>>775533Anons were a lot more chill even inside occasional bait thread, like xitter without the brain damage, and there was a soyjak general. 'berian board culture felt a lot more unified, with regular reuse of and variations on OP templates. I guess its current state is just a consequence of the entire Internet having become more incel-ish and i strongly suspect a lot of people from then and the time around the .org/.net split have moved to their own isolated corners of the fediverse.
Instead of geopolitical circlejerking, we had regular slapfights between MLs, ancoms and succdems, yet even then most /leftypol/ threads were about defending AES or debunking marx. /alt/ boards were about as slow as they are now.
You can still find a lot of the old hobby threads on leftychan.