My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.

I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.

I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.

When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.

The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.

I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.

This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.

It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.

But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.

Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.

> You see this in real life on the streets too.

To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)

Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.

I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.

In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.

so normal human behavior is immune to shame and consequences?