They birthed and normalized shitty internet behavior: rickrolling on the lighter end, trolling, doxxing, and swatting.
They would also do shit like make fun of mentally handicapped people, which would lead goons to harassing the victims IRL and teaching kids that this was all OK.
And they would go after people who talked shit about about them, criticized them, or otherwise attacked them. The 4chan army would come out in force and try to ruin people's online existence.
Before Q-Anon showed up, they had started calling Trump God Emperor during the election. I think they may just have chose him as the candidate who would cause the most chaos, but it's easy to see how others others would take their goals more seriously and want Trump as president.
And the cycles of shitty behavior over decades attracted more and more rightwingers. I used to think of them as a chaos collective, but the politics swung hard right.
And then they spread to other platforms with r/the_donald, pepe the frog, and calling each other pedes.
Dragon's Lair, when you look back on it, was a corporate grab in the arcade world. Disney-level graphics when all the other games were 8-bit, and the worst gameplay ever in an arcade game...because it was made by someone who'd never set foot in an arcade.
The only competition it has for worst came later when that hologram game came later where you're a cowboy shooting...Native Americans. Another turd that was all graphics and nothing else.
I don't have a solution to your question, but I started deleting my account annually so that it was harder to track me, spy on me, and sell my information.
Before I started doing that, I had an account with 900,000 karma. When you asked for your account to be deleted, the Reddit automated response was 'Are you sure you want to do this? After one month, all of your content will be deleted.' And that's what happened. If I look on reddit, my posts were gone. On google, I could find people mentioning my username but not any actual posts by that account.
TLDR: They used to threaten you with deleting all of your posts, and, based on my experience, they did exactly that with my old account.
It's kinda funny to see them flip to threatening to keep your content.
Now that I've been here a couple of weeks, kbin.social is chock full of recent reddit immigrants saying we need this, this, and this. Are these people going to do the programming? Nope.
We need to focus on posting, responding and communicating so that this place has more content.
People who will remain at an exploitative corporate website to avoid the inconvenience are not people I'm interested in trying to sell the fediverse to.