The issue isn't really the amount of asshats. In the physical world, it's generally really unlikely that you'll get more than a couple of particularly egregious asshats with similar beliefs in the same place. When you do, it's often a news story. Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together.

In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying.

Of course, it's a lot quicker and easier to cause damage than to do anything constructive, resulting in unmoderated spaces online probably doing a lot more harm than good in the near-term. Long-term? No idea.

> Online, just as people with good intentions can find each other, people with bad ones can find each other and band together.

Yup. Besides egregious asshats, it has greatly helped conspiracy theorists to get together, fringe religious groups to get together, and fringe political groups to get together.

> In other words, the unmoderated Internet is an amplification device for small groups of people who might otherwise not get a voice, and it doesn't actually matter what they're saying.

I think that the amplification effect does vary, though, among different groups. Some groups already had worked out good ways to communicate before the internet, and to spread information. It wasn't as fast or as convenient as the internet, so things were slower than they are now, but it got the job done.

An example of such a group would be those in STEM fields. We had big libraries of technical material extensively cataloged and indexed and cross referenced, an extensive system of mailed bulletins and journals to keep us informed of new developments in our fields. We had telephones for long distance real time person to person discussion, and the postal system for less urgent communication or for sending documents and photographs.

The internet was a huge increase in the access to and speed of sending information for STEM people, but in some sense it was just a change in efficiency, not a fundamental change in what we could accomplish. I've compared it before to the printing press. We had books before the printing press, but it took a long time to make copies and they were expensive. The printing press made it faster and cheaper to make copies.

For those groups that were not organized like this, which includes the random asshats, the conspiracy theorists, and so on, the internet was a fundamental change. For them it like the discovery of fire or the development of agriculture. It put them in a whole new world.

Maybe the big universities had those big libraries, but mine certainly didn't. Without the internet I wouldn't have had access to nearly the amount of material I did.

You don't need to be a horrible person to make insensitive posts, it's a role played depending on environment and audience. I'm sure the 4channers among us aren't famous for trollish funposts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

It doesn't need to, because the general population is already overflowing with asshats. Keeping a forum civil is a matter of keeping the local asshat population artificially low, not preventing it from growing artificially high.