The biggest difference IMO is that trolls were simply trolls, not paid adversaries or guerilla marketers or influence peddlers, so ignoring the trolls was an effective response. The bots nowadays also makes the volume of everything so much greater and harder to deal with.
The good old days aren't coming back.
Then there was that case of the spammer who got hacked for being an ahat and he sued and got the hackers sent to big boy prison. That was back in the mid to late 80's (I think... it was so long ago.
Back then we were setting up uucp, and uudecoding alt and we were all alt.binaries.gifs.sex.freaky.youdontwanttoknow
Aol wasn't even a thing yet, but after Gen Pop got let in to the Intenet and that spam guy got someone put in jail, it was all downhill IMHO..
- the facts of the case are irrelevant, what's important now is how the tech companies reacted
- the facts of the case are extremely relevant, because that would obviously inform how Twitter/Facebook deal with the content on their website
- Twitter's response was severely mismanaged (or not, some think it was wise) because it will invite further accusations that they "censor" conservative voices
- The usual, and completely unsettled, debate about publisher vs platform for social media companies
- "How did we get here? When I was young, the internet was a free for all and it was cool. Can we go back to that?"
- Some interesting discussions about if democracy can survive in the social media age
- At times, some philosophical discussions about what is a "fact"
- An interesting discussion about what it means to have "anonymous" sources
- A great discussion about if the "slippery slope" actually is a logical fallacy
There's a few more.
To be quite frank, HN really is a good community. These are all worthy things to talk about! Within the horrorshow that is 2020, it's kind of cool that there's a place where a (mostly) civil discussion can be had about these extremely complex topics.