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Yes...
xkcd #438 (June 18, 2008)
Personally, I think that we (humans) haven't really socially adjusted to digital communications technology, its speed or brevity, or the relatively short attention span it tends to encourage. We spent millennia communicating by talking to each other, face to face, and we're still kind of bad at that but we do mostly try to avoid directly provoking each other in person. Writing gave us a means to communicate while separated, but in the past that meant writing a letter, a process that is generally slow and thoughtful. In contrast, commenting on social media is usually done so quickly that there isn't much thoughtfulness exhibited.
We've had three-ish? decades exchanging messages on the internet, having conversations with complete strangers, and being exposed to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other people reading and responding to what we write... less than one human lifetime. We're not equipped for this, mentally, emotionally, historically. Social and cultural norms haven't adapted yet.
Totally agree. Seeing how "Internet like" communication existed before the Internet is always fascinating to me. Whether it's fanclubs, wargaming zines or Enlightened era correspondence, people have had written interactions with effective strangers for centuries. But it was incredibly different before.
The very act of sitting down to write, paying some money and effort to literally post it probably had a huge calming effect on idle bad faith takes. And I imagine that getting a letter with someone telling me names for thinking McCoy is better than Spock would probably make me feel derisively sorry for the poor nerd who went to the effort.
Yeah, and if you wrote some feedback to a magazine article, the editor might write a response to you and publish both in next month's issue, but that would be the end of it. No one who read your feedback as published in the magazine could respond to you directly - it's not really a conversation, it's slow and limited by the format. You could write another message to the editor responding to their response, but that wouldn't get published in the following issue so at most it would just be a one-to-one communication.
This is very different from writing a post on an internet message board and getting twenty responses from twenty different people in a span of minutes. The closest past equivalent I can think of is literal soapboxing, where you go stand on a street and talk at people walking by, and they can immediately respond to you if they choose - but then that's in person, face-to-face.