I’m actively involved in two communities. The first is the NetHack roguelike community, and the second is the fan community of a German internet broadcaster that has existed, in one form or another, for about 25 years.

On average, I’d say both communities are equally kind and welcoming. I’d also argue that both contain roughly the same proportion of people who are unhinged and tend to go way over the top. The difference lies in how they go over the top.

In the NetHack community, you have people who start and immediately abandon 200,000 games during a tournament because they’re trying to roll the ideal starting conditions for a very specific playstyle. Then there are the Bobby Fischer types who create their own ultra-hard forks of the game because vanilla NetHack is too easy for them. There’s also plenty of criticism. Not everyone is happy with everything, but it’s mostly civil. The worst you usually get is something like, “The dev team sucks; they ruined the game with their latest changes.”

By contrast, in the internet broadcaster’s community there’s a very toxic minority that claims to have stopped watching years ago, yet continues to hate on the creators because the channel took a direction they didn’t like. Employees get mobbed and bullied, everything is torn down, and there’s a concerted effort to ruin the fun for everyone else.

I mean, I can understand that if you spent your formative teenage years “with” these people, it really hurts when that influence disappears. But can a parasocial relationship really go that far, that you drift into this kind of behavior?

How can someone be so hurt that they hold a grudge for years, keep hate-watching the creators, and invest so much time and energy into such a destructive hobby?