I am getting the impression that you are rather new to the internet. This forum is extremly tightly moderated. You should visit the dpreview or other forums where everything goes. Or look at youtube comments
macrumors seems like a gentlemens club to me.
I joined this forum in 2004. What you say there may be true, but I find a tremendous difference in here now in terms of more people being "mean" about stuff. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a reflection of all the turmoil in the world (economic upheavals, ethnic and religious strife spilling into more or less constant wars, etc.).
It's not just about age of forum members. There's more road rage out there in the real world today than there used to be, at least in the USA. Not all the acting-out drivers I see on the roads are teenagers! A lot of them look to be in their 30s. I'm really no more sure what that's about than about what goes on in, say, some of the iPhone threads. It's anger, it's acting out, it's displacement, it's sometimes pretty scary and sometimes just silly.
I've long said that too many of us now act as if the mere expression by someone else of a different opinion than our own (about anything) will translate into that opinion's having been engraved on our own tombstone by nightfall. Maybe with our polarized politics that's understandable in political threads but when it carries over into rants against people buying a 5C instead of a 5S, or an Apple vs. competitor product, well... the irrationality seems even more bizarre to me. Why can I not like my green 5C? Does it threaten someone else's gold-colored aluminum 5S that I liked that green plastic over steel of the 5C better?
Where does that sort of xenophobic fear come from? Anyway the ancient "fight or flight" response certainly lives on, doesn it.
There are doubtless some intentional disruption and mischief-making of people either working for competitors of Apple or consumers who are concerned that their own favored alternative gear will get displaced from the market by Apple's product launches. All that sometimes makes me think about historians writing about the fallback to tribal ways when a society loses faith in its institutions. I think MacRumor's setup of a forum for alternative phones is a good thing but it doesn't seem to have reduced the rudeness even some of the thoroughly Apple-centric members engage in when a new model of some gear comes out.
Whatever the causes, I don't think the escalation in "mean" posting is just about ability to be ruder online than face to face without having to deal with consequences. We could be quite rude online in 2004 if we wanted to. It didn't happen so often over trivia. PRSI thread showdowns aside, there were not all these vicious exchanges erupting every day, certainly not over matters of opinion like what color or model of gear to buy. Maybe this stuff is mostly a substitute for first person shooter videogames.
