I was originally going to write something else but, and having reread Foxhoarder’s post, I think she covered most of what I was going to say. The only thing I’d add is my own opinion that an over-emphasis of abuse is what led to the fandom’s many problems. Hellgremlins and ugly design was born out of a need to “justify” abuse, and the harassment of other artists was done more so by abusers to hugboxers, aka posting abuse comments on hugbox images, or demanding artists to draw an abuse follow-up. And thats not counting the history of shit-edits and hate art the booru (a reason why art-anon and mixxermike both distanced themselves away from the fandom at the start)
On a tangential note, I decided to do a write-up related to how MLP had an influence on the original fluffy pony fandom: Reddit - Dive into anything
EDIT: I decided to post it to the site as well: From MLP to Fluffy Pony or How Fluffy ponies came to be on 4chan's /co/ and /mlp/