Goldilocks – Great answer!!
Coffee – I think his posts kind of prove him to be both new and a bachur. And knowing why he has all this free time makes me feel better 🙂
I think the real answer to his question though is that the CR was one of the few moderated places to go to talk to other frum people and back then, I hate to say the truth, but people cared about what they exposed themselves to more than now. People send around not so appropriate memes that they never would have forwarded years back. They “skip over” nivel peh and topics that would never have been given their attention in the past. Anyone who reads comments on articles (anywhere) is exposing themselves to tons that most of us would never have considered letting into our heads 10 years ago.
So back when there was no whatsapp and people were more careful about what they read we had the CR for connecting and schmoozing. People now have whatsapp groups giving their phone numbers away like it ‘s nothing. Times have changed (unfortunately)
And last piece, I think, was the twitter damage. People used to have conversations. Even pig headed, narrow minded ones. Things evolved over time to people throwing pot shots, responses, put downs at each other. We take up a cause and get ready for battle. If you compare even the angry threads from before that time, it is so much different than the machine gun style, spit your piece out to the world type of “communicating”, sometimes on three different forums at the same time.
Not everyone does this obviously, not every conversation is like this, but it is definitely a very huge shift from before. People have causes, defend their teams. It used to be like that in the zionist/anti zionist threads but all others were more conversationalistic. Now….