> At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?
Usenet, for several decades already. Good NNTP servers had nearly perfect spam filtering and the trolls were handled individually by each user in killfiles.
If Google had kept the simple original web interface from around 2004 we might not have had all these issues. GPT-3 spam is hard to detect, but can be handled by killfiles.
Of course the real goal of Twitter is to do user profiles and possibly log private messages, for which Usenet isn't suitable. I wonder who on earth would send a sensitive "private" message on Twitter.
Usenet was much, much smaller and quite certainly not a statistical representation of society (people who could afford, access and understand the thing).
Most modern problems with social media started emerging when the general public started using it.
Specialist communities like IRC channels, Hacker News, certain subreddits or webforums still work quite well, because let's face it: It is not the general public there.
And even in specialist communities there is a certain degree of moderation needed in order to keep it in order.
In the offline worlds individuals for which (reasonable) moderation is needed are kept in check by society (either through social pressure or physical force).
Very seldom they are the beginning of societal changes but usually they are just unpleasant (e.g. "I hope you and your loved ones get murdered because...") people which most others avoid if they can.
I'm very sure I would leave any platform where their kind is allowed to run wild and so would many of my family and friends.
Facebook is a very good example: Most people are boring and nice enough. Those who are not (ranging from annoying to vile) spoil the fun for everybody else.
People leave (in part) because they don't want constant conflict and not every opinion is worth to be heard.
Usenet, for several decades already. Good NNTP servers had nearly perfect spam filtering and the trolls were handled individually by each user in killfiles.
If Google had kept the simple original web interface from around 2004 we might not have had all these issues. GPT-3 spam is hard to detect, but can be handled by killfiles.
Of course the real goal of Twitter is to do user profiles and possibly log private messages, for which Usenet isn't suitable. I wonder who on earth would send a sensitive "private" message on Twitter.