Games

In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out.

I mean... it depends, not everything can be descalated, dependes on the person, their intentions and the place.

On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with.

Pretty much, people know how to behave or they don't... and they can learn or not, but we have no reason to tolerate the village idiots.

I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.

I remember old forums, there was no tolerance for trolls and you could get punished along the troll for feeding it, so people learned to leave them alone and just report them, good sites/forums were heavily moderated and curated.
I think it started to go down the drain when moderation/ownership was removed from the users, just like with community servers for multiplayer games, companies care only about their own interests so allowing trolls who cause engagement by bait were more than welcome, they just pretended to moderate the services.
Nowadays... well reddit punishes mods who actually moderate the subs so that's a waste of time, the fediverse seems to need to learn to just not tolerate nor engage with trolls... and the users have to learn to just report and block, just like the BlueSky users do so the mods can locate and remove the trolls (either users or servers).
I think admins/mods must be MUCH less tolerant of possible trolls and not be afraid about curating the content to their liking... it's their server/community after all.