Actually, I used to belong to a site where the flame wars became intolerable. It had nothing to do with not communicating; the ones who were the worst ones knew exactly what they were saying. The called people names and followed them around the board, repeating epithet after epithet. It finally got to the point, I shook the dust of that place off my boots and corrupted my sign-on so that I COULDN'T get back in if I wanted to. It's like a car wreck that people have to gawk at. I didn't want to be a gawker or a recipient of that kind of abuse.

We used to say on that site that people's TRUE personalities came out on-line because there was nothing to keep them in check, no societal rules to which they had to abide. You take away the societal rules, you're left with cavemen grunting at each other and stomping aggressively around the fire.