Aggressive yes, and more people deliberately misinterpreting what you say just to feel smug. Also people that don't understand that a Lemmy comment can't have the exhaustive detail and context of a Wikipedia article, and they take any omission of such in a comment as ignorance by the op.

All I know is the tanky and red scare shit took a steep nose dive.

Especially the grammar Nazis that floated here on a turd from the reddit cesspool.

Yeah I've given this place an honest try but people are so quick to downvote, it's not exactly encouraging me to actively post here

Also I notice the same 10 assholes in every thread

A couple days ago someone was trying to debatebro me I told them to eff off and that I wasn't going to humor their bad-faith ass.

Was expecting to get hate for it but instead woke up to 20 votes on the comment. It's awesome.

Not just the comments. It used to be page 4 or 5 where the hate/rage content would start appearing in the top posts. But it's been creeping up, and now even page 1 looks pretty bad sometimes. I bet even Americans are starting to feel alienated if they're not perpetually angry.

every time I see a full page meme in the middle of a comments thread I want to punch a hole right through its face

I kinda started getting that feeling too but I thought that was because I started getting more involved in discussions and political ones more. Before it was mainly quick comments for me. Anyways if someone starts to insult or deliberately distort what I am saying by cherry picking combinations of words from my comments, I put on my "three words at most troll hat" and the discussion dies pretty quickly. No point in writing a paragraph for a comment if the other person is just gonna take one word out of it and bash the rest with it.