Why online forums have bad behaviour (was: Steve D'Aprano, you're the "master". What's wrong with this concatenation statement?)

[Jason Friedman]

> TL;DR: because we're all human, and human behaviour needs either
> immediate face-to-face feedback or social enforcement to correct
> selfishness and abrasiveness. Where face-to-face feedback is lacking,
> social enforcement needs to take more of the load.
>
>
> Many people have a false sense of entitlement to be caustic in dealing
> with others, and have no better response to a request that they tone it
> down than to escalate their bad behaviour.
>
> This behaviour is usually counteracted in face-to-face interaction, by
> being confronted with the immediate result on the other person: most
> people don't enjoy *seeing* other people become upset, so most people
> tend to work harder to be more polite in face-to-face discussion.
>
> On an internet forum, especially one with such low bandwidth as text,
> these feedback mechanisms are not sufficient (not immediate enough, and
> not informative enough) for the person to experience a link from their
> bad behaviour to the unpleasant consequences.
>
>
> This isn't a new problem. It's not new to the internet, and it certainly
> isn't new to humans.
>
> What is new, though, is that many online communities – the Python
> community specifically – have decided we are not going to tolerate
> anti-social behaviour, and we have also enacted policies to enforce that
> decision.
>
> We'll always have some anti-social actors, and bad actions by otherwise
> good actors. Many of them when confronted will respond with petulance
> and name-calling and bullying and other schoolyard reflexes. We have to
> be consistent in rejecting such behaviour from our community.

Well said.