Out of Pod Experience

You're surfing the Internet like a pro - no wave can bring you down, until you post your opinion in a chat room and get greeted with a "shut the f*ck up" or "nobody cares". You greet a fellow player, but he yells profanities and brags about how he banged your mom. Little kids in the lobbies do the same. In the end, you feel sad, furious that you cannot punish these little fools for their insolence. So then, why are people on the Internet mean?

Actually, the answer to this question is pretty simple. First of all, you're on the Internet. It's a realm that, physically, does not exist. Anybody can tell you anything because there will be no repercussions. That means that people will, in general, be tougher behind a monitor. Because of this sense of invulnerability, people who have Machiavellian traits in real life but are too afraid to use them in the real world will take their jerkyness to cyber-space.
They just simply know that they can be buttholes and get away with it - it's a very unpleasant feeling to not be able to do anything about it.

But are mean Internet people mean in real life?

Once again, this depends. Some people like being mean because they're too weak / scared to do it in real life. Others are simply ignorant and love making salty days for others. This is bad, because Internet behavior does not work in reality - even a simple "shut the f*ck up" can touch too deep and set off the fuse in someone's inside. Some people will just swallow the insult and develop a great feeling of enmity, and others could, well, kick the guy's *ss for saying that.

Besides, cussing at everybody and being rude is, in general, immature and shows the lack of brain cells that the meanie has. If you want to combat a guy that's giving you trouble, don't fight him back - stupid people will always win because they're arguing more than you. Just mute the dude and think no more of it.

Hope this was accurate.

I saw that one coming xD

The reason people on the internet are mean is really very simple.

No accountability.

"When you're away from home, you have no shame." - Japanese saying What it means is, if nobody in your daily life is watching you, there are no rules, you just do whatever you want. There's no social pressure to keep you following the rules of nice behavior. If you look at tourists around the world, or the behavior of armies while in foreign countries, the saying kind of makes sense. Maybe the ultimate freedom is to be like a two-year-old little monster again, before you were trained about "good" and "bad" social behaviors.

But, some more mature/developed people have individual standards that they follow wherever they are. They're nice because they choose to be nice, not because society says they have to be nice. Mature/developed people might be outliers among the population, though.

On the other hand, we have to remember that EVE itself is kind of an outlier, when it comes to Meanness Quotients. Dog-eat-dog was designed into the game from day one, so the elevated meanness level was bound to follow, right?

Why I am mean on the internet? Well, I together with my family live under a bridge and having five mouths to feed so I hand out my business card to people passing by.

TRYHARDER, shitlord!

Internet: Ah ha, I see the rules to this game/forum. Jab, feint, riposte! Crap, got owned. Grr. Logging, I'll think about it. WTH, I might just try some other game/forum.

RL: What are the rules to this game? The suckers keep changing all the time! Crap, teacher gave me an F/supervisor bitched me out/I got dissed in a party. And I still have to stay X more hours today. Can't log! In fact, I can't log tomorrow either, or for the rest of the indefinite foreseeable future. Got to rethink my strategy and try to fit in.