Everything about the internet for the last 10 years seems to have exclusively boiled down to building tools to control and ban people.
Reddit used to just, at worst, ban you from a single community. Then the power moderators began expanding bans to their entire 'network'. Automoderator tools to ban people for having accounts that are 'too new'. "You are doing that too much, try again in 9 minutes". Messaging the moderators used to get you a 72 hour mute, now it's 28 days. And now every time you get banned from a community, you almost always get a site-wide ban at the same time, when 10 years ago, the admins never did anything, and the admin team was actually relatively small and 'known'.
We used to have mIRC for chat, running independent chat servers unrelated to each other. Then Discord centralized it, and then added phone number verifications. I've seen channels where they literally require you to link you Google and Steam accounts to 'verify'. There's times where Discord would ban an entire server and literally ban everybody who ever used it, because I got caught up in one that I think I was just a member of and never even chatted in.
Can't use Twitter or anything without a phone number, so they can more permanently ban you. Photo identification, face ID.
You used to actually have to get banned by a real community manager or something. Now everything is about "safety teams" who have no names, no identities, and you can only issue appeals to an empty void that likely never gets answered. The identities of all employees on these "safety teams" is always 100% anonymous and unknown. Reddit even has many subs where all bans are issued by a 'moderator account' so you can never know who did it or why.
Now they're rolling out AI tools to monitor everything in real time and "interpret" TOS violations to automatically issue unappealable bans.
This change is 100% so they can ban your entire PSN account for 'TOS violations', since they can't ban your entire Steam account.
Normies took over the internet. The same people that were all about having the latest and greatest because their friends have it and they want to be cool. The ones that are easily influenced by anything and everything without knowing how to critically think. They took over the internet, completely changed how we saw social media to bring in all the normies for maximum ad revenue, and now we're seeing the destruction as we speak with the government sweet talking these normies into adding backdoors.
Now it's all about safety and security over privacy. Hurt feelings of certain groups is part of that safety and security. Your own privacy is what's given up in order to have that. Reddit and Discord moderators have all your info in order to effectively ban you. When reddit mods demanded more moderation tools before gamergate, this was the reason. To better ban anyone. They used emotion and vague reasoning to talk the admins into giving more tools and the power mods are given more info on users. This is how they're able to ban people with multiple accounts. They've also banned people for things they've done offsite.
Internet 1.0 was the beginning. Internet 2.0 was after the dotcom boom and the rise of forums. Internet 3.0 is the rise of social media and smartphone apps. We're now at Internet 4.0 where you have no more privacy and to speak freely on one site means you are completely eliminated from many other sites.
The internet and parts of the internet are at their greatest moment when it's just a bunch of nerds and autists together.