Oof, so much this. The basics of online etiquette and safety are still being actively hammered out, and it's pretty much just chaos out there. Which doesn't make it okay to lash out at people, but if everyone's feeling spooked to begin with, it's a little bit easier to see how it happens.

Yeah. And it seems like this kind of behavior has been normalized.

I've been thinking about your post a bit more. I've volunteered a bit as a mentor for kids before, and the volunteer org gave us some tips: consistency, modeling positive behavior, and asking kids to work at understanding their own perspectives and other people's. We wouldn't tell them "your teacher is upset about X", we'd ask them to do the work themselves.

And all of those strategies seem much harder to apply on the Internet, and I think they rely on more of a personal connection that we lack over text.

Same with the "we don't do that here" strategy that I might use at a workplace or a club; there isn't really a "here" on something like Tumblr.

I'm glad to be around as well! :D It's nice to read them and have stories to apply them to -- those interests were originally separate but then I found a couple of poems that resonated with me a lot better once I had stories to apply them to.