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The internet is a bountiful paradise of information, entertainment, social opportunity and footage of kittens being cute.

But alongside this outpouring of human creativity is substantial proof of human cruelty and human frailty, too. We can all get things wrong, leap to conclusions, get offended and get angry, but the way the net encourages us to express all this publicly tends to magnify bad feeling. Offloading our thoughts about politics, sport, or soufflé making is inevitably followed by someone telling us where we can stick our soufflé ideas. And we instinctively fire back with choice words of our own.

But what is it about the internet that makes everyone so cross? If I was walking down a street and a stranger started criticising my hat, self-preservation would force me to ignore them and keep walking. I might even take off my hat. But online, I'd square up to that person and get dragged into an interminable slanging match – over a hat, for goodness sake – that only served to entrench the opinions of both parties.

We almost feel compelled to be unpleasant. Intense, long-running debates are endemic; on Wikipedia, for example, there have been huge disagreements about the correct spelling of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and under the entry for "hummus" there are about nine nations (including Israel, Turkey and Lebanon) whose citizens are all claiming that their nation invented it.

Sometimes online spats are down to tribalism; tight-knit online communities will see factions, in-jokes and cliquey language, with derision heaped upon newcomers and petty issues blown out of proportion. Sometimes people are combative purely for the sake of it – so-called "trolling". But the biggest factor is anonymity.

Now, online anonymity is a useful thing (online privacy campaigners would say it's essential) but you can mete out whatever abuse you like from behind the safety of an alias like "Spaghetti Hoop" without fearing real-life repercussions. I know I'm guilty; I've got an alter-ego named Geoff who expresses himself in colourful language whenever I come across something on the internet that annoys me. You could say I'm a coward for lurking behind Geoff, but the people he's arguing with are equally anonymous and equally angry.

Two years ago there was an American politician called Tim Couch who got so worked up about this issue that he filed a bill proposing to make it illegal to post an anonymous comment online. He meant well; his campaign came hot on the heels of some well-publicised cases of online bullying. But aside from being an attack on free speech, the idea was unworkable, because there's no way that websites can truly establish that people are who they say they are.

While some news organisations, weary of the anonymous or pseudonymous bile that's projected daily, have shut down their online comment facilities (Sky News closed their discussion boards last week), others are moving to systems that link your comments to your Facebook or your Twitter profiles, unmasking at least some of the anonymity and making people think twice before getting nasty.

Some websites, by contrast, thrive on bad feeling. After all, bad feeling guarantees page views, and page views means advertising revenue. One alarming example is the website, failin.gs. It looks like a social networking site, but its purpose is to invite friends to anonymously point out your faults. They call it "constructive criticism", but as someone who makes an effort to avoid knowing what people actually think about me, I call it a recipe for misery.

You know on Amazon where there's a product page and then a load of reviews underneath? Well, it's like that. Except the thing people are reviewing is your personality. You might wonder why anyone would go looking for themselves on such sites at all, but they do. In their thousands. The internet has forced our egos into a very unusual place.

Sadly, spats and finger-pointing are never going to go away; it's part of the cut and thrust of the internet, and the best we can do is develop a thick skin and turn the other cheek. Or maybe just don't air our views at all. For example, I get comments on my blog from people calling me an idiot. But my dad doesn't have a blog. As a result no-one calls him an idiot. So who's the idiot?