I used to be heavily involved in student atheism, and there were two things I noticed at the annual club recruitment day:

• Huh, the Korean Club is mostly awkward white guys... and one pretty Korean girl. Oh. Ohhhhhh. I get it now.
• Wow, the atheist club is exactly the same, except we don't even have the Korean girl.

Women and POC would occasionally show up at our meetings, but they never came back unless they were mostly attending to spend time with a boyfriend. It would be fair to describe the club as a group of Very Very Angry Socially-Awkward Men who enjoyed banging the table and getting outraged and feeling important for 90 minutes a week.

Then there were the legit creeps. One member in particular had this whole convoluted rant which he'd get into at the least provocation about how women were allocating sex wrong and letting the entire species down and how we needed to be sensible and allocate sex more fairly. Another would take any opportunity to make completely crude and inappropriate remarks, as if expecting 4chan to burst out of the ceiling tiles and applaud him. (Literally. He was all about "pool's closed" and "nigras" and "I'm batman" and all that memey crap.) And then there was the specimen who insisted that every type of social project be justified in terms of how it helps him. (And I'm talking full-on "Well, yes, but what did abolishing slavery do for ME???")

But, again, it provided that platform, right? These men effectively ran the show, and felt included and empowered to speak up and be horrible for that 90-minute window. They owned the place, in more senses than one.

And that's toxic. It's a great place to be if you're one of the angry young men, or crave that type of attention. But something else happened at that recruitment day which stuck with me.

One of us would be having a sensible conversation with a young woman (or a POC) who seemed interested in joining the club. Then one of the angry young men would turn up, and somehow turn the entire thing into an argument. Then she'd leave, because why would she stick around?

This happened over, and over, and over again. And it's pretty much proof of toxicity, right? We'd be on the verge of sealing the deal and getting this person to sign a membership roster or come to a meeting, and instead they're running in the opposite direction because "feminism is the cancer that is killing western society".

So we changed it.

We took the club over. (Legitimately. My "side" nominated a slate of candidates for election, and our slate won.) And we fixed it.

It was really, really easy, too. Basic initiatives:

• We moved meetings from a dodgy, windowless basement to a well-lit, comfortable lounge right near the campus transit centre.
• We started holding public events, rather than angry ranting sessions. We did food drives, film screenings, pub crawls, warm-and-fuzzy publicity stunts, anything we could get our hands on. (One of our greatest successes: we booked a long hallway, hung up clotheslines, and handed out postcards, asking people to write the most "sinful" thing they've ever done on the card, then put it anonymously into a ballot box. Every half-hour, we emptied the box and hung the cards on the lines. We got so many answers we had to quadruple the number of lines, and we got tons of positive feedback and press on the exercise: people liked participating, people liked reading other people's submissions, and people thought it reflected extremely well on us.)
• We wrote equity language into the group's charter and created a position on the board explicitly to represent and attend to the inclusion of women, POC and sexual minorities.
• We shifted the meeting format to one which effectively prevented table-banging: instead of a free-for-all, we had structured discussions with break-out sessions, and we ensured that discussions never turned into one person feeling pressured to justify themselves or their own actions. We discuss ideas and events in the world; we don't jump down people's throats.
• We approached people and asked them to lead discussions, rather than relying on the same 2-3 loudest people in the room to always take charge. We went to special pains to approach women and POC for this purpose.

Within just 2-3 months, the situation had completely reversed itself. The club reflected the demographics of the university population, we had way better turnout at meetings, we got some amazing coverage in the student press (which had never historically noticed our existence), and to this day the university's office of student leadership uses our materials to illustrate what a successful club looks like.

Co-incidentally, we lost most of the angry young men. And a few of them went out in a blaze of glory: we were destroying the club; we were ruining everything; we were kowtowing to the feminists and the cultural marxists; we were destroying something very important and very precious and did not fully understand what we were doing.

That's not what happened. The club thrived.

But those young men lost their platform. They had something taken away from them. They had this tiny little bubble within which they ruled, and they felt important, and they felt special, and they felt empowered.

And we took it away from them.

I think something very similar is happening within atheism more broadly, with one big caveat: my slate could take ownership over the club, and we found it very easy to leverage a silent majority behind us. The club was a singular entity with a membership roster, and once we had control, we could direct its activities and resources.

You can't do that with atheism more broadly, right? Insofar as these institutions even exist, they are atomized and distributed among so many leaders and so many groups in so many countries that nobody could ever pull them together in service of a project, even if a silent majority supported it.

We also had one major advantage: we knew who all our toxic people were, by name, and if they were going to come at us, it had to be in public, in a forum where they were already unsure on their feet.

Internet atheism?

Anyone can register a Twitter account under any name they like. Anyone can register a gmail account and set themselves up as a commenter on PZ Myers' blog. Anyone can yell or scream or abuse or threaten anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, anonymously. And unless your actions reach the threshold for police involvement, nobody can fight back.

We won our culture war because the problem was small, because the institution was singular, and because we forced the toxic people to fight back in a forum where they weren't anonymous and would be held accountable for the things they said and did.

Internet atheism has none of those advantages, and the project of making it less toxic is thus significantly more difficult.

But the people involved, and their motives? Startlingly similar.