Flaming is the act of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting, usually in the social context of a discussion board on the Internet. Such messages are called flames, and are sometimes posted in response to flamebait. Flaming is said by some to be one of a class of economic problems known as The Tragedy of the Commons, 
when a group holds a resource (in this case, communal attention), but 
each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. Flamers 
usually call their flames justified attacks.