This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-mean-are-the-people-on-Quora/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

Quora users are no different than anyone else on other social media sites.

The virtual environment, coupled with the insulation of an identity divorced from who people are in real life, allows them to indulge in their basest behaviours without repercussions to themselves.

Some are deliberately more abusive online than they would be in person because of a lack of consequences to them in life. Some use social media as a vehicle for venting their frustrations, and that often involves victimizing others.

It’s a dynamic that exists everywhere but is exaggerated online due to the shield a fraudulent identity provides.

All social media is much like Quora, but I would argue that Quora is more civilized than Facebook. A lot of aggression on Facebook is expressed passively through the emoticon reaction system. Facebook UI also sucks big time for permitting extended dialogues, while Quora’s system of ownership of content and content threads by the answer writer helps to minimize aggressions here.

Quora’s system is less antagonistic than Facebook’s because of its structure and is more efficient than other sites at handling long discussion threads.

Insofar as degrees of meanness on social media, my decades of experience on Usenet remain unsurpassed in meanness. Still, social media has generally degenerated in decorum to more closely resemble interpersonal dynamics on Usenet.

It’s a shame that social media has become so toxic. This devolution of courtesy is an argument for a publicly owned and supported social media venue that eliminates the profit motive by operating as a non-profit entity to serve as a community development tool, performing various community development functions and providing various public services.

A sign-on system, for example, could replace the various sign-on systems that people use for logging into sites where sensitive data is stored while ensuring one’s data is accessed through a single entity that provides access to one’s government-related needs such as their taxes or identification needs, and etcetera.

Social media has always been about community development. I have found amusement in statements about upholding community standards from privately owned entities like Facebook that routinely violate the bounds of decency within a community-oriented context. I often complained to Quora about inconsistently applied BNBR standards, and the result of attempting to manage nuance was resolved for them as a business decision deemed too expensive to operate effectively. There was no profit-oriented point to them to pretend that being nice and respectful was an important feature to protect.

Part of the problem with moderating systems is that petty people find ways to weaponize moderation against people they decide to behave spitefully toward.

I’ve been considering a series of articles on social media while arguing in favour of a community-based, owned-and-operated system that can address a number of the shortcomings while functioning as a means of “encouraging” improved interpersonal dynamics through a self-moderating model, but that’s a significant endeavour while I’m currently in the process of addressing more profound to me issues through a struggle I’ve been undergoing for the last decade. I hope I finally get a resolution to it soon and in time to focus on other areas in which I hope to make more constructive contributions to society rather than the wholly destructive path I’m currently on.

In short, and as a summary, however, people can be pretty mean everywhere, and sometimes, there’s nothing one can do about it but try to avoid or dismiss their meanness. It might help to be aware that not everyone is always mean. I’ve noticed within myself while using Quora as a public therapy tool for coping with my circumstances that my bouts with meanness correlate directly with my mood, and my mood is often affected by my current experiences. The best I can do is to learn to understand myself so that I can better understand the meanness of others, and that seems to be helping because their meanness over time has a decreasing impact on my psychology while I’ve become more effective in addressing their meanness in ways that I hope help them to improve.

That’s essentially all we can do for each other is to ensure we protect our boundaries in ways where the meanness doesn’t destroy our self-image. If it impacts it, then it serves as a teaching moment where we improve ourselves and become less mean over time rather than more mean — which is precisely the distinction in attitude I see creating the division between the toxic MAGA phenomenon and a world struggling to cope with increasingly aggravated divisions that have been cultivated within us by the people who have been setting us against each other while they rob us of our dignities.