Fake Name 1234 wrote:
Two answers to this:
1) Anonymity: any forum that provides the ability for posters to be anonymous is going to be ugly. Whether its running, gardening, or politics: anonymity breeds negativity.
2) It's not just LRC. Within any group that is hyper-focused on one thing (i.e., running, baseball, music, football, cooking, etc.) you will find people who are really invested in that particular thing. People who are invested to the point that they are going to spend their time on a niche forum discussing that particular thing are going to have strong opinions about the content. They are also more likely to be relatively gifted at that particular thing, which breeds a machismo that brings out the worst in them that is helped along by point #1 above.
There is truth to this. However, I do believe we were more civil a generation ago and the influence of the internet is a big factor in all that.
There is also some more nuance. A little history helps. LRC just didn't spring out of nowhere (i.e., the foreheads of the brojos). It arose from the ashes of three different venues.
Back in the mid-90s when we were all just getting started with the world wide web, there was Track and Field listserve, which was an email-link where you signed up and got linked in other track/running fans. A fair number of the old timers on this board got their start there, and you can recognize a few here and there. Then the more user-friendly message boards arose in the late-90s. Two of the bigger ones were TnFmedia.com and Mervs Running. TnFmedia was more closely related to the T and F listserve, and somewhat to Track and Field News (although that venue has always been heavily moderated--no nonsense), hard-core track people. Mervs arose from a first generation messageboard had migrated from Runners World, and it tended to be more social, with a range of interests from OT qualifying hopefuls, to relative newbs and recreational runners, to masters runners and sub-elites.
For entirely different reasons T&N media and Mervs imploded at about the same time (within about the same year). There was a lot of vitriol among and between the sites. Letsrun was kind of a backwater upstart for a year or two and no one paid much attention to it. T&Fmedia went down first, and the rowdy, testosterone-driven hard-core trackies locked in here. Then Mervs underwent a lot of upheaval and its users went all sorts of directions, a fair number finding a home here. So there has always been an acrimonious undertone at letsrun. Note that the Dyestatters and Flagpole arrived a couple years later.
So yes the anonymous nature of the site, plus some trolling and thread boosting from up top (not to mention political-social disagreements), have fueled letsrun for 20 years now. But the historic background from whence they came has also had an influence. And a lot of people post here on pure hate.