I think it's important to recognize how we got to the point where we are now. Infantilism is a big component in far anything communities, but the internet has made it way worse in some cases
If you go to (excuse my outdated concepts of extremist communities) Parler to talk about LGBT in a positive manner you will get about the same amount of vitriol as if you went to r/FemaleDatingStrategy to call out misandry or if you went to a specific /pol/ thread to fight antisemitism.
I think the bottom line here is, vitriol is pretty much omnipresent among us. The difference between communities is how they run the ductwork to siphon it out of our daily conversations. That's where the discourse is formulated and fine-tuned to the specific needs of its members.
When you build bubble-like communities, you will get echo chambers that breed infantile subjects. If you allow people to call each other certain slurs, but not other ones, you will naturally optimize for resistate to the former. If you build a forum with usernames and perhaps even an upvote system, people will recognize and build up reputation bound to their names. If you make an Anonymous board, people won't care about reputation. These are just two options on a huge spectrum of possible alignments. Engagement-oriented platforms (by that I mostly mean social media and Reddit), are however a special case.
Maybe an anecdote makes more sense: A few years ago, in high school, I used to find joy in trolling. I felt especially at home on the imageboard that starts with four, but when the thread would scroll over the limit and plunge into oblivion I realized how little those three people that I made seethe actually mattered. To contrast that, on platforms that value engagement, it was and probably still is a lot easier to reply with something inane and watch the replies roll in. A single statement that would go into the archives mostly unnoticed instead made an impact on dozens if not hundreds of people. After getting out of my turbo edgy phase I realised that I hurt a pretty good amount of people in both cases, and it feels somewhat dishonest to believe that every single downvote, reply and slur hurled my way was born in infantilism.
What I'm trying to say is that when we increase the number of interactions, we as a byproduct also increase the number of "bad" interactions. When I talk to "bad" people with "bad" opinions, I try to recognize that even if they are 90% infantile garbage, the rest can come from honest pain and discontentment. But sometimes that's just being too charitable. People are hard.
> Infantilism is a big component in far anything communities, but the internet has made it way worse in some cases
I definitely agree with this. I've seen it in my own ideological development.
I'm about 40 years old now. I've labelled myself lots of things over the years: Republican, conservative, libertarian, Objectivist, Anarcho-Capitalist, and more. I still identify in some way with all of those, which makes sense because while my ideas and beliefs have been refined over the years, much of the foundation and all of the personal experiences that informed them haven't.
I stopped calling myself a Republican when I saw that most Republicans had strong beliefs that ran counter to mine. I've never cared who someone loves or how they live. I'm happy to live peacefully and respectfully with whomever is around me as long as they're happy to do the same. I've always been opposed to the unbound growth of government and particularly opposed to government violating its own rules in pursuit of a goal that happens to be "an exception". The people I knew who called themselves Republicans increasingly differed from me, in these areas and others, so I looked for a new (or perhaps "more specific") community.
Libertarians seemed to fit that mold for me, and that worked for a long time. That term became associated with the Libertarian Party for me. For a while the LP seemed to be making some progress. I was an ardent supporter of Ron Paul and would have loved to see him take the Presidency. He didn't, so I started to care more about building a solid foundation so the "next Ron Paul" could be better supported. That looked like it might work for a while, but ultimately the LP fell apart and was taken over by people who weren't there for the same reasons that I was.
Objectivism was a more well-defined label, and at first I agreed with almost all of it. I loved that it was so consistent! But over time I found more and more edge cases where it wasn't consistent at all, and I realized that the people I interacted with were more interested in what Ayn Rand said than they were about thinking critically about things. I came to see Objectivists as "Randists", and abandoned the label.
Anarcho-Capitalism was similar. It's consistent, I agree with the foundations... but the people who apply it to themselves began to feel more and more "shallow" to me. Most of them were self-described Ancaps because they saw it as edgy; most those that earnestly believed it have such a shallow understanding of the way social systems work that they expected to be able to throw out all government tomorrow morning and everything would work out great. I (think!) I know better - while I believe government in its current form is immoral and should ultimately be abolished, trying to do it in one fell swoop is a sure recipe for social and economic disaster. Historically that's always followed by a period of violence and the rise of authoritarianism. No thanks.
These days my views are pretty much just my own, and I don't strongly identify with any label that I know of. My username is sorta tongue in cheek, even - I've seen it used as a slur for ancaps in the past, and it was mildly amusing to me, so I adopted it.
TL;DR: I think I've grown as a person to the point that I know my beliefs change over time, allow for the idea that I could be totally wrong, and am really just looking for a way to leave in peace and harmony with those around me. If I can find common ground with them and work together to move toward our shared goals - awesome. If not, that's OK too. I'm happy continuing to ignore the things I can't change.
If you go to (excuse my outdated concepts of extremist communities) Parler to talk about LGBT in a positive manner you will get about the same amount of vitriol as if you went to r/FemaleDatingStrategy to call out misandry or if you went to a specific /pol/ thread to fight antisemitism.
I think the bottom line here is, vitriol is pretty much omnipresent among us. The difference between communities is how they run the ductwork to siphon it out of our daily conversations. That's where the discourse is formulated and fine-tuned to the specific needs of its members.
When you build bubble-like communities, you will get echo chambers that breed infantile subjects. If you allow people to call each other certain slurs, but not other ones, you will naturally optimize for resistate to the former. If you build a forum with usernames and perhaps even an upvote system, people will recognize and build up reputation bound to their names. If you make an Anonymous board, people won't care about reputation. These are just two options on a huge spectrum of possible alignments. Engagement-oriented platforms (by that I mostly mean social media and Reddit), are however a special case.
Maybe an anecdote makes more sense: A few years ago, in high school, I used to find joy in trolling. I felt especially at home on the imageboard that starts with four, but when the thread would scroll over the limit and plunge into oblivion I realized how little those three people that I made seethe actually mattered. To contrast that, on platforms that value engagement, it was and probably still is a lot easier to reply with something inane and watch the replies roll in. A single statement that would go into the archives mostly unnoticed instead made an impact on dozens if not hundreds of people. After getting out of my turbo edgy phase I realised that I hurt a pretty good amount of people in both cases, and it feels somewhat dishonest to believe that every single downvote, reply and slur hurled my way was born in infantilism.
What I'm trying to say is that when we increase the number of interactions, we as a byproduct also increase the number of "bad" interactions. When I talk to "bad" people with "bad" opinions, I try to recognize that even if they are 90% infantile garbage, the rest can come from honest pain and discontentment. But sometimes that's just being too charitable. People are hard.