Interesting theory; what also plays a big factor is mob mentality I find.

And if someone comments after you correcting one small thing, you'll then get downvoted as well.

I like your theory and wanna agree.

In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.

Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we've seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.

Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I've been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.