The dehumanisation of online dialogue is interesting. Is it because of 'anonymity' or is there more at play?

I think it's an exaggeration of the "city effect": the denser an environment is, the more likely it is that people who see you out to talk to you are going to have a negative agenda, because everyone else is trying to keep their head down.

If you meet a stranger at the North Pole, where you're the only two humans around, you're going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger in a remote village, you're probably going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger on the street in New York, you're probably going to put your hand over your wallet. Adverse selection wins.

It sometimes feels like social media has gone from a place to make friends to a place to make enemies - or at least to bond with a group through the medium of hate. Bonding through hate of the outsider is hardly new, but it's especially negative on the Internet where it can be amplified over and over.

Dehumanization is a poor framing, really. It was never humanized in the first place.

Sure, those of us who have a technical understanding understand that it is likely that there are humans involved as an implementation detail, but from the user perspective there is no other human to be seen. If the technical backend were replaced by a sufficiently capable LLM (or whatever technology) absolutely nothing about the user experience would change. From the user perspective, it is a solitary activity.

Human interaction hasn't gone away. Online discussion is a different tool for a different job.

No, I don't think it's anonymity. You can see absolutely rabid, hateful, unhinged things people post under their real names on Facebook, LinkedIn, nextdoor.

I think it's the bandwidth, or lack there of.

A lot of it happens in out of band posts like these.

It seems to happen less in interactive (i.e. chat, etc.). Make no mistake, it absolutely happens there.

But not as much as in async posts (I don't think).

I don't think it happens much at all with video.

Most of it is surrounded by context (or lack of). How difficult it is to communicate (typing like this is not easy, and certainly not for the impatient).

I have to keep telling folks when they get that Look in their face because of what someone said or didn't say over email or an instant message to not judge on that. If it's that important to you, CALL them. TALK to them, you simply can not rely on typed conversations for anything that impacts you emotionally.

"What do you think they meant by that?" Oh no.

It's just an awful medium.

I think that part of it, is that when we are engaging with people in realtime (especially face to face), our emotional driver is behind the wheel, and when there's a pause between responses, our analytical driver has time to grab the wheel, and that's where the "dehumanization" comes from.

That's not always a bad thing. In emotionally-charged situations, that "few seconds of consideration" can help stabilize the interaction.

People claim that it's the lack of consequences, and illusion of safety, but I feel as if it's really the emotional disconnection that does it.

Anonymity is one aspect, for sure. But also, people often have not taken in the lesson of interpreting generously. They take the worst interpretation of the words, and often add a few imagined things that were never written (oh you like healthcare, you communist?). This is worse in written form because the feedback loop is longer, but it being written makes it feel like the author has had plenty of time to think about it.

Forums are also the kind of place that everyone thinks are populated by political bots. Believing every other comment is written in bad faith is going to change how you behave.

When you think of arguments as a kind of battle, you end up forgetting the person on the other side.

A long time ago, you would only interact with humans from your own tribe. Most of your actions had direct consequences for you, and you interacted with these people every day. Your life and wellbeing depended on that group and your social status. Then came local communities, followed by the global village, with access to eight billion people you will never meet or know. You can say whatever you want to them and face no real consequences, you can simply block them if you wish.