Excellent point Bill!
Jonas, I'm not saying anything - not anything meaningful anyway,
, Without facing the need to make a decision - from total lack of event stimulus - my words are only political postures. I haven't seen any moderation happen here at all nor have I seen any at DPR. So it's all relative to non-event.
Why people act different? They perceive the environments differently. If you are placed in the middle of a crowd at a rock concert you act one way, If you are placed in a children's kindergarden class while in session, you act another.
You, making someone else upset? Wow, how would it be - to have such power... No, you can't. Only
they can upset themselves. For whatever reasons (probably associations with images or past declared alliances of some opinions they did or didn't identify with) they choose to interpret/extract/interject a feeling and a tone. It's their own choice tho! You have nothing to do with it. Aside from calling someone socially unacceptable names, our sentences can be interpreted in almost any way the reader wishes - actually even with name calling too. And the secondary choice - how to react once a perception is made, is equally as subjective - perhaps more-so. A mighty and angry rant can be interpreted as fun and light and casual commentary can be interpreted as hate-speech. We, each of us as readers, choose what emotions to tag it with/as. Once one person takes it in a particular way and reacts or retorts then others with less personal will assume a similar posture - or sometimes an opposing one but around the same points of contention. This is even true of image critiques. The first poster to critique the image(s) WAY more often than not, sets the direction for the next 5 or 10 posters - even if they don't read the words to themselves - all they have to do is see the text. If one looks at such threads objectively it almost looks like the individual posters just copy each other. This for me is another reason I hate moderation. There's just no way the mod can guess what a poster means or what their tone is without completely assuming almost every aspect all on his or her own. Even the phrases we trigger on are used and meant completely different from sub-culture to sub-culture. Of course someone with multiple experiences in on-line conflict is more enlightened as to which phrases are best avoided all together and how to defuse
a situation once it occurs - but that's a learned skill and we're all at different stages of learning and on different paths. Anyway, the internet is one place where it really is
them and not you - at least for the vast majority of cases...
I dunno, just another 2¢...