The old Internet, the Internet that I grew up on, feels different than the new Internet. Some of the factors:

1. The medium has changed. The intellectual part of the Internet used to be a decentralized, interconnected system of forums and blogs, mostly text-based, which made it analogous to the Republic of Letters. I remember a lot of threads that unfolded in argumentative controversy over the course of days and even weeks (in many cases, mostly among people who were familiar with each other). The new Internet, by contrast, is centralized. Most people most of the time go to Twitter, YouTube, etc. The new Internet is also less text-based. Where long attention span still dominates, namely in podcasts (e.g., the Joe Rogan Experience), there’s an unfortunate concomitant phenomenon: the passivity of listening to somebody who’s talking to so many people at once that there’s little chance that they’ll be able to give you the “time of day.”
2. The demographics have changed. Why has the medium changed? There are probably a lot of factors, but one of those factors is surely that the demographics have changed. (And even if the medium hadn’t changed, the demographic change would have nevertheless lowered the intellectual standards.)

I used to think that the most significant change was related to attention span. People went from the decentralized, interconnected system of forums and blogs, to websites like Twitter. But what about the ascendancy of the Joe Rogan Experience and the like? How many people watched 3-hour interviews, especially about deep questions, in 2000? 2010? 2020?

The most significant change, then, is actually that insofar there’s a long-attention-span milieu of the new Internet, there’s a much stronger incentive to be passive. People listen to 3-hour interviews, yes. But does that lead to debate? Not really.

On the new Internet, there’s a sharp distinction between the producers, who are active in their pursuit of money and power, and the consumers, who are passive.