Has Web flaming bled into the real world? Think what you like about TechCrunch, but no one should have to take the kind of abuse that founder Michael Arrington is getting. Verbal abuse, being spat upon at a conference and even death threats. This is completely nuts! I’ve met some abusive web-heads and open source guys over the years, but this takes the cake. Arrington has posted a calm and level-headed account of this development.But I can’t say my job is much fun any more. Startups that don’t get the coverage they want and competing journalists and bloggers tend to accuse us of the most ridiculous things. It hasn’t been worth our time to respond to these accusations; I always assumed that our work and integrity would speak for itself. But as we’ve grown and become more successful the attacks have also grown. On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say… Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family… The threats were, in the opinion of security experts we consulted, serious. The individual has a felony record and owns a gun.I don’t know why, but sometimes on blogs or in e-mail, people will say things that they would never do in person. But it used to be only in electronic forums. I hope we’re not seeing a degeneration of human behavior in the real world. The saddest part is it may cause people like Arrington to not only take a break, but completely stop what they’re doing. That would be a tremendous loss for startups and Web companies.What do you think? Is this an isolated incident? Or is it a societal change? Open Source