[parsimo2010]

I think it’s a combination of anonymity, the power of the internet to increase your reach, regular greed, and human tribalism. IRL you have to be polite to people because you need to interact with people and politeness helps with that. But when you’re anonymous you don’t care as much- it can’t come back to you IRL and you don’t know the other person, so you don’t feel bad about hurting their feelings. And then there’s the sample size- if there is an opinion so extreme that only 0.1% of people agree, you could make a forum with 100k members just from the USA’s active internet users. You could go even bigger with a global audience.

A lot of people want to make money, and if you cater to someone’s opinion then you might want to give them money (a prerequisite to getting money is telling people what they like to hear). So we have a lot of super specific communities popping up, because people see it as an easy way to make money. This is fine so far. But then a fairly large group of people (by IRL standards) gather and see that everyone is like them. The idea that everyone is like them doesn’t hold true in the rest of their lives, so people start to appreciate this new home they’ve found. And then some other people from the outside come along and the “protect my tribe” instinct kicks in. Because of the anonymity people get rude over silly stuff, because they don’t like to entertain the idea that someone disagrees with them in “their” piece of the internet.

This is inevitable in nearly any internet based community. Strong moderation helps, and so does raising the cost of entry a few bucks, but neither is a perfect solution. See Stack Overflow for moderation or Metafilter for a place that costs a few dollars to join. It keeps the trolls away but something about them feels different, and I don’t know if I’d point to either option as being a best solution.