Yes, what’s really bizarre is many frequent posters aren’t anonymous, having met each other in person.
I wonder if there might be something social or biological at work. If you speak with someone in person, and they say something you don’t agree with, you may turn defensive, but your brain is going to stop you from doing or saying something which might earn you a face full of knuckles. There’s something about being in the physical presence of others which brings on-line (so to speak) our decades of social training. We naturally want to get along with others and take the means of least provocation when conflicts arise. The same mechanisms prevent us from being total asses, which limit things like gloating, criticizing, and boasting.
Now. take the same person and the same scenarios and put him/her in front of a computer screen, and you’ve got an entirely different subset of variables. Sure, we know people are on the receiving end of our posts, but they’re not physically there. Our inhibiting mechanisms are largely off-line. Also, people hide behind usernames, which further depersonalizes communication.
But even beyond all that, I suspect there’s something in the nature of the medium which provokes us into acting in what would be considered grossly anti-social ways in f2f communication. We stand behind positions we may not even care about. We exaggerate claims to gain bonus points in discussions which may have limited importance and dubious merit. We nitpick over trivial details in order to ‘win’ an argument.
And yet, I have seen other, more positive forms of behavior emerge in on-line forums. People tend to form cliques or groups on scales much smaller than the total number of forum participants. People also tend to fall in line behind self-assumed forum leaders (who may or may not be staff). I find this behavior tribal - similar to the most common answer to the question, “How many names are in your address book?” (The typical answer is 100-150, which roughly jibes with the size of hunter/gatherer communities.)
I also agree with the poster who said the most balanced people are those who are roughly similar in person and on-line. Over time, many of us try to improve our social skills and become better people. Surely, when we notice ourselves acting erratically or bizarrely on these forums, we should try to adjust that behavior, or at least limit those tendencies. That doesn’t mean we should all be chipper PC Mouseketeers, but I mean, hey, by definition this is a community, and one would think that it’s a good thing to transfer f2f community building skills to this sort of on-line community. I’m not talking about constantly policing oneself, but having a general set of principles in mind, to draw on or at least consider when one finds oneself lost in The Land of Personal Ass-Making.