The Op-Ed

Not what each tribe is. After eight years running two opposing online forums, the honest answer is structural.

By Andrew Conru

On November 9, 2020, the morning Pfizer announced its emergency-authorization vaccine, I posted the same question to two websites I had built. Would you take it? Same words. Same database. Same moderator (me). One thread scored 8.5 out of 10 on civility. The other scored 4.0. The science-trusting room handled the news calmly. The freedom-frame room came apart. I had been running both rooms, on the same backend, for over a year. Five years later I went back and scored 49 matched cross-posts. The data does not say what I thought it would.

A brief about-me. I grew up on a 10-acre farm in northern Indiana. My parents were union steelworkers. I started writing code at age 12. In 1994 I built the world’s first online dating site. In 1996 I founded Friend Finder Networks, which carried over 700 million registered members across its lifetime. I sold it in 2007 and spent several years trying to figure out who I was when I was not building anything, which is harder than it sounds.

In 2017 I bought a domain called agnostic.com. Humanism without God, a meeting hall for people who had walked out of a religion. In 2019 I added IDW.community, a Mill-flavored room for people whose questions had stopped being welcome on other platforms. Same MySQL backend. Same PHP code. Same 36 humanism essays at the front door, lightly re-framed. Same moderator. The only variable I did not control was who came in. At peak, agnostic held 209,110 user records. IDW held 145,827. Five years out, I scored 49 matched cross-posts where I had asked both rooms the same question within two weeks. The findings sit in 18,891 words of analysis.

Pre-2020, on housekeeping prompts (button fixes, layout questions), the rooms averaged 8.94 and 8.61. Both maxed out. By the September-to-December 2020 election window, both had dropped, in lockstep, to about 5.85. The five matched pairs from January 6 to inauguration: agnostic 4.04, IDW 6.26. Both rooms crashed. They crashed in different directions, depending on the prompt.

The texture is in the single-question pairs. On January 13, 2021, I asked, in earnest, what Trump had done, if anything, to incite violence. My agnostic thread scored 2.5. My IDW thread scored 7.5. Two weeks later I asked how Biden was doing. The agnostic thread scored 7.5. The IDW thread scored 3.5. Same poster, same week, same paragraph format. Each room was placid on the prompt the other erupted at.

The cleanest single piece of evidence is the cross-site members. 15,957 people made accounts on both sites, half on the same day. The 291 who posted at meaningful volume on both sides filed 23.3 times more abuse reports on agnostic than on IDW. Same login. Same human. On a sub-sample of 108 of them, scored on tone, the IDW-side voice came in 1.46 points lower on civility, 2.04 lower on warmth, 1.89 higher on argumentativeness. The rooms shaped the voice.

I wanted, when I sat down to write this, a clean verdict on which side was meaner online. The data did not give me one.

What it forced instead is structural. Civility online is not what each tribe is. Civility is what each tribe protects. Inside the protected zone, where the prompt names something the room loves to think about, civility is portable, durable, and beautiful to watch. Outside that zone, where the prompt names an outgroup, civility flips into the polite vocabulary of expulsion. Same person, same chair, ten seconds apart. I know this is true at the individual level because the cross-site members did exactly that, on the same engine, between two browser tabs.

I am writing in 2026 from Seattle. Five years after January 6, both rooms are still in the database, dated, signed. I closed the question of whether civility can be engineered into a medium itself a couple of years ago. Mostly no. The line between housekeeping prompts and outgroup-triggering ones has been moving faster than any dashboard I built could keep up with.

So I started building rooms with walls instead of comment threads. There is now a 16,000 square foot art salon at 110 Union Street in downtown Seattle, across from the Seattle Art Museum. Most Wednesdays, 4 to 7 pm, I am there. There is coffee. There is a painting on the back wall. There is no thread.

If you live somewhere I can drive to, come by. If you do not, before you post the next thing, ask yourself which side of it your room is loving, and which side you are rehearsing because the room is watching.

Andrew Conru founded Friend Finder Networks in 1996 and runs the Conru Art Foundation in Seattle. The Art Love Salon is at 110 Union Street, across from the Seattle Art Museum, open Wednesdays 4 to 7 pm.