There's a feedback loop, regardless of whether we find the communities virtuous or not. It's not difficult to see how, for instance, the boardgamegeek forums helped turn a very niche strategy hobby into something that has a nice sized shelf at Target, with a market over a hundred times larger than 20 years ago. You still needed people that could enjoy such social pastimes, and different societal changes will have an effect of how many people are even interested in such things, but the meeting ground sure makes a difference, as it reinforces the interest, and makes it easier for people to dive deeper on it. It just happens to be something that we consider harmless, or even positive.

o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.

It's easy to blame "economic issues" for all sorts of social problems, but I doubt that has much to do with this one. The 4channer-types I've known were mainly from rather well-off families and with tons of means and opportunity. Perhaps even so much that it'd be easier to correlate the other way.

It’s not about the narrative I don’t think - it’s about people trying to find communities that accept people as they are, and then what starts out as a joke starts to go too far. The commonality between every right wing mass shooter is that there was an online community - I dont think anyone goes straight to a hate community, they go to the first place they feel like they themselves aren’t treated awfully, and then latch onto whatever the culture is there. So it’s not so much the blaming their lives on others, as it is doing a win for their “team”.

I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).