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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinematics" data-source="post: 8706005" data-attributes="member: 6932123">Concerning the OP:I had a similar experience with the anime community. I got into anime and manga in the mid-90's — good old VHS days — and then joined a forum dedicated to anime released on DVD (animeondvd.com, naturally) when the DVD format first came out.In those days DVD players were still costly (especially multi-region DVD players that could play region 2 Japanese DVDs along with region 1 US DVDs), and you bought 3-4 episode discs one at a time at $30 a pop, rather than an entire season for like $50.  And I was buying most new series coming out.  And a lot of the community on the forum was of a similar mindset.  These were the people dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars per month on anime; they weren't just fansub pirates.  I get the feeling that that had a strong influence on the flavor of the community. It was both serious and fun, and you could count on the people there being serious about it as well, and not just trolls passing through.  There were strong opinions about which style of DVD case was the best, but not (very) heated arguments about which anime was the best. Everyone was there because they loved anime, and they were willing to invest heavily in that love.That website eventually was bought by one of those early venture capitalist firms trying to make a buck on a brand, and the owner of the site needing a bit more financial support to keep things running.  It's gone through a few more rebrandings since then, but when that first happened I started looking around into other anime communities to get my "fix" of discussion.Anyway, what I found was a whole lot of what would now be called toxicity, even if of a very different brand of toxic. There was hate and vitriol spewed all over the place, both in the forums and in the editorials.  Anime News Network was one of the worst, despite being one of the premiere anime news sites around. Some news aggregator/comment sites hosted plenty of sexist and bigoted vitriol in their comments sections.Ironically, one of the best places I found was a site built around fansubs, that had a well-regulated and moderated forum covering every new show that released each season.  That worked because of proper moderation, and good siloing of topics (ie: one thread per show, or, if there was enough ongoing discussion, moving it to a subforum with one thread per episode).Good moderation (and a corresponding lack of moderators/editors/administrators prone to stirring the pot) and focused discussion seem to be the keys for a healthy fandom environment.  Lack of politics is another huge help.  Twitter and Facebook and the like are the exact opposite, with little to no moderation, and discussion that can go anywhere at any time.People are people, which means the worst of people can come out any time in any fandom, but it also means that in the right environments you can expect them to be decent people, too. Recognize the difference between arguing and criticizing and trolling.  People are too quick to blame the first two on the last.  Maybe give people a place where they can vent. (One creative writing forum has an entire sub-forum for Rants. You can yell and scream and vent all you want in there, but you leave it at the door when you move to other parts of the forum.)It doesn't seem like it should be too hard to have a healthy discussion environment, but you do need to actually put a little effort into it.</blockquote>

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