My theory is that as people get more success in life, they tend to get "busier". They have families, careers, hobbies they've invested time in, money to take travel vacations, etc. They just do more "stuff". This results in less time and interest towards getting into arguments with randos on the internet.

The internet is extremely accessible and economically inexpensive though, so almost everyone can get on here if they want, regardless of any personal degree of any sort of life proficiencies.

Together, these factors result in it being the mass of humanity with some of the cream skimmed off. So that's what we tend to see around us, the internet is the skim milk of humanity. Then to avoid all the watery garbage so prevalent everywhere, we further clump into more segmented communities where we can find more like-minded people to associate with, simply because that's more enjoyable.

This is one of the reasons I think it's important to actually put effort into interacting on here, to try to help prevent it from worsening before we can address some of the underlying technical problems it has introduced into our societies.

It was true before the internet too, there was just less opportunities to witness it because you didn't interact with thousands of strangers at once.

Maybe it’s that we made the Internet so full of disinformation that everyone is just automatically refusing to listen to others,

We've made a vast social space where people can get validation and acceptance as easily as they can choose to be challenged and face threats to their own sense of self importance and their egos, and this isn't to sound disparaging, we ALL have sensitive egos and all feel a resistance to facing challenges, so what will we all choose over and over? It's natural that we seek the path of least resistance that also boosts our positive feelings about ourselves.

We're not a rational or reasonable species, we use rational and reason to explain our emotions but those explanations are rarely accurate or based in reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF98ii6r_gU pretty sure this is the one [from the series] your post made me think of.. My take away as relevant here is that it's not overcomplicated: If your a marginalized person and you know your rights, all the facts and appeals reason will be dismissed by those who buy into the fear-based moral panic propaganda about you, solely on your intrinsic traits.

That's not a two-way street.

Choosing not to engage with such people does not put me in an information silo in the same way that the population influenced by right-wing authoritarianism choose to stand on both sides of a contradiction and refuse to analyze the true root causes of their woes; that you can't class traitor yourself onto the side of the ultra-wealthy, and that their Supreme Leader will throw them under the bus at the first incentive.

A person who chooses to protect their energy from such a Facebook uncle, does not consitute a both-sides.

Not that I went looking for anyone pressing a "both-sides" angle...hoping we can leave it behind in terms of "information silos"

I think it's because people have grown up with or are the people who were lied to by the smart people with credentials. And now that a lot of that information has been disproved, don't trust the system. If you've tasted the credentials system, it's known that a lot of that is nepo, wealth, political, etc., it casts a doubt on everything. Now you have to weed through everything to find out if it's right regardless of credentials. Who do you trust? Also, new information comes along and theories change, so who's to say that those theories are going to stick around. Basically, it's complicated.

They haven't left, they just chum the water a bit and sit back and enjoy the show.

With hard vacuum though, I believe I remember you may get a couple seconds of consciousness before you pass out from the stress. (unless it's explosive which could knock you out instantly) You should usually get a couple minutes without any permanent injuries before death from asphyxiation. Any injuries would more or less be your larynx and eardrums, both from air getting rapidly pushed out. To minimize it you would need to be actively exhaling while opening the tubes to your ears (what you do when popping them) which will allow air to escape less forcefully.

Emboli and frostbite will however happen towards the end of those minutes. But with us being mostly a mix of liquids and solids, (with dissolved gasses) which take time to sublimate, (evaporation in a vaccum) no insta-freeze or red mist.