> Communities built around what they love are usually good, but what if what you love is terrible?

We have the law to regulate what is acceptable or unacceptable - almost all laws are there to regulate person-to-person interactions. If what you love requires murdering someone, we already call that out. If what you love involves playing "I Will Survive" with a kazoo, we don't call you out unless you have a very loud kazoo and people are trying to sleep.

Laws and social pressure are also a moderating force. Forcing 2 people that are very opposed to have a forced interaction about the things they are opposed on probably results in quite a few bar fights - more often than not though they leave.

If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before. If anything interactions have gotten better, except for those who need to have everyone look and act like them in order to function.

> Laws and social pressure are also a moderating force

Perhaps this was true in the days prior to the internet, but it certainly isn’t the case now. In fact, social pressures in the online sphere can be the opposite of a moderating force. In the analysis of the online culture wars, many authors have pointed out how the alt right bursting into the mainstream was in many ways a response to the societal pressure to conform to ever increasing (and at times, absurd) rules of a radical “PC culture”.

As a disclaimer, this isn’t to justify the alt right movement or to condemn political correctness wholesale. But the point is that societal pressure is not moderating anything. On the contrary, the internet has allowed people to simply retreat from the parts of society that previously may have pressured them into moderation, and instead to enclose themselves in the parts of society that not only accept their radical culture, but encourage it.

> If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before.

And yet the rights of racial minorities still made massive strides in absence of the internet. Many of the commenters here have made arguments that along the lines of “a gay person would never have found acceptance without the geographical boundary breaking communities of the internet”, and frankly, I’m not sure that is true. The changing attitudes towards LGBT persons isn’t any more radical than many of the other social revolutions that have taken place without the internet.

I think you have a reasonable interpretation, though I disagree that the endpoint is increased radicalization. Certainly it’s far easier to find people that are on your side, but that doesn’t mean that the number of people that believe what you believe goes up naturally. I think everyone is jockeying around in a new space and trying to figure out what “community” means as conversations move online. There definitely is a radicalizinf element in an echo chamber, but there’s also a lot of wonderful communities being built that could not have. When things start to translate into the public sphere is where it is messiest right now.

Bang on. Other people are definitely a moderating force towards what they collectively believe to be reasonable. Sometimes that's something like "no murder". Other times its "those with the wrong skin color are subhuman".

It's possible that this kind of conformity might be best treated as something other than a universally positive force.