No, it always had tons of ill-informed opinions and obnoxious users. The difference is that people were able to put it in perspective.

It was just the "exotic" opinion of some anonymous user on the internet you will very likely never meet in real life. Crazy and colorful opinions made a lot of places interesting in the first place, meeting people completely different from yourself or similar to you in ways you could't or didn't want to share with close friends.

The demand that everything wrong should be purged from the internet is fairly recent. Today users demand conformity like they demand it from their TV and newspaper.