Partly it's because this is an industry that acts like it's very geared towards youth. The emphasis is on the young millionaires: Zuckerberg comes to mind. (I'm 18 and applying to YCombinator, so I fall into this category too.)
The environment is much more geared towards the hotheaded youth. It's not that you have a few outliers that act immature that get kept in check: everybody is immature, and the outliers are the people who act mature. Beyond that: a lot of the people in this scene are the unpopular sorts. People like that often have a ramped up persecution complex: they feel like everybody's got to be against them. As a result, you get very ramped up fights over really stupid things.
I get this a lot whenever I take the time to read Gawker - I followed the big Jakob Lodwick fight when it happened. Every side was awful. Gawker took potshots at Lodwick to get hits, people online started threatening him because he was a public figure, Lodwick worked up, and in the end he denounced the masses for being "common", Gawker still takes every chance it can get to diss the guy, and people like Ted Dziuba go out of their way to denounce him as pathetic and meaningless. It's a shame, because Lodwick does incredible work and Dziuba doesn't, and so the one takes it out on the other.
(Then, of course, there's Connected Ventures, which makes a few good-but-overrated things and whose staff tries to act perpetually like they're frat kids. They're fun, but it doesn't help this attitude of people that it's okay to be over-the-top and conceited and loud about it.)
It's an attitude that I despise, and it hurts the community at large.
"The environment is much more geared towards the hotheaded youth. It's not that you have a few outliers that act immature that get kept in check: everybody is immature, and the outliers are the people who act mature."
My experience being a part of Y Combinator is that everyone is precisely the opposite, though my experience is limited them the people I've met directly a indirectly because of Y Combinator.
That's why I like YCombinator, and consequently why I like Hacker News: it avoids that level of immaturity. All the HN users who have YCombinator-funded companies tend to have great conversations. I can't think of a troll here who also was part of YC.
That said, this is the exception. I can't think of many more online groups that are this adult.
The environment is much more geared towards the hotheaded youth. It's not that you have a few outliers that act immature that get kept in check: everybody is immature, and the outliers are the people who act mature. Beyond that: a lot of the people in this scene are the unpopular sorts. People like that often have a ramped up persecution complex: they feel like everybody's got to be against them. As a result, you get very ramped up fights over really stupid things.
I get this a lot whenever I take the time to read Gawker - I followed the big Jakob Lodwick fight when it happened. Every side was awful. Gawker took potshots at Lodwick to get hits, people online started threatening him because he was a public figure, Lodwick worked up, and in the end he denounced the masses for being "common", Gawker still takes every chance it can get to diss the guy, and people like Ted Dziuba go out of their way to denounce him as pathetic and meaningless. It's a shame, because Lodwick does incredible work and Dziuba doesn't, and so the one takes it out on the other.
(Then, of course, there's Connected Ventures, which makes a few good-but-overrated things and whose staff tries to act perpetually like they're frat kids. They're fun, but it doesn't help this attitude of people that it's okay to be over-the-top and conceited and loud about it.)
It's an attitude that I despise, and it hurts the community at large.