I'm pretty much always disappointed these days reading online discussions, and I sometimes think about how intentionally devolving most online conversations into petty slapfights is one of the very effective astroturfing techniques. It's basically signal jamming anything substantive or cooperative because people get tired sifting through all the noise and get mad reading all the bad takes. Though I have no doubt that many of them are still 100% genuine foolish humans.
Image there is an objective truth to all debates and it shows, that one side is further away from it than the other. If that more wrong side was more capable of leaving its cult and admitting mistakes, the discourse would change its shape.
The signal jamming as you called it, only works because signals get - wrongfully or not - reflected and amplified instead of absorbed.
