One of my neighbors had a bit of legal trouble recently. Numerous law enforcement agencies were involved. There was an article on the small, local paper’s site. I’m guessing the commenter was one his friends/customers and she posted “people need to mind there [sic] own business” or something to that effect.
I was highly tempted to write back “Honey, it’s hard to do that when your dealer is running a criminal enterprise in our backyard.”
I’ve seen a million comments a lot worse than that, but it just happened and cracks me up.
My BIL is a firefighter and he was badly injured when a large fatal apartment fire was set by an arsonist, he was trying to help trapped people down and they lost it and just started jumping on him one hit him from several stories up.
A local paper had an interview with him and a small article on his injuries.
The positive comments were drowned out by a sea of crazy, everything from racist rants and political finger pointing to those who said my BIL was now going to sit on his lazy ass sucking up their tax dollars(the article had a picture of him in traction in a hospital mind).:smack:
Goddamn there are a LOT of crazy motherfuckers out there.
Gotta love the comments section. Awhile back I published a letter in the print edition of the local daily rag…it was (I thought) a prudent and nuanced rebuttal to an op-ed piece from some young whippersnapper who was trying to form a chapter of “College Republicans” at a nearby university. “Liberal professors who knock down your grade for opposing their marxist agenda” figured largely in his rant, so I had ample material to work with. (It is, btw, exceedingly difficult to say everything I wanted to say about “College Republicans” in 200 words or less).
The comments that my simple missive spawned, both in print and online, were simply amazing, although to be fair they ran about 50-50 for and against. I can’t remember all of the venomous outpourings, but two at least stick in my mind. I had the pleasure of being called a liberal fascist (huh?) and a smug intellectual ( I am neither). One lady damned me with faint praise - " while I disagree with everything Mr. Seen says, at least he is a much better writer than the “College Republican” that wrote the original op-ed."
If you pre-moderate everything, your response won’t show up right away, and most people are going to just leave after that point, never to come back to the article. The ones that do come back can cry all they want to, but their cries won’t ever be seen.
I don’t really have any problem with only the people who feel strongly being represented in the comments. And I don’t necessarily think that stupid in and of itself should be moderated. Many people are stupid–no point in pretending they aren’t. The main problem, in my opinion, is the abusiveness. That’s the only thing that actually hurts the news company, in my mind. Poor reasoning written in a civil manner doesn’t hurt, as long as there’s someone out there who can respond.
And I don’t get this idea that you shouldn’t bother because everyone else is being stupid. Just write your intelligent response and leave. If you’re goal is to convince those who have a closed mind, there’s no reason to ever respond to anything. My goal is just to put my opinions on the subject out there where people can read it. If it convinces them, great. If not, oh well.
Still, many times my primary intended audience is the writer of the article, so I can’t get too upset if they just don’t publish responses. But it still would be a lot better if they’d post the best “letters to the editor”, like a real newspaper does.
my day job is a journalist. Lemme tell ya, H.L. Mencken had it right about newspapers AND the internet: they are tools to make the stupid stupider and the crazy even crazier. Unfortunately, the internet has also given the crazies a forum in which to publicly display their crazy. the comment section of most articles is why I do mainly photojournalism.
All I wrote was that due to staffing changes (read lay-offs) at one of our sister agencies, we had to report the same information that we did two years ago. And that due to funding cuts, we weren’t able to provide new data related to public health.
Youtube is by far the worst for this. Just checked out a documentary on those affected by the recession and there was an individual spewing off the usual rhetoric against the unemployed, calling people desperately looking for jobs fat and lazy and whatnot.
So I checked out their channel to see their proposed solution to unemployment and found another comment: “this guy is a fake, the aliens are living in earth far more years than he predicts, and actually they are here on earth living among us, communicating by telepathic messages”. Right, just kick out all the interstellar illegal aliens and we’ll get America back on track again.
Yes, it can be depressing but know what I would find even more depressing? Row upon row of comments that reflect my views exactly. That would be just plain creepy. Disagreement, even vigorous, even moronic, can be stimulating or amusing. And yes, annoying. But that is far far better than shutting off those who think differently.
It’d be one thing if the trolls, the Paulites, the glibertarians, the wackaloons, and the just plain dipshits ever made reasoned arguments about anything. But they don’t. They’re either parroting back some nonsense they heard somewhere, or they’re just spinning their wheels.
Funny enough, on the yahoo front page there’s now an article about some of the best comments from people who posted after reading an article about the Mega Millions jackpot the other day.
I read the comments after that article. How meta.
Oh the irony. I first noticed this thread yesterday. And, today, I came across this piece on Wired (about the NSA’s grand ambitions and capabilities). The article is one thing (by James Bamber who may or may not be Cassandra) but the comments, well, the comments are scarier than the article: a survivalist who compares us to Germans in 1935 while he stocks up on assault rifles and ammo; 9/11 conspiracy nuts, two factions mind you, accusing each other of ignorance; those who paint Obama as “the anti-American”, . . . Good lord are there really people like that?
Take a look at those comments in the linked Wired article. Please. Then cry with me.
To add to the irony, I was unable to even see the comments at all until I disabled Ghostery (a privacy browser extension that blocks tracking scripts).
Yeah…but that’s always funny. And I believe the correct noun is actually: sammich.
That one example aside, I do agree with the OP. Absolutely terrifying to realize these are the people who are smart enough to use a computer. There are even stupider troggs out there, and they vote too.
I’ve been following the news story about today’s tragic shooting in nearby Oakland pretty closely…and, of course, the comments. They seem to fall into a few major categories:
Har har, California, this is what happens when you have gun control laws. (Apparently if California didn’t, the victims would have all been packing and would’ve shot back.)
Why does the media have to drag race into it? Why is the suspect’s race important? (because he was still at large and his description was kinda pertinent)
Obama is a hypocrite for not commenting (because this is exactly like the Trayvon Martin case)
Because the school is described as “Christian” this was some kind of anti-Christian hate crime (even though the suspect is a former student.)