Annnnd the bad... When Anonymity can also cause areas of hate

Well, the internet is great! BUT the internet also sucks. Why? Well, as long as you don't publicly announce who you are to those in forums, repercussions are fairly low (unless people specifically dox you). The probability of a context collapse (when people from different realms of your community collide) is relatively low when anonymous. A specific power of anonymity is felt, and well to some users, we can write some really BAD things.

SGDQ was great this year, but it didn't come with its controversy. With the inclusion of multiple trans runners, the twitch chat was put into "Emote Only" mode instead of its usual meme filled text mode due to fears of anonymous users saying hate to those runners rather than hate to their skill for dying on an easy 2 frame jump (I kid, that is too easy, all about 1 frame backflips). The meme adage of who you really are when using the internet is a great example of this being:

This is rather true. No one KNOWS who you are, thus any inhibitions, beliefs that you may harbor that aren't acceptable in real world face to face conversation can be unleashed, causing some of the ugliest of human emotion to come out. This isn't a thing restricted to twitch, but rather mostly all web 2.0 sites. Reddit with their Redpill, 4chan with /pol/ /b/, youtube with its comments section (and in some cases even some of the video providers), tumblr, facebook fake accounts, and so on. A device used for good can also be reversed, and with the champion of these devices promoting anonymity (sans facebook really), there is not a lot that can be done.

This is all I could screen cap...there was more, but I'd figured it wasn't acceptable to see

Dennen (2008), and her explanation of identities in blogs can help explain a little bit on what exactly is fostering this rampant amount of hate.  Identity. Identity in this case is "anonymous", you may have a tag name but sometimes you don't. The user wants to be accepted into a specific community, and if they fall down the wrong holes, will expand their "profile" to gain more acceptance in the community and have a larger network. These people might circle around specific areas such as r/theredpill or Sargon of Akkad on youtube, and from there it grows. In the gaming culture, back in the day for me I was part of "Clans", groups of people together to work together in specific games. The culture there was rather hate filled towards specific people (including to my annoyance, people like me). It took understanding and something to break the barrier of "belief" from the whole in a calm and tolerant way to truly start changing the culture at least in the "clan". I can't say it will work in other HUGE communities such as /pol/ but, these areas just like the r/speedrun community are "communities" whether we like it or not, and it is the attention we give to these communities that strengthen it just as much as the guys at GDQ in viewer appreciation. And well, one example of this is through "memes"....

Sources:

Dennen, V. P. (2009). Constructing Academic Alter-Egos: Identity Issues in a Blog-Based Community. Identity in the Information Society, 23-38.