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Insulting random internet strangers is really just the discourse equivalent of public masturbation: you're doing it for self-pleasure and most passerbyes just turn their face away so as not to have to see it, except for a tiny fraction of people who actually enjoy seeing somebody have a good wank in the middle of the street whilst caring naught for whatever bullshit they're saying whilst they wank.

Insulting delivers pleasure to the kind of intellect and type of personality that believes others have a low enough mental age that they will feel bad when a random internet stranger which they've never seen before insults them, something that they themselves only believe because they would feel like that in the other person's shoes.

Meanwhile a fraction of passerbyes will give positive feedback, same as a fight on a street might get a handful of people who stop, stare and maybe even egg on the combatants. However on the street it's plain to see that almost everybody just moves on and tries to ignore the fight, whilst on the Internet, one can't seen those who just "move one trying to ignore it" and might convince themselves that they have support for their style of comment.

The real reason for Politeness is not the "you should do it because it's the right thing to do" that parents tell their rebel teenagers before their brains have fully developed, it's that the pleasure some people get from being rude, is often more than outweighed by the long term effects on the audience of being frequently impolite, which are worse the smaller the environment and hence the bigger the chance others will cross paths with you having made their minds about your character by a previous display of rudeness.

Whilst Reddit is a city, were people can get away with a lot of shit (far beyond mere rudeness), Lemmy is still more of a village, so the negative effects will be greater.

I shouldn't have to explain in a step by step way this pretty basic adult knowledge that most people figure out by themselves when they become mature adults about the actual concrete benefits of behaving in certain ways rather than others in social contexts.