RL involves ...
If I'm a jerk in public, outside of racist/prejudiced violence or a mentally unstable antagonist, I'm not at serious risk of being physically attacked unless I start breaking laws or pose a notable threat to someone else. Because about 90% of the less edgy side of trolling (just being annoying or verbally mean, mostly) won't really draw physical violence in meatspace, you'll just be treated like a jerk or risk being politely asked to shut up or leave by an authority figure. Yes there's a risk of physical violence, but it's overplayed as a reason why people aren't trolls in real life as much as they are online, and I think it's significantly superseded by the things I mentioned, and probably other things too, which stop people from being jerks far before physical violence needs to be brought to the scene.
As another commenter pointed out, facebook (and facebook-based commenting) has plenty of trolls in public comment sections. Anonymity is not what makes people jerks. More real reasons why internet forums enable trolls include:
- the asynchronicity of negative feedback: our primitive brains don't get to closely associate the negative feedback with the moment we expressed something in a socially unacceptable manner
- the lower bandwidth of negative feedback: IRL involves awkward silences, dirty looks, snickering, people turning up their nose at you, telling their children not to be like you within earshot, etc. All of this is suppressed over the internet, at most summarised by a downvote (which some trolls feed off of as positive feedback, knowing they ticked someone off, but don't face immediate social consequence). The trolls don't get conditioned to avoid doing things that hurt other people or are socially unacceptable.
[0] https://kotaku.com/blizzards-real-name-forum-policy-has-fans... [1] https://kotaku.com/blizzard-scraps-plans-to-display-real-nam...