I think it is partly intrinsic and partially because it’s much harder to create the right conditions IRL. I don’t think online behaviour maps to IRL behaviour well, the two are different worlds.
Online empathy is basically absent: You aren’t a person, you’re text on a monitor, I can’t see the effect my words are having on you, and there are no tone, body language and other soft markers to inform our interaction. On a scale of empathy running from “imaginary conversation in my head” to “talking to my Mum” people online feel much closer to the imaginary end of the scale than a normal face to face conversation.
Offline I can see, hear and smell you, I am mostly operating externally, things are real. Offline I am acting in context as myself, not a projection. And arguing takes more energy, more frictive, the stakes are higher and it’s continuous, if I start an argument or behave negatively the effects cannot be deferred or escaped in the same manner as they can be online.
I don’t think number of people is the metric that determines when people feel comfortable engaging in bad behaviour, it’s just a useful rule of thumb when talking about online communities.
Offline I think it’s more determined by the energy required to engage, motive, means, opportunity and likely response.
Go into a busy bar or to a public event, most people are genial even when they’re drunk or semi anonymous, even sports games where big crowds, charged emotions, and copious amounts of alcohol intermix and events like Halloween where it’s socially acceptable to be outside in a disguise are mostly peaceful.
Most arguments are small, between relatively few people, and end without major wider consequence for the society they happen in. Someone getting thrown out of a bar, people screaming at each other in a shop, a bust up in a club; these are the IRL equivalents of commenters feuding or minor forum drama. They take far more energy, are less pleasant, and carry far more severe consequence for the individuals involved. Most people that will jump into social media drama would never do anything even approaching this level of confrontation offline. Their are lasting consequences to engaging in this kind of thing even once, and it isn’t necessarily limited to direct response by the mods (cops etc.) shame and social stigma are stronger motivators offline than online.
Major trouble is usually the result a few instigators that feel empowered to flout norms or don’t care about being punished, and the trouble goes from limited to general when they are in a situation where other people are suggestible, likely to agree to go along, and feel like they have safety in numbers; they aren’t just in a crowd, they’re in something together. Offline it’s quite rare for all those factors to line up and it usually happens at relatively predictable times and places: two football teams with supporters that hate each other playing, at an emotionally charged protest, etc.
What do you see at such events? Meat mods (security and cops), to contain the event and enforce the norm again.
Really very strongly disagree that anonymity is bad but that is a seperate discussion.
We need to actually set a meaningful, sufficiently narrow to be useful definition of social media then, because nobody on the street thinks of social media and thinks “ah yes a platform where you talk to only 100 people”.
I mean, is IRC a social media platform, are BBS’ social media?
Is this forum?
These are media platforms, and they are social, but they are not “social media” in the common meaning of the phrase. They all also tend to need moderation after reaching a certain size, and the size isn’t all that large.
And 100 people is still too many to peacefully coexist without someone having a big stick and deploying it at least occasionally.
This is an art house experience model of social media, it’s more performance than actual platform. I understand it’s being brought up as an example but I don’t things with a very clear ulterior purpose are really worth looking at.
I think profit motive definitely makes certain choices more appealing, and a lot of those choices are likely to lead to negative behaviour once experienced at scale, but I think a lot of that is tied into the fact that certain things make mass participation far easier and mass participation is necessary for a commercially viable social media platform. If you want to make a large, easy to use platform you are going to make most of the same choices.
Again I really think Mastodon is the canary in the coal mine here, it’s a non profit decentralized all signing all dancing “social good!” social media platform and it’s as given to rancid behaviour and toxicity as anywhere else, on similar lines Matrix is basically discord for the technically discerning peadophile at this point, Lemmy would be as twee, grating and noxious as reddit if anyone ever used it.
Profit motive exacerbates, but structure and moderation are determinate.
I’m not sure how you expect a non moderated platform that allows users to engage and explore freely with each other to be anything but a shittip once it grows past having a very, very small userbase.