Months ago I made a topic 10 Great Habits for Playing Go, in which it was suggested that greeting one’s opponent (hello and goodbye) was the first and most basic principle of Go etiquette, at least in China. I believe this is true also in Japan, whose professional players brought these traditions to western countries. (See British Go Journal.) As a result, when I learned Go, etiquette and respect were taught as part of the Go culture. Like, you can’t have one without the other.
I feel the Internet kind of changed that. It’s so impersonal and anonymous that people are used to acting differently (worse) than they would in person. Add to that the fact that some players play from third-party apps or clients, do not speak english, or came to Go from technical domains like math or computer science and may not have learned the traditional etiquette, and it begins to look like an epidemic of bad manners. But knowing this is the case helps me not get too worked up about it. It’s best just to move on.