It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an intuitive appeal.
We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion.
An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.
Twitter is a terrible place for conversation to take place. There is no capacity for nuance or well-reasoned thought. It's a site for announcements, not nuanced musing, as expected from a place where every comment has to be a soundbite. Occasionally there might be a two-way conversation that works well, but that's not the norm.
It was a pretty big change in tenor depending on what group you were looking at. I will say the some groups (comp.lang.objective-c) had some seriously nasty trolls already. I remember getting pretty liberal with my killfile. I am not sure that was a good thing thinking about it.
We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion.
An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.