I'm an old BBSer. I was on message forums seeing the entire array of so-called problems of today, which people summarize as "toxicity." I saw the full gamut of what can happen, including court-ordered restraining orders, personal harassment in real life, fights. But I also saw communities of what were (in those days) teenagers and young adults (sometimes older adults) finding self-moderation through trial and error and experience.
We were anonymous in those days and no, it wasn't more toxic, it was less. I credit those days with teaching me to learn to write correctly, to learn a style of approach to the world which is a mix of rational and skeptical, and with being exposed to numerous philosophical and ethical viewpoints that I would NEVER have been exposed to in the actual toxic environment that I experienced as "high school in America."
Now, this was in the mid 90's. Fast forward to the Internet revolution, we start to see the beginnings of message forums online. Fast forward a little bit, we're shocked to find an extremely low level of intelligent engagement, and a high level of emotive hissy-fitting, anger and knee-jerking. Worse, there's a set of interests and focus areas that belong to the masses. My BBS friends and I quickly abandoned our years-long dedication to messaging. It was finito.
Because suddenly, a computer nerd niche was exposed to the masses, and the interests of the masses overwhelmed this niche, to the point that intelligent message forum discussion boards because extremely hard to find. RIP intelligent message forums (that I could uncover, anyway) circa early 2000's.
Now, to me Reddit is the pinnacle of that. I've never written a single item on Reddit but I've read hundreds of posts. And to me they are:
-- Very short, one or two sentence one-liners Me-too's, "this!", etc. Blanket dismissals. There's nothing inherent about anonymity or any other element of the media itself that leads to that.
-- Controlled by autocratic "mods" who delete or otherwise punish views that aren't held by them. The political ones are classic examples. Newsflash, guys, there's nothing inherent about politics that should lead to that, and it's not the medium that leads to that degree of censorship. Echo-chamber my butt - that's not an echo chamber, that's a top-down dictatorial type of dictatorship. And evil at that. An echo chamber is when people self-select (in my view) and bounce and reinforce each other's ideas.
-- Emotiveness. This is number 1. In any discussion, whether discussing a muscle pain in one subreddit, Trump in another subreddit, or altcoins in another, what you find are people view the message medium as a chance to express their feelings. And so when one person disagrees, it's almost an attack or a failure to acknowledge the other's feelings, if you look at this psychologically. But it's perceived as "toxic." What you say is toxic is a manifestation of people who are not USED to rational back-and-forths -- they didn't qualify for the debate team if you know what I mean -- and they think that it's about expressing personal feelings. Almost like they are VOTING on what is true and false.
Folks, I assert this: it's not the anonymous aspect. It's not "toxicity." There's no "cure." There's only people. And levels of education and intelligence (yes, I'm sorry, intelligence plays a role here.).
I was going to talk about Facebook but I deleted the paragraph as it's a whole other set of variables in addition to these.
If there's ANY cure it's education. Teach people what argumentation is. Ad hominems being the first thing they should learn is naughty. Next, a code of conduct for MODERATORS. If you have moderators who behave like the Stasi intercepting private correspondence and throwing out the bad ones, that should be number one on the hitlist.
It's about a, education on argument logic, b, ethics on what moderation is (and isn't). Again, my BBS peers learned this when we were 13-18, gradually.