I should consider myself lucky in real life, having had just a single unpleasant personal encounter with an aggressive dogmatist in the last twenty years. Not bad considering how much active involvement in various organizations, conferences, etc. But the online world has been a nightmarish dystopia by contrast.
In the mid-90s on Usenet I frequented several discussion groups where scholars of religious history and believers in various "alternative religions" mingled freely and had spirited conversations about many related topics. Three groups in particular I'd studied stand out as memorable-- one in the Abrahamic tradition, another Indic, another hybrid. In each of these Usenet fora, there was a steady increase in dogmatic aggressive behavior by believers towards unbelievers, until all the scholars were driven out. Later it was revealed that there were various underhanded attempts involving organizational leaders encouraging the subversion and targeting particular scholars. All these discussion groups were eventually destroyed by the dogmatists. After 2000, political interests dominated my online discussion participation and there were several places where friendly, mutually supportive conversations among progressives were available. But they were all destroyed, or at least ruined for me, by dogmatic aggression. Some are shadows of their former selves and one was completely taken over and then destroyed by a gang of true believing extremists. By the end of that decade, my online interests again shifted elsewhere. For the last several years, racial rather than religious historical topics have been my major interest; and now Facebook is the major place one can go to find discussion opportunities online. But again, time after time initially friendly and welcoming groups have been disrupted by aggressive dogmatists driving out the more thoughtful and kind members, and I foresee the same result ahead for others.
So even though in the real world, obnoxious dogmatists face a lot of blowback for their behavior and tend to be isolated rather than welcomed in most social settings, the online world is a creepy mirror image in which the bad guys always seem to win. The friendly, sensitive, empathetic types get mocked and bullied and driven out and then the predatory creeps turn on one another and the whole thing collapses. Have seen this in more than ten different settings now, from Usenet to Yahoo groups to Facebook; involving religious, racial, and politlcal topics. What's especially creepy is the way authoritarian submission encourages authoritarian aggression-- the biggest bullies online have the biggest fan clubs egging them on with high fives whenever they display their charms.
One hypothesis related to evolutionary psychology suggests itself to me. Our bonobo cousins are much more empathetic and much less violent than our chimpanzee cousins, which is very well documented and has some physiological basis in brain differences. For humans, our ability to empathize with other humans is strongly related to body language as well as tone of voice. So when we come together in person, we are more like the caring and playful bonobos. But when we meet online, the predatory, threatening, violent side of humans is more likely to express itself. We become more like the unpredictably aggressive chimps because we are not perceiving one another with all the visual and auditory cues that bring out empathy in face to face communication.
= new reply since forum marked as read