I find a lot of people (on both sides) will do things online behind the shield of anonymity they wouldn't otherwise in real life.

I find this behaviour cowardly.

Would you confront these people in real life, and mock them to their faces? I suspect a lot of people who do it online wouldn't in real life (if for no other reason than they'd get punched in the face).

I'm not saying we can't argue with people, or be direct - however, there are lines you don't cross (and I feel Reddit often crosses those lines). You can be upfront, and honest about your beliefs without being a jerk.

I guess it depends on the context right? I remember in college there used to be these religious fanatics that would loudly berate strangers in the plaza; whenever someone would walk up and try to "debate" them, it would just make things worse, but sometimes someone would just say something really funny and the mood of the whole crowd would change and the extremely aggressive obnoxious fanatic would end up packing it in early or going for a new tactic. (Maybe not immediately, but it did seem to have an impact overall)

My point isn't like, go pick on people, that would suck, I'm just saying that humor is a really useful tool sometimes. Self-serious "be nice" policies can remove those tools and give some unreasonable people a nice cloud of cover to haunt places.

Maybe a different metaphor is better. A good community is like a garden. Nobody likes pesticide, but sometimes if you have a pest problem... It's all a judgement call right. "Be nice" policies only work if you can assume the other people you're interacting with are reasonable, and that's not really always true.

I've worked on construction crews were people will rib each other over almost anything. If you start spouting off about the earth being flat, you're for damn sure going to catch some flak and everyone is going to have a good laugh at your expense.

Okay, but malice and schadenfreude are not requirements for humor. Obnoxious memes and troll baiting are not some kind of Shakespearean fools. They are the lowest form of humor that incubate far more bad ideas than they're worth.

That's not working for climate change, brexit, the Us election, etc etc etc.

Maybe it's time to accept that mockery is a sub-optimal tactic that makes you feel good but is counter-productive.

The worst thing that ever happened to fixing the pollution was calling it climate change. Making wildly inaccurate hyperbolic documentaries and politicizing it to such a degree that it became a defining aspect of our species. Where everyone needed to have an opinion on it, no different than their favorite brand of cereal.

When greedy selfish people make doomsday prophecies which happens to make them more money, the people get skeptical. We've been exposed to millions of such prophecies in the past, the average person will just say "Oh? Another one..."

Regarding Brexit/US election, I think Obama interfering with peoples choices by telling them what they should pick hindered one side in both events. Brexit and Trump happened because Obama was condescending. Both would have been different results if he had done nothing at all.

No. I guarantee that Obama's opinion on Brexit was given little attention in the UK, and his intervention had no effect on the outcome. I am utterly baffled that anyone could possibly think that the result would have been different had he not communicated his opinion.

I don't think this a good citation for the point you're trying to make. The problem is the concept of "both viewpoints" rather than many viewpoints, and that they get extremely irrational people to debate against slightly irrational people, and the viewers think that's the entire range of discourse and they have to choose somewhere within that continuum to fall themselves. (Usually right smack in the middle based on the average person's trust in the "law of averages.")

The problem with Fox is a narrowing of opinions to a range acceptable by management, not any diversity of ideas.

I think you've touched on a very important point. There is a huge difference between enforcing "niceness" and civility. The latter allows for the organic and authentic discussion of ideas, while the former doesn't.