I wrote about the trouble of email comms about a decade ago that used about the same percentages as in Phil’s post. Forums are in the same boat. In the days of Compuserve forums, we used emotioncons as one of the ways to put tone into the message. We put the effort into communicating in the writing some of the tone and body language to let people know we were joking, or not. The community was good at keeping people civil, and we did not have to have many moderators.
Phil’s last line was the key to the success of those programming forums I participated in - giving the other the benefit of doubt that the intention was good. It worked then. It can work now.