I’ve become convinced that anything which makes us experience strong feelings has the potential to be compelling. Add to that the difficulty many of us have with letting things go, and you have a recipe for intellectual/emotional “crack” as you say, in the online world. Offline we tend to pursue extreme feelings in ways that don’t erode our relationships with others, or give us a bad reputation, but online those controls tend to fall away.

It’s a tough problem that seems like it requires commensurate energy (mods) to control.