When opening up a website to read a story or watch a video, or hell, even an up-and-coming blog, you'll often see a comment section at the bottom of the page. It can be tied to people's Facebook pages or simply just a stand-alone comment section.
If all you do is read the comments section of pages, you are likely among those people who think the world is going to hell or already there. With the exception of a handful of people, most commentators on websites are complete morons.
In most web stories that allow commenting, the items posted usually end up devolving into very polarizing, ignorant, and absolute statements. I'm convinced that any story or video posted on the web that allows commenting can eventually become an argument about race, gender, religion, politics or sexuality.
A story about bubble gum? A couple comments down, you could get into an argument about abortion.
A lost dog? "Your" a racist.
The music industry failing? "F- you, you liberal piece of shit".
These particular examples might be made up - at least I believe I made them up. But if you look closely at the comments posted on the stories you read, your IQ will go down about 10-15%. And many of them may be on innocent stories like the topics I mentioned above - which have nothing to do with the t
Very little is gained from a comments section. I can understand why my friend Nick closed it off on his site (www.berserkhippo.com), even though I don't know how much spam/stupid comments he would get if he had it open.
The comments section on my blog is usually empty. When it's not, it's usually filled with coherent information that doesn't look like it was crafted at a junior high Klan meeting. I appreciate my audience and feel that they can comment on stories as they wish - and I look to respond to those folks as soon as possible. I would not hesitate to shut that function off if I felt like morons were taking over my blog with their ignorance. So to reiterate, this commenting beef is not with my folks - my comment people are great.
It's all the other sites, the sites that lend themselves to massive amounts of views and clicks. I believe many of these sites would benefit to go the way of my friend Nick and get rid of their commenting sections. Very little is gained from their presence on stories posted on Yahoo or some newspaper chain.
I hope that the people who randomly comment on stories here keep commenting, because they're usually well-versed folks. If I have to start moderating moronic comments, that may be the day I heed the advice I'm giving to the news conglomerates and shut down the ability to comment.
Added after blog post: looks like I already wrote a similar blog in July 2011. I guess this can happen from time to time when one is nearing 300 total blogs. The same moronic things are cyclical apparently.
