At the end of Obama's speech in Ohio, he complained about the political culture degrading. I mean yes but people didn't suddenly get shittier. The change tracks the rise of algorithmic social media. It created an incentive to be outrageous in order to get attention as a candidate or commentator. The computer knows what you lingered on, even if you didn't click on it. And this mechanism does not exist on decentralized social media without algos or data mining. It was the billionaire tech bros.