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Comment by francoisdevlin | Hacker News Reader

I think the fine doctors over at penny arcade documented this earlier....

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

I’m very confused, because the abstract actually says the complete opposite. It states that fuckwads online also tend to be fuckwads offline!

Seeing some people whom I knew well offline first and now interact with mostly online (typically schoolmates), it seems like their offline acidity is around lemon juice and their online acidity is 6 to 12 molar HCl.

It’s simultaneously correct to describe them as being “more acidic” online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon seems to fit better.

I understand what the general argument is. I’m saying it’s incongruous with the actual study presented here, which posits that people who are acidic online are also similarly acidic offline in political discourse.

(It seems unintuitive to me, because I have similar experiences to you! But I’m wondering if my resistance personally to the concept is due to bias…)

The study is looking specifically at hostility in the context of political discussions, not just general internet misbehavior.

In any case, The Penny Arcade comic seems to depict the mismatch hypothesis which the study found little evidence to support:

> Overall, however, we found little evidence that mismatch-induced processes underlie the hostility gap. We found that people are not more hostile online than offline; ...

And while they're not ruling out the mismatch hypothesis entirely, they do offer an alternative which they call the connectivity hypothesis:

> ...Thus, our findings suggest that the feeling that online interactions are much more hostile than offline interactions emerges because hostile individuals–especially those high in status-driven risk taking –have a significantly larger reach online; they can more easily identify targets and their behavior is more broadly visible.

Politicians don't have anonymity and yet we see plenty of fuckwad politicians.

I've heard that as an explanation for why we have so many fuckwad politicians. Only the most shameless will tend to volunteer themselves for such a hostile career path. Normal people don't want it.

They have it backwards.

Most people are fuckwads that have to pretend they are human beings out in public due to culture.

Anonymity removes that pressure.

This seemed true back in 2004 when it was originally posted, but since then Facebook and YouTube have both pursued real name policies (at one point or other) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. Eg Anti-vaxxers have little qualms on having their names attached to their opinions.

If online discourse is to evolve, merely linking to an irrelevant post from 16 years ago, being presented as gospel, would make for a good case study on why it hasn't evolved.

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