The process by which harmful actions—harassment, clique exclusion, gangbaiting, banlighting—become routine, expected, and even praised within online communities. When toxicity is normalized, new members learn that this is “just how things work”; targets are blamed for not adapting; and perpetrators see themselves as simply following community norms. Normalization happens gradually: each act is dismissed as minor or justified until the cumulative culture becomes one of cruelty. It is the mechanism that turns individual incidents into systemic abuse.
Example: “New members quickly learned that if you questioned a mod, you’d be called every name in the book. Normalization of toxic behavior: making abuse the price of participation.”
Fogey/fogy /fougi/ sl. (early 18C+, orig. Scot) old-fashioned, stuck-in-the mud.
Person with old fashioned ideas which he is unwilling to change: Come to the disco and stop being such an old fogey!
You think me an old fogeyand an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O’Connel’s time. I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O’Connel did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things. (James Joyce, Ulysses. Penguin Books,1992. p. 38)