It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.
That's baked into HN's philosophy:
"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:
- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)
- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)
- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)
People suck far more in some environments, online and off, than others.
Which is to say: there's an inherent potential for sucky behaviour, but there are specific circumstances which really seem to amplify and trigger it.
Something like locusts: a behavioural transition of a species under the right environmental stimulus.
Brief (<4m) videos, NatGeo: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uURqcI08IC4>, also PBS: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dt6zCJ2VHok>, and Attenborough/BBC: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lAI6W2TOkh4>.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206555>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239835>
It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.
That's baked into HN's philosophy:
"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:
- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)
- "it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164049> (2023)
- "Trying to keep the bottom from falling out on a public forum is harder than it perhaps sounds." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712216> (2015)
- "[T]he internet doesn't do such fine distinctions. Please just keep away from that rail." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605136> (2017)
- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)
- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)
- "It's hard enough to keep these threads from incinerating themselves" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436973> (2022)
- "The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445> (2021)