It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another.

I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the punch-up in the aisles, and placing wagers.

The problem is that the theatre is on fire, but that hasn’t quite yet eclipsed the spectacle of a good old fashioned confrontation.

I used to agree fully with what you say. But only a few days ago it occurred to me that in the early days of the web (let's say late '90, early 2000s) I thought that the internet was going to make the world a more peaceful place: everybody would have talked directly with one another, irrespective of distances and languages; we would have understood each other better and disagreements would have been smoothed out.

Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs.

Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.

Its a war over controlling the narrative. The little people seem clueless about what will, can and probably should happen when the status quo loses their grip on them. If people had half a clue about the prosperity that awaits them the narrative would effortlessly flip 180 degrees. We should all be as mad as General Smedley D. Butler about it.

Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it. YouTube comments were deanonymized but that didn’t improve discourse. Look at Facebook and some of the “discussions” about politics there. Newspapers tried running comment sections, but either they’re a cesspool, real names or no, or they just gave up having comment sections entirely. Even locale isn’t a help - NextDoor is full of the same, or worse, combative vitriol. Sure, child porn and death threats don’t go unpunished like “back in the day”, so things are infinitesimally better, but we still have a very very long way to go.

Anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean namelessness - it means being a voice in a crowd, it means being seemingly removed enough from your target that you, personally, won’t be the target of retribution. It hearkens back to really primal primate behaviour.

Group dynamics are crazy - you can use them to get people who might be drinking buddies to instead get into tin cans and try to murder each other, because you’re using the ultimate anonymity of a battlefield to let slip the dogs of war.

The deciding factor seems to be if the internet group (as in characteristics defining cohesion) has strong enough mores to demand acceptable conduct. wide-open commenting (anon or not): NO. Neighbourhood FB group: you'd hope so, but not always...

I'm on one forum where the only rules are "leave family other than spouses out of it" and "no n-word". It is a hobby interest forum with a gender homogeneous user base. It's one of the most civil places on the internet if you can get past the fact that any mistake will be remembered and you will be made fun of for it. There are definitely some people who hate each other over ideological differences but they seem to tire of arguing and just ignore each other. I think small enough group size for people to remember each other and no reason for people without the shared interest to stick around matter more than anything else.

> Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it.

I think people have realized what the real line of what will be tolerated in society. There isn't any repercussion for being a pos in real life or online. I think we're to polite to the people being rude.

For some groups, if they are large enough, powerful enough, or vicious enough, deanonymized is not an issue because they are the majority. For smaller groups, where having an opinion will lead to death threads etc, deanonymization will extinguish their voices.

Well one difference is the scope of participation, which was only slightly mentioned (old people on FB) - even in the lat 90's the internet was still mostly the domain of a relatively homogeneous technical-skewing audience; the composition has probably flipped since then.

Judgement of whether this is good or bad aside, it is definitely easier to maintain peace and harmony when the socio/economic/cultural differences are smaller. Those days are long gone.

I'm finding the only winning move is not to play (i.e. "don't go to the theatre; stay home and read a book")

You’re asserting that it’s worse like that’s a fact. It’s not. It’s much better than the old days now that many accounts are tied to your real name, and since enforcement of community standards became commonplace.

The US political polarization is more widespread, on and offline, but online discourse is still pretty mild compared to the old days of greater anonymity.

I'm not sure that's true. I remember when "netiquette" used to be a bigger thing than it is now. People would lurk for a while before posting to get a feel for the community. Flamewars would happen if someone top-posted instead of bottom-posting. Debate still happened, and some of them would spiral out of control, but I wasn't nearly as afraid to mention my opinion about such a wide range of topics both on the web and in real life as I am now.

What accounts are tied to your real name? I don't use any facebook products so don't know about that, but don't know of any other that are tied to my name.

Enforcement of community standards has backfired in the form of weaponised censorship.

There's Google that uses your name but doesn't enforce its authenticity.

Anyway, I don't comment on any services that use a real name policy. I'd prefer that my name didn't appear on the Internet at all, but don't fight against it when it inevitably happens via some participant lists and whatnot.

Facebook, google, anything tied to your bank accounts, anything you access with your phone or from your home address, if any of those things you access use your email, anything tied to your email - which ends up being just about everything. Even if I might not know your name, there are probably a dozen big data companies that can tie your name to 99% of your web activity.

Even where there's some anonymity by using a user name, there's rarely anonymity from legal authorities, who can easily access your entire internet and location history - and a VPN won't help you, because those aren't secure.

This is all out of context.

The quantity has increased, if the quality is still basically the same. Also, I bet the average education/intelligence of the typical user has shifted as the internet user looked more and more like the typical population.

Also different is the velocity. It's easier than ever before to spread something far and wide.

Bingo. In the 90s, you had to be pretty smart (and wealthy or near a decent school) just to know what the internet was, how to get access, and then do something useful or fun with it. Now, everyone uses it to pay their taxes, order soap, and use facebook. However the quality, while always full of trolls, has dropped imho.