People suck online. It's rare to have interactions IRL that are as bad as what you see in the old Youtube comments section. So which is more authentic? How people behave in person or in unfiltered comments/fora?
I think that's part of it, and part of it is that we curate real-life interactions a lot more than online. There are plenty of places I would never show up to / people I wouldn't talk to in real life (precisely because they would be the sort of people who troll online).
Whether that filtering is done explicitly or implicitly (i.e. neighborhood wealth)
Thanks for highlighting that point, the geopolitical filter,along with 'physical availability' (as you stated) are likely larger contributing factors than I had initially considered.
It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.
That's baked into HN's philosophy:
"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:
- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)
- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)
- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)