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Highway OP wrote

This corresponds to the middle and end of the Internet atheist movement, and some of the same dynamics I discussed in my article there apply here as well, especially the slow shift from 2000s-era "argument culture" to 2010s-era "echo culture". The very early Internet had pro-argument norms; it was your god-given right to march into any blog or forum you wanted and tell the people there why they were wrong. Partly this was the inevitable effect of everyone on the early Internet being the sort of programming nerds willing to try this weird new invention. And partly it came from a utopian philosophy where the Internet was going to be a new medium that united humanity regardless of nation or creed in a great Republic Of The Intellect, or whatever. Maybe it was even partly due to naivete - a lot of people hadn't really met anyone who thought differently from them before, and assumed that changing people’s minds would be really easy. For whatever reason, the early Internet was a place for polite but insistent debate, and early websites centered around the needs of a debating community. The most obvious example was TalkOrigins' massive alphabetized database of arguments against creationist claims, with the explicit goal of helping people win debates with creationists.

Gradually throughout the 2000s this transitioned to "echo culture", where people hung out in ideologically sorted communities and discussed things from a shared perspective.

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