Defending your own or trolling the haters?

Online incivility – understood as communication that violates norms of politeness and respect, ranging from subtle dismissiveness to overt hostility – is a growing problem. Even the subtle forms can violate norms of respectful communication and have serious consequences – driving users away, polarising debates, and damaging the quality of discourse. In organizational contexts, it can reduce trust, collaboration, and well-being.

When online discussions turn sour, it’s easy to blame trolls, moderators, or platform governance. But our new research finds that incivility is not just about bad behaviour or flawed design – it’s about how people and technology interact within what we call a sociotechnical system.

Pathways to incivility

By analysing 4.3 million posts across 100 Reddit communities, we identified five distinct pathways to incivility, each shaped by a unique mix of social and technical factors. The pathways fall into two broad types of communities: close-knit and scattered.

Close-knit communities: loyalty with a sharp edge

In small, active communities with strong member ties, incivility often stems from group loyalty. We found two main patterns here:

• Uncivil defence: Members act as guardians of group norms, responding harshly to outsiders or dissenting views – especially when moderation is light.
• Uncivil support: Rudeness becomes a bonding tool, with members showing empathy to each other while targeting outsiders with sarcasm or aggression.

Scattered communities: many users, little cohesion

In larger, loosely connected groups, incivility takes different forms, often shaped by moderation and topic focus. We found three main patterns here:

• Uncivil banter: Sarcasm and mockery thrive in busy communities with strong moderation but weak social ties.
• Uncivil explaining: “Experts” dominate narrow-topic forums, using jargon and dismissive language to assert status.
• Uncivil heckling: In large, poorly moderated spaces, low-effort insults become the norm, crowding out meaningful dialogue.

Detrimental or social glue?

A key takeaway from the study is that incivility is not always obvious. It can be subtle, indirect, and still have corrosive effects on a community.

Sometimes, it even plays a role in keeping the group together. In close-knit settings, a cutting remark about an outsider can strengthen in-group bonds. In scattered communities, playful banter can help maintain engagement, even if it occasionally crosses the line.

This complexity makes it harder to address. Simply banning certain words or punishing individual offenders may miss the underlying structural conditions that give rise to uncivil behaviour.

Tips for building healthier digital spaces

For anyone managing or designing digital spaces ­– whether public forums, professional networks, or internal company platforms – the challenge is to understand those configurations and design interventions that address the specific pathways to incivility in each context. 

Key takeaways from the research:

• No one-size-fits-all solution
  A rule that improves civility in one community might backfire in another. For example, heavy moderation could reduce hostile banter in a scattered group, but in a close-knit one it might stifle the self-policing that keeps outsiders in check.
• Platform features are not neutral
  The same technical tools – like voting systems or threaded comments – can encourage very different behaviours depending on the individuals interacting with them. A feature that fosters healthy debate in one space might fuel incivility in another.
• Community architecture shapes behaviour
  Incivility is not just about individuals; it’s a product of how the system is built. Effective interventions must target the underlying configuration of size, affiliation, control, and topic focus.

This means that interventions should target the system as well: In close-knit communities, balance the benefits of loyalty with safeguards against exclusionary or hostile defences. In scattered communities, address the risks of impersonality by fostering some degree of affiliation and shared norms.

Even within the same platform, communities can have radically different “participation architectures”. Recognising when subtle incivility acts as social glue, and deciding whether its bonding benefits outweigh its harms, is the first step towards building healthier, more resilient digital spaces.