I sense a deep fear of inadequacy in a lot of online comments. People feel they need to say something that's accepted by the forum, so they often go for chest-thumping. They also fear saying something that will require argumentation, so a lot of discussions that could be meaningful end up being slagging matches, that way you can play it to a draw: say something rude and then when the other person is offended you point at how they focused on being offended rather than the argument. The other person will then point at how the first person was rude in order to avoid the issues, so basically both are right.

There really is something about it being online that makes this terrible. I've never seen in real life debate that things deteriorated to what one reads regularly online.