We all know negative content drives more engagement, see: Facebook. But I've also noticed this trend and for me it makes sense seeing as most of the content on the internet nowadays is negative content. Social media is used to belittle and criticize other people/ideas, the news has never been positive, we've passed the stage where content creators that are positive about products are seen as trustworthy, because an overly positive attitude has been linked to a "shill" mindset. We've seen the evolution of big tech from trying to destabilise old/existing industries and giving us a new, improved service to trying to squeeze as much profit out of their users as possible. Other big companies have dominated their competition and have used that power to boost prices, limit access to media, decrease the user experience,... In a lot of ways I feel like the toxicity that we are experiencing online these days is a direct result of noticing all these negative patterns and realising that most of what is being advertised to us has a large chance of being too good to be true. Games that look good pre-release but then get released full of bugs, software that was once a good deal becomes a subscription, series that get cancelled too soon, products that look good on release but have issues not long after without a chance to repair them, companies completely changing their objectives after a CEO change, the list goes on. So instead of trying to be positive and finding ways to get excited about something it is now a "safer" bet to be critical and negative about anything that is being announced because of the cycles of dissapointment we've all been through. At least to me, this makes sense, eventhough I would like to see it be different.

I agree with you assessment but I think it’s a snowball effect as well.

Mental health is notoriously declining and I myself feel the difference when there are days where I don’t touch social media.

I also found that some social media affect me more than others, namely X.

Before the acquisition I remember feeling like I was under an authoritarian regime censoring everything and that made me feel bitter.

After Elon there were short periods where there were no bots, and the algo was actually adapting to me, I didn’t feel bad using it.

But right now its so toxic and full of fear mongering posts, making it unbearable.

I hope society figures this out quickly because AI is only quickening the decline.

I've been wondering if Reddit has always been this cesspool or if I just got older. When I'm logged in it's not too bad because I curated the subreddits, but the default subs it shows me when I'm logged out feel like half the content is angry people complaining about politics and immigrants.

My personal pet theory is that the Internet is aging.

20 yrs ago, most of the Internet users were teenagers and very young adults.

Most of these people are in their late 30s to 40s now. Did new kids join too? Sure! But if you look at the birth rates of our societies, you'll notice that it's a bell curve. Consequently, the average age is going up.

Furthermore, there is a strong selection bias with this demographic: the happier they're, the less likely they're going to be on these platforms, because they'll prioritize family, hobbies or whatever else over ... Well... "shit posting with random strangers".

Ultimately you're left with a significant chunk of people that are often disgruntled, jaded or outright mentally unwell.

It's not really new, even going back there were flame wars and shit-posting on BBSes before the internet was common. It tends to come with relative anonymity.

It takes curated communities in order to overcome. Some places do better than others. It's also all to easy for biases to become policy in some of these communities/sites which can wind up almost worse than the shit posting to begin with.