This is a very important key point. I’m a 41 year old conservative who grew up in the rural midwest in the 1980s. I was a teenager during the 90s.

When I cut my teeth on philosophical arguments, learned how to talk deep into the night about disagreements of the complex problems facing humanity, it was in the context of hanging out with my tightest friends from high school and college.

We could say pretty much anything, and because we had each other’s backs in the world, it was easy to fit in lots of potentially-ambiguous messages with confidence they’d be received well.

But online we’re interacting with people outside our social groups, from different cultures. As much as I personally hate it, it may be necessary to sanitize our words here moreso than elsewhere in order to avoid misinterpretation.

It’s just a totally different social context. And for people of my age — again I’m 41, born in 1982, graduated HS in 2000 — it’s a hard transition to comprehend because we did our social formation before online discussion with strangers became a norm.

We had online discussions before, but they were more niche and embedded in more stable communities. I remember being part of a forum around 2005 and I knew the people I was talking to. Not from real life, but from our many, many discussions. Instead of hundreds of millions, that forum had like a thousand members.

So I do think it’s healthy for people in real life to be unafraid to use extremely violent, absurd, insulting language, because that helps people bond. But online it may just not be necessary.

It’s less even about knowing the person directly, as it is about having the same microculture. Like back in the 90s I could assume any teen dressed like me would have roughly the same values and mannerisms as me. Now that’s not the case, because the internet has blurred the associations between different elements of culture.