This kind of sociopathic behavior—treating people like things—is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.

I’ve read this 4 times now, and still I don’t agree with a single word of it. Is it not simpler to assume that the people acting like sociopaths are sociopaths? Anonymous environments allow people to be judged via their contributions to a community and nothing else, and this aspect of net culture has always been one of its most vital attributes. In 1997, I would not have written any of the things online that I did, were it not anonymous. Had I not been able to share them with other people—because I certainly never would have been able to share them with people I knew AFK—well, I don’t care to speculate what would have happened, but the fact is that I did find a supportive community online that was a great help to me. Anonymity is not the problem, the problem (Ms Fake and other entrepreneurs have) is that human social groups do not scale to the thousands of individuals required to make a community profitable instead of, merely, a community.