> Somehow we've built a culture where its socially acceptable, and even rewarded, to behave online in ways that would never be acceptable in other social settin

> Somehow we've built a culture where its socially acceptable, and even rewarded, to behave online in ways that would never be acceptable in other social settings. It's an unfortunate consequence of the point-based reward systems that platforms use to incentivize participation. There are certain topics that large groups of people will always upvote or always downvote. It's a rational behavior to repeat the same comments whenever such a topic comes up if those comments can reliably mine rewards by doing so, even if the rewards in this case are adjustments to one's own dopamine balance. In offline social settings, the ability to monetize comments is somewhat more difficult but not totally absent (popularity, elections, etc).