So a couple things:

I feel like those who don't experience the net as an extension of their lives are actually more likely to unwittingly present a more honest face in online interaction.

You may feel that way, but your feelings on the subject are completely, documentably, demonstrably 100% wrong. Jeron Lanier spends a chapter on dishonesty and online cultures in You Are Not A Gadget and the nature of identity and the fluidity anonymity grants online have been a central theme of not one, not two, but three books by Sherry Turkle. Your "feelings" on the subject are internal, reflect your own emotions, and are absolutely 100% wrong in regards to common, greater trends that have been clinically documented since the rise of online identity.

"A lot of folks on Reddit espousing" anything is one thing - but they know as much about it as you do. They're going on instinct as much as you are. And as we've had computers as part of our daily lives for exactly one generation, nobody has any "instinct" to go on.

the internet makes our person invisible, and that provides a huge incentive to be more honest in some ways than we might be in real life.

If by "honest" you mean "tactless" then you are correct. If by "honest" you mean "honest" then you are, as mentioned before, baselessly, groundlessly wrong.

I have a problem with people being so gleefully and blithely ugly.

Yup. And Reddit is Thunderdome. I've been good at fighting online for more than a decade but Reddit made me absolutely lethal. It's the same problem as everywhere, though - you have to learn the lingua franca for anywhere you're at or else you can't communicate, and Reddit's default communication standards are cruel. So when I'm elsewhere, I have to reef myself in... and when I'm on Reddit, I have to let myself out.

When you get down to it, I'm more for being dishonest in some ways online.

That is because you have demonstrated a naive inexperience with the online world.

Or just more controlled.

The fact that you think "honesty" and "tact" are interchangeable concepts proves my core point better than anything else you could have written. "Honesty" is being true in the interests of fostering communication. "tact" is being mildly duplicitous in the interests of fostering communication. Your mistake is that you think the cruelty of online interaction fosters communication - it doesn't. It's monkeys screeching at each other from treetops.

On your side, it sounds like you've carefully crafted this narrator that refuses to suffer fools gladly, and deals with foolishness in a way that you, the author, wouldn't in real life.

Nope. I've written an apologia as to why I do not imprint my personal expectations on online communications and argue that nobody else should do so to me.

One more thing on the note of narrative versus authorial intent- there's a weird tension between your two posts.

That's because you started out with an incorrect thesis, backed it up with incorrect evidence and reached incorrect conclusions.

And as such, sounds like you're saying that we're a bunch of characters interacting with other characters rather than real people interacting with other real people.

From a psychosocial standpoint, "me" as in this thing that you are reading is made up of text. That text contains exactly zero body language, exactly zero facial cues, exactly zero vocal inflection and exactly zero shared experience. You know less about me from what I have written here than you do about the waiter that refills your coffee. If this is not the case, it is evidence that you're not paying attention to your waiter, which also furthers my point.

e.g. I don't know you at all, so I shouldn't take it personally when kleinbl00 insults fuffle.

No.

NO.

NO.

You don't know me at all, so who the fuck do you think you are to have "expectations" of me.

Here's the part you're not getting: there are over 400 people on Reddit that have told me, via PM, that they look up to me. That they always look out for my posts. There are over two dozen people who have asked for life advice. There are a half-dozen people for whom I have gotten jobs. There are three people for whom I have greatly reduced prison sentences.

But there are over three million people on Reddit.

I interact with people regularly. I interact with people above and beyond the boundaries of Reddit. But I also regularly get people professing their "disappointment" in me because I did not live up to some construct of me they have in their head.

The entire point of the essay linked is to explain why, in no uncertain terms, those who are "disappointed" in me are "disappointed" in their construct of me, and who the fuck do they think they are expecting anything of me at all?

Which seems to run in direct contradiction with your Reddit point. How do you jive those two?

Easily. All you have to do is read what I wrote for what I wrote, rather than what you want it to say. But, as my ENTIRE ORIGINAL POINT EXPLAINED, "kids these days" suck ass at this. The fact that you wrote a 500 word essay saying "you're wrong" only illustrates that "you're wrong" is your way of saying "I don't understand." Which, again, is my point.

Or am I missing a vital point?

You tell me. Are you?