I've noted over many years how, one by one, each usenet enclave of
enthusiasts on this or that topic eventually collapses.

How does it happen? One to three assholes consistently ride the pony
with bile and anger and angst and an endless series of faux vendettas,
all of it fashioned to look like something they care about, when in
fact it is primarily a proxy way to engage the world for folks that
apparently have no social contact otherwise. They can fight, they can
vent, they can stalk, but otherwise they've got almost nothing to offer.

Every post on topic eventually becomes bickering and insults. Each
such conclusion begins to happen more rapidly; at first there are still
8 posts on topic, before the flood gate opens, then it's only two.
Hapless people, who ostensibly care about the newsgroup, but only know
how to respond in kind, participate in suffocating the group. I use to
say "when somebody slaps, I slap back". I ditched that approach about
8 years ago seeing that all groups then become slap-groups and no
substantive discussion has a chance to breath.

I saw that happen to a fabulous group on afro-cuban music;
rec.music.afro-cuban. It became a bulletin board for the same
anti-semetic rants, mostly cut-and-paste from websites. After a couple
of years his lone voice eventually stopped. Everybody else vanished to
some laundered and rigid "bulletin board" with a different
time-consuming UI than all the other different and time-consuming UI's
out there. The job is about complete at rec.arts.movies.past-films,
and seemingly rec.food.cooking is hanging on by its fingernails as 1
(or is it 3) people have no other life than a daily name change and
cut-and-paste roadblocks. And then of course all their incensed prey,
nobly, dutifully slapping back; blocking all blood to vital organs.
There's another 8 or 10 of these I've seen die in the past 15 years.

As long as y'all insist on endlessly giving hand-jobs to the 1 (or is
it 8) trolls whose only objective here is to kill discourse, the result
will be the same.

Usenet is just a snapshot: This is happening on a much bigger level as
politics becomes an opportunity for dismemberment alone. I use to have
substantive debates with Republicans over policy. Now "substance" is
primarily the ludicrous Fox daily lies, Limbaughs empty agitprop,
whether the president is a Kenyan or a Mooslim. And I hold up my end
with outrage. Instead of policy on climate change and illegal
immigration, we're bickering about what Donald Trump or Sarah Palin
said. Instead of politics--or even political propaganda--we're
bickering about celebrities and racist one-liners. And I've been a
participant in changing the subject from something to nothing! The
Republicans would rather have us bickering about bullshit than arguing
about policy; when they control the discourse there will be no
discourse.

What's revolting is not that there are jackasses whose only goal in
life is disruption and destruction, what's nauseates most is the degree
to which well-meaning and interested people are so easily manipulated
into facilitating it. Every. Single. Time.