Because it’s a community founded on hatred. Hating foreigners, hating gays, hating brown people, hating women, but especially hating democrats. Hate is their fuel. Without it, they’d realize they’re all chumps, getting played by rich assholes to benefit other rich assholes.
“Community” has such a fuzzy, feel-good meaning to most people, but a community can be founded on anything, and many are founded on terrible things - hatred, fear - and they can be incredibly effective.
That’s why I’ve spent my career trying to build positive communities and warning about dangerous ones. Trump’s community of hatred was built on the back of Fox News’ malice, MSM’s free propaganda, and Twitter/Facebook’s idiot idealism and abdication of responsibility.
I’d like to say that communities built on love and hope are stronger than communities built on fear and hate, but that’s not what I’ve seen in my career. Human nature just weighs anger more strongly. It swallows our attention. It’s probably evolutionarily advantageous.
Fear and hate are just powerful motivators. That’s why community companies have to make conscious choices to fight those paths. To see how people are really using their tools and actively work to combat our baser instincts. The Trump presidency is what happens when they don’t.
Hate based communities online do tend to burn brighter and hotter but fizzle out faster. Love based communities are quieter, smaller, but tend to stick around longer (see Craigslist, Wikipedia - both have drama but are positive at their core).
It’s very difficult to change a community that starts off hate-based into anything else. Once the hate cools, the community has no glue and everyone drifts away. But a love-based community can be poisoned by hate very easily. Like ridiculously easily.
That’s why, again, it is the responsibility of community creators to work endlessly to make sure their spaces stay safe, positive, and healthy. It only takes a drop of poison to ruin a well.
