I wonder if there is another aspect in play, the mutability of identities.
In small, local communities, you have one thing you can never get rid off, your face.
But online there is no face, nothing to tie your claimed identity back to your biological self.
While pondering this i reminded myself of a mmorpg that may illustrate this.
It originated in South Korea, and there the player account is tied to the players national identity number. So once banned, one is banned for life.
But when it was exported to the states, anyone could sign up multiple times. End result was that various mechanics that originally was meant for the community to police itself, was used to harass other players.
That is an important characteristic of online communities: someone with a bad reputation can usually (depending on the application) throw away their old account and start over with a new identity; therefore, having no reputation is more-or-less indistinguishable from having a negative reputation. That's not really a problem per se, it's just a characteristic of the problem domain to consider when implementing a reputation systems (and in particular, in deciding how much leeway to impact the system to give to new users).
In small, local communities, you have one thing you can never get rid off, your face.
But online there is no face, nothing to tie your claimed identity back to your biological self.
While pondering this i reminded myself of a mmorpg that may illustrate this.
It originated in South Korea, and there the player account is tied to the players national identity number. So once banned, one is banned for life.
But when it was exported to the states, anyone could sign up multiple times. End result was that various mechanics that originally was meant for the community to police itself, was used to harass other players.