Over the time I've used it (94 to 2020) it's shifted radically, it used to be kooky, niche, fun or just weird (and it is still that on the edges) but by and large rarely mean/cruel, the main sites are just a torrent of bile spouted by morons venting their spleen at the universe.
Comment sections on any news article, youtube videos - pretty much everywhere outside of heavily moderated forums and the like are vile.
It's one of the reasons I visit a few heavily moderated subject specific sub-reddits, this place and IRC and ignore literally everything else (I have comment sections nuked in ublock origin).
I respect anyone who voluntarily wades through that crap honestly.
I do moderate https://old.reddit.com/r/realminimalism/ but no-one has ever gotten the joke.
As a community grows the probability that it includes disruptive assholes approaches 1. Unmoderated communities do not scale.
I think that a lot of communities had a passion for cultivating a freedom of expression, but actually had a lot of unspoken/unrealized rules in mind.
In my opinion a lot of communities would gain a lot by a flashing banner "We decide what content we want on our platform and we will take arbitrary action to protect our choices". In practice is what social media companies are doing now even if they cannot state it as such (in part for legal reasons and in part for marketing reasons)
We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community.
It's been a slow boil. But things are different now than they were years ago. Not just because the community has grown but (at least from my perspective) because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.
We at least are fortunate to have the capability to build tools to identify behavior that might be an issue even without taking automated action. But "I'm not touching you" behavior is sometimes hard to catch when people avoid certain key words, at least until confronted. It's a pain, really.