[johnnyanmac]

It's arguably always been like that. The Internet's audience (on average) has simply grown up to an age where they start to care about that more.

>maybe people are getting sick and tired (and banned and flagged) of "good natured discourse" being entirely windowed by the latter.

I know it feels cathartic, but "record company bad" is neither discourse, nor particularly good natured. It's more reflective of how forums have shifted by twitter's popularity into being "microblogs". You don't really talk "to" people on Twitter, you throw out your tweet among a sea of tweets.

A shame, because I hate twitter precisely because of that.