Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years.

Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”

The big political change of more recent years, I would say, is political discussion overflowing expressly political fora and contaminating pretty much everywhere because of how social media functions. A band or author will share some entirely innocuous, non-political post on their social media pages, but the comment threads below them can easily descend into a shitshow of partisan quarreling.

Until the last few years, the choices in basically every developed country has been between 'red neoliberal' and 'blue neoliberal'. Predictably, voters were bored. Recently, there have started to be genuinely different options on the ballot sheet, on both ends of the spectrum.

I would agree with that. Freedom of expression seemed to be a foundational value of the internet when I was growing up, but perhaps that was a less political idea back then. Nowadays, the top comment in this thread is lamenting that we have allowed people who don’t have ‘the correct values’ to participate in the internet.

Internet == Good for Humanity

Social Media == Bad for Humanity

that is my opinion, since the raise of platforms like facebook and twitter that is when things IMO really started to descend. Of course I am open to the possibility that social media is not the cause and it would have happened regardless but...

I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. I don't remember ever seeing politics on Gopher, but I could have just missed that.

Even aside from overtly political newsgroups like talk.politics.misc, and talk.abortion, politics was all over Usenet.