The big-city theory of online behavior

People are rude on the internet. That's not controversial.

The usual explanation is anonymity: people behave badly because they can't be identified. Remove the mask, the argument goes, and you get accountability, and accountability produces politeness.

I don't think that's right. I think the real mechanism is older and simpler than the internet, and you can see it by comparing two places: a village and a city.

The village: repeat interactions shape behavior

Walk around a small village for a while and a few things become obvious.

You keep running into the same people.
Very few new people are arriving.
If you piss someone off, you will see them again—tomorrow, and the day after that.

This shapes what "good behavior" looks like. Politeness isn't just a moral virtue in a village. It's optimal strategy. You can't burn relationships when you only have a finite number of them and no supply of replacements.

There's a second effect: because novelty is scarce, new input gets treated with genuine interest. A new person, a new idea, a new product—these things stand out against a quiet background, and people have the bandwidth to engage with them.

The city: one-shot interactions change the math

Now walk through a big city.

Most of the people you see, you've never met before.
Most of them, you will never see again.
If you have an argument with someone, it probably doesn't matter. Neither of you will remember it next week.

The consequence: politeness becomes optional, and filtering becomes essential.

You are constantly bombarded with new stimuli—new people, new pitches, new noise. You can't engage with all of it. So you become very good at tuning things out, and you don't spend energy being polite about it, because from your perspective, every stranger is just another face in a crowd you'll never see again.

This isn't a character flaw. It's rational behavior given the constraints. In a village, the cost of rudeness is high (you'll face the person again). In a city, the cost is nearly zero.

The internet is the biggest city on Earth

Once you see the village-city dynamic, the internet stops being mysterious.

The internet isn't a village. It's the largest city ever built. And it inherits all the behavioral properties of big cities:

People are dismissive, because they're oversaturated with new stimuli and have learned to filter aggressively.
People are impolite, because interactions are one-shot and the cost of rudeness is negligible.
Being loud is rewarded, because in a crowd of millions, volume is the only way to reach the people who actually want to hear what you're saying.

The standard framing—"anonymity makes people mean"—misses the point. Lots of real-name accounts on Twitter/X aren't exactly paragons of thoughtful discourse. Twitter/X isn't special, it's just the devil I know. The mechanism isn't the mask. It's the crowd size.

Loudness as optimal strategy

In a group of 10, if you yell, everyone hears it. Yell repeatedly and you get punished—socially, immediately.

In a group of 10,000, if you yell, most people won't hear it at all. What happens instead is the crowd rearranges: people who agree with what you're yelling move closer, and everyone else tunes you out and moves further away.

Social media adds a layer on top of this. The reshare mechanic is the yelling. People mostly interact with your "greatest hits," and something only becomes a greatest hit if it gets amplified—which means it has to be loud enough to break through the noise.

So the optimal strategy on social media is: yell a lot. If most of what you say is mediocre, it doesn't matter—it gets drowned out by everyone else's yelling. But if one thing catches, it compounds.

This selects for a specific kind of content. Not necessarily good content. Loud content.

Big cities favor fluff; small cities favor depth

There's a corollary I keep noticing.

In big cities—and on big platforms—there's a tinder mentality toward ideas. New things arrive constantly. People swipe through them. Engagement is shallow by default, because there's always something newer one scroll away.

In small cities, you're more likely to find people engaging deeply with problems. Not because small-city people are smarter, but because the environment has less noise and fewer exits. You stick with things longer because there's less pulling you away.

When I worked in big-city environments, I noticed a pattern: the loudest people in big corporations often weren't the ones doing the most substantive work. They were signaling. The people who actually cared about how things worked and moved them forward had often come from smaller places, where depth was the default mode.

That's not a universal rule. But the tendency is real enough to notice.

The counterintuitive consequence for early-stage products

This produces a dynamic that surprises people.

In a previous startup, we had enormous difficulty getting traction in big-city schools. They were dismissive—not hostile, just uninterested. Another new thing, another pitch, another product. Swipe.

But when we went to schools in smaller towns and rural areas, the reception was completely different. People were curious. They wanted to try it. They had the bandwidth and the openness.

This felt counterintuitive at first. You'd expect big-city schools to be more forward-leaning, more willing to experiment. But the big-city filter works against you when you're early-stage: you don't have social proof yet, and social proof is the only currency that cuts through the noise.

A colleague doing sales at another edtech startup confirmed the pattern. The most forward-leaning adopters were consistently not in the biggest cities.

The failure mode of villages: stagnation

None of this means small is always better.

Villages have their own failure mode: when the rate of newness drops too low, things stagnate. Institutions, practices, and people that should have been replaced by something better get to persist indefinitely—not because they're good, but because there's no competitive pressure to displace them.

In a city, bad ideas get killed by better ones constantly. In a village, a bad idea can survive for decades if nothing better shows up to challenge it.

The internet also has villages

The internet isn't only a city.

Group chats, small Discord servers, tight Slack communities—these function like villages. The same people show up every day. Repeat interactions create accountability. And the village rules reassert themselves: be polite, don't yell, don't spam.

Which is maybe the most useful takeaway: behavior is shaped less by character and more by the structure of the environment. Change the crowd size, change the repeat-interaction rate, and you predictably change what "optimal behavior" looks like.

The internet isn't rude because people are bad. It's rude because it's an enormous city, and cities make rudeness cheap and sometimes neccesary.