I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider.<p>This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check.<p>There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task.<p>Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold.<p>Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.