The question to me becomes: what facilitates quality over quantity? What encourages earnest dialectic dialogue over raging and trolling?

Yeah that definitely is the question. And I’m not going to claim that I have the definitive answers.

I think one aspect is that it used to take a lot of effort to publish something. So there was an incentive to only publish stuff that was worth publishing. That doesn’t mean it was necessarily close to factual or even strictly objectively “better”. But it was harder to unleash a shitstorm on small things and, since a lot less was published, there was more time to consider the things that were.

I think that ties into the second point, people had more time to process stuff. We are racing from headline to headline and only processing using emotions not rational thinking.

But I also have to admit that manipulation and propaganda obviously were a thing and worked in the past too so maybe that’s all just romanticism for a time that wasn’t actually better, just different.

Edit: I think Lemmy is better only because we are still in relatively small spaces and many instances are relatively quick with banning trolls (and even defederating entire instances). So maybe smaller but diverse spaces with harsh moderation on trolling/intentional misinformation are the answer?