapable in the community. I think we could slowly overcome the issues associated with connectivity on our own in time, and we were for a while, but the internet opened the floodgates and gave us too much connection before we were able to handle it.

My own mom went from a staunch democrat to believing Trump was literally the second coming of Jesus Christ sent to deal with actual honest-to-goodness Lizard People running the government, all because some small community of 100-odd people she found on the internet said so, and that many people can't be wrong.