“being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims”
So the tooling and moderation aspects – removing the worst, small number of very aggressive people – are critical. On top of that, the whole “are we inadvertently training people to be polite racists/sexists/bigots” angle is something you have to watch out for as well.
(The version check stats say there are currently around 34k instances of Discourse out there.)
