The AOL effect

 

Many years ago the internet was a place where only government agencies or education facilities existed. These players were denoted by one of the following domain suffixes:

*.edu
*.gov
*.mil

Then along came the .com revolution and those of us on the net found a new group of people "the general public". At first this was people who were not typical members of the public because in 1989 the people who had a computer were fewer and usually had some legitimate business reason to own something of such specific use. 

AoL however tried to capture the mums and dads of America and the experience became more and more the opinionated and uneducated and quickly if you saw a argument occuring you'd find that the protagonist had a domain suffix like .aol

Quickly it became known as Arseholes On Line and opinions were more like:

Then came internet on phones and it all got much worse as the base of internet use expanded. To me its not insignificant that the guy is using an Apple computer. Despite Apple not being the first to produce smartphones, they were the first to lowball it ot the General Public even adding cunning things to their default system seeings like "Sent from my iPhone" on emails. Making idiots think that only iPhones could do that , while making the rest of us facepalm.

Now its about "main stream TV" level.