You're also right, something has changed. I'm old enough to have seen it on a much larger scale than most who use these sites. I remember before the internet, people were engaged and focused on issues, families gathered around the nightly news and presidential debates and then discussed them with their peers.

What we're seeing now is the result of America (and other nations) opening up an unchecked access-point for enemies, foreign and domestic, to subvert our very identity as a people. They (being a mixture of forces who want to slice off a piece of America's pie) used the KGB handbook word-for-word for years to amplify both sides of every discussion, every social issue and every political debate to absurd levels. Online allowed this to happen without any resistance and it's so easy to do that with a tiny amount of funding anyone can set it in action. There is no point or goal other than making online discourse so incredibly vitriolic, absurd, unreal, and disconnected from reality that people gradually tune out and stop caring about the actual issues that impact us all.

You saw this happen slowly and ramp up in the last several years, so we now have a population who do not trust science, do not trust their political representatives, they do not trust what they see online, they don't trust what they see on television, and they don't trust their neighbors. While at the same time, feeling that it's so inconsequential that there's no point in being involved anyway. If everything is bullshit and nonsense, why not just watch the latest Netflix series, browse facebook and laugh at everyone you don't agree with and go to bed.

The carnage is all people tune in for.