I ran into this problem myself in the 90s when I first got into the whole internet forum thing. This is something that has worked for me, though YMMV:
I re-read every post I write in my head, and pretend I'm saying it to the other person IRL who is sitting across the table from me. Would I use the same words? The same tone?
The internet is, in its current form, dehumanizing, you have to take care to maintain your own humanity and the humanity of the semi-anonymous non-faces you're interact with.
The negativity on HN doesn't bother me so much as the tone and language. Instead of criticizing, many posters here outright bash. Remember OMGPOP's sale to Zynga? The word "coward" got tossed around as if the company was staffed by an army of unfeeling Mecha-Hitlers.
If a post gets me emotionally fired up, I often type up my response. Read it. Then delete it. Then type it up again. I find just getting the emotional response out helps.
I first really learned to program on an LP-Mud that was in the early to middle stages of development. We had lots of live interactions that went just fine, but our message board conversations were often teetering on the brink of flame wars.
The exact same handful of people, usually around five or so, talking about the same subjects, but with really different results.
So there's something about the forum or message board format that is dangerous, I think.
With live chat, of course, misunderstandings surface faster so you can correct or elaborate as needed, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think that somehow people read tone into the messages that isn't there. I'm not sure exactly why. Over-aggressive pattern matching maybe. You get an idea in your head around the first or second sentence and then fit the rest to that idea.
I re-read every post I write in my head, and pretend I'm saying it to the other person IRL who is sitting across the table from me. Would I use the same words? The same tone?
The internet is, in its current form, dehumanizing, you have to take care to maintain your own humanity and the humanity of the semi-anonymous non-faces you're interact with.
The negativity on HN doesn't bother me so much as the tone and language. Instead of criticizing, many posters here outright bash. Remember OMGPOP's sale to Zynga? The word "coward" got tossed around as if the company was staffed by an army of unfeeling Mecha-Hitlers.