I don’t remember that many political arguments. At least not this way conservative<->progressive. I remember them mostly from the comment section of news articles and YouTube videos (since YT has been a thing and of course Twitter. But less so from dedicated discussion places like forums and such. But my perspective is probably skewed. I wasn’t really part of early Reddit. And I’m not American and we have/had different discussions here. Well… Maybe I wasn’t that interested in political discussions on the internet when I was young(er). But the places I used to frequent were more focused on specific topics, technology and not about ideology (apart from free software ideology.)

But trolling, flaming, baiting etc has been part of internet culture for a long time. I don’t remember how they called brigading before Reddit. I think that is a term I learned in the last few years.