I think it's just what happens when you're exposing yourself to potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. From that sample size, there will

I think it's just what happens when you're exposing yourself to potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. From that sample size, there will always be a lot of abusive idiots, even though they might reflect a tiny fraction of the total audience. That small percentage can end up dominating the conversation because of the nature of (most) electronic communication. Unfortunately the medium itself is such that someone who is an abusive idiot is a gazillion times more likely to go out of their way to contact you or post something than someone who actually has something meaningful to say. The same goes for online forums and mailing lists. There's just a natural bias towards people posting extremely negative/inflammatory/abusive things. There's also a natural bias towards the people who have the least to contribute being the most likely to hop in with a comment, because they're the ones most likely to have strong kneejerk responses that they just have to share with the world right away. To make matters worse, there's some sort of signal:noise entropy dynamic. Anyone who was into Usenet in the 90's or has followed the same online community over the course of many years has probably seen this. Online forums tend to get worse over time, and never ever ever get better, aside from attempts to impose moderation which always meet with strong resistance. It seems like one lousy comment (or commenter) breeds two more, which drive away the good commenters (meaning, people who actually try and don't just post knee-jerk responses to things). This is how things like YouTube happen.