"like most people would never steal even a fruit in the supermarket but see no problem pirating movies and software"

A stolen fruit is gone from the supermarket and cannot be sold to a paying customer.

A downloaded movie remains the same.

There is only a loss, if the person who pirated it, would have bought it otherwise.

So no, it is not the same.

Ok, wrong example.

Let's say, most people would never dare to make racist insults to anyone on the streets but many do so copiously online.

I like Mike Tyson's take on it - “Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it,”

The one that always surprises me is NextDoor. Given the much greater chance that you will literally run into someone on NextDoor in real life, and the fact that NextDoor accounts show your actual identity, you would expect discussion to be more civil there than on other social media.

But, holy cow, every time I go on there, it is a hot mess of angry people screaming at each other. I have to assume those people just don't go outside at all?

I mean, there are plenty of people who would say bad things about others, even if they know it'll get passed on to them, than go up to them and do so directly. Plus you have the usual problems that come with NIMBYs+HOAs all in one app.

Whether it's through moderation, or the real name policy, NextDoor has avoided the worst of 4chat. There are no page long posts of a single repeated epithet, and there's no child pornography, and the only drug talk is in reference to the local homeless problem (though that may also be related to the age range of users on NextDoor). It turns out that adding real names only slightly raises the threshold on what some people will say.

IMO it is NextDoor's hyperlocality that makes it such a hot, angry mess. On Facebook, your cousin that's 5 states away's friend that's straight up posting swastikas unironically? The chances of meeting them, ever, is fairly close to zero if you don't want to, so it's far easier to walk away. But on NextDoor, it's because that the people are in some cases, literally next door to you, that the conversation is almost immediately emotionally threatening. It turns out your neighbors aren't like you, but not in a good way, and it challenges your sense of belonging to the local community. It turns out George down the street who's a sweet old man who's lived there for 20 years and has a pretty dog, is a neo-Nazi. Not something that would come up while exchanging pleasantries about the mail being late today, but thanks to the Internet, his eccentricities are on full display. Good fences make good neighbors.

It's easy to dismiss Nextdoor as a hot angry mess, but there are very sweet things too. My neighbor just recovered their cat, someone is collecting clothes to bring to a women's shelter, but the hot angry mess is very shouty, and impossible to tune out.

Oh, I very much agree to your general point, I just happen to be a free information believer, so I was triggered by your example ...

Pirating movies/software is not in the same moral category of stealing physical goods because it’s non-rivalrous. Yanking something off of Usenet is akin to watching a baseball game or a movie at a drive-in from over the fence.

> Yanking something off of Usenet is akin to watching a baseball game or a movie at a drive-in from over the fence.

This is a excellent analogy that I don't recall having encountered before; thank you.

To say nothing of the fact that you have a credit card and therefore real world identity (presumably) attached to that card and that any serious in-person griefing can easily end up with you tossed in a jail cell.

AirBnB currently requires pictures of your state-issued ID to create an account in addition to the credit card.