I find that it depends on the size of the community, and your stake in that community. If you're a regular somewhere, you're a lot less likely to start some shit there. After a while some users earn a reputation that affects all future interactions.

I treat my local subreddit like I would treat my local pub, especially since I know a few of its users IRL, and many tie my username to my business. I can't say the same about large subreddits.

Tight moderation also helps a ton. It enforces a certain tone, and after a while the community crystallises around that tone and enforces it itself. You don't pick fights at the country club.

I realise now that I stopped interacting in larger communities. I prefer quieter channels where people have a reputation to uphold.

"Social media made y'all way to comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." - Mike Tyson

Digitization has clearly added lots of negatives that otherwise wouldn’t last. As simple as, does it really make sense for something local with only local and fittingly small consequences, to be discussed at a global level? But anybody can post a photo or video to be seen the world over. Depending on content there will even be users on the internet policing (“influencing”) other users in the internet to weigh in on whatever. But clearly human societies function at a level of cohesion that breaks apart at scale. Ie there isn’t one truly universal way to live that everyone can and in time could be made to live.

Edit-I’d venture even the ability for the internet to bring together people who would otherwise not have a cohort “breaks at scale” because people just don’t scale like that.

I think digitization, specifically the commoditization of attention in advertising-supported social media, has strongly incentivized bad-faith communication. It turns out that outrage and conflict are a great way to get attention. So systems made to profit from keeping attention have inadvertently started promoting conflict and outrage to capture the value of the attention produced.

This has been profitable enough that these social media now dominate a large part of public discussions, and other platforms have followed suit either by choice or by selection pressure. Hence a large part of public communication is happening in a context that is (inadvertently or intentionally) built to encourage conflict and outrage. This rewards bad-faith communication, so that is what we get.