I grew up on anonymous message boards in small communities, largely the ones surrounding video game music and chiptunes/"micromusic." There was some nasty behav

I grew up on anonymous message boards in small communities, largely the ones surrounding video game music and chiptunes/"micromusic." There was some nasty behavior exhibited and I always figured it was the anonymous pseudonyms. Then I joined Facebook and saw the same thing playing out with real names and, usually, real faces as avatars. In America, we have a social network called NextDoor that uses aggressive methods to keep outsiders from being able to post in your hyper-local community/neighborhood. Your village's site is the same concept, only maybe without the postcard-mailed address verification step. It's a great concept. Just neighbors helping each other out, right? I thought that, besides the required real names, most members having profile pictures of their real faces, and many of them having their exact addresses listed on their profile page (oh, Bob lives 8 houses down from me!), would put a halt to the vitriol I saw on Facebook. It hasn't. It must be something about looking at a picture on a screen instead of a human who's reacting, visibly, in real-time to our hateful words, that lets us do what we do online.