Why are people so rude on the internet now?

Yahoo! Answers was a much different place 6 or 7 years ago.

There were always trolls and troublemakers, but at that time, the site was used mostly as it should be (to ask and answer questions) and most of the users actually were here to help others.

Most of those helpful users are long gone. For various reasons I'm sure, but I think a lot just got tired of the site and found other things to do. Others got fed up with the sheer amount of CRAP that gets posted here, and some (a lot) hated the purple format and all the changes too much to want to continue.

people have always been rude on the internet, it's just that there used to be more respectful and knowledgeable people on here but they were slowly driven off by all the horrible and illogical changes yahoo kept making to this site.

.....so now while there are only a few holdovers who still try to help, you're mainly dealing with an army of trolls and idiots who are just here to screw around cause they have nothing better to do with their lives at this point.

It is getting worse that's for sure.Unfortunately the anonymity of message boards tends to bring out some less than pleasant people and others who seem to enjoy causing problems rather than providing solutions. It's like in school when the teacher asked , are you helping with the solution or are you part of the problem.Try to ignore them, report them if they break community guidelines or TOS. Fortunately the majority of members are sincere, polite and try to help other members.There are also point gamers who answer just to get 2 points the easy way they should be reported

http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&id=SLN...

also, if posters don't answer the question asked they could be reported for not following the question and answer format.

http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_US&page=c...

They feel free to be rude, cuz chances are they live thousands of miles away from you and you will never get close to them to slap them across their rude faces

No nice way to liars wrong.

because they want people to think that they are tough.