Why are so many people more ruder/nastier online than they are in real life?

kowloon wrote: »

A lot of this. I find some people online can't detect sarcasm without very obvious indication. People also get offended by slagging that would be perfectly normal in person.

True and I agree but I actually was coming at it from the other direction. People who think they are carefully conveying their tone cannot see that they are not even after they get a reaction. They just think the other party is being overly sensitive when in fact it's they who are obnoxious.

Because online, you don't need to pretend to be somebody you are not.

Roger the cabin boy wrote: »

Because online, you don't need to pretend to be somebody you are not.

Yet so many do just that online.

It depends what we’re talking about. I think online a lot of people come to escape or vent about their issues, and thus can project a lot of anger they’re feeling about a certain thing in their personal/professional lives onto a random that it only loosely relates to. They’ll see a word or sentence that’ll remind them of something that triggers them, they’ll assume that person is the worst derivation of that and just let loose because they feel powerless to do so in real life. That’s been my experience anyway encountering people who’ve been arseholes online in the real world, they’re often the most quiet people in the room afraid to look you in the eye.

Another part is mental health issues tbh. It occurred to me the other week that Twitter is just people assuming their worst anxieties are fact then getting extremely angry about a thing they just imagined. You see a lot of this around COVID, for example: every day the death rate is falling, but one person saw a few kids not social distancing at the shops, so because of that we’re now all gonna die. And everyone is then feeding off that with their own anxiety until it builds into a hysteria, which they then need to release through anger, then boom some poor ****er gets absolutely ossified and their life destroyed because they were imperfect for a moment and said/did a thing this random hysterical mob has decided is now ‘bad’.

What’s scariest is that mob mentality is now starting to affect the world at large when it comes to elections, policy etc. Facts and logic are out the window in favour of anxious delusions. It’s the norm now and it’s been the norm for so many growing up who are now adults that they don’t even identify it as strange, so talking to them rationally is impossible because their brains never worked that way to begin with.

I don’t think people actually are more rude or nasty or anything else than they are offline. It’s simply that we encounter a lot more people online than we would in the course of our lifetimes offline, and we wouldn’t normally surround ourselves with those types of people offline, whereas online we have less of a choice in who we are surrounded by.

Take as an example someone like Ricky Gervais - some people think he’s great, some people can’t stand him, but most people have never heard of him. There’s no such thing as anonymity online, but it doesn’t matter because more and more people are quite proud to put their names to their opinions - because a bigger audience means more appreciation and support of their opinions, which by far and away outweigh any potential backlash for expressing their opinions.

The only difference in whether we think someone is being nasty and attempting to humiliate someone else, or whether we think they’re an upstanding individual and a fighter for the greater good simply comes down to whether or not we already agreed with their opinions. It’s not just an online phenomenon, and it’s certainly not new. John Cleese does a good observational take on the phenomenon -

Maybe you should ask Trump.