People have raised the art of vulgar insults to a new standard in the Yahoo news comment section! I just finished watching a video where a black peewee football coach instigated a fight against a white referee, in which at least one member of his team participates.
The comments that follow the article are almost universally shocking racist insults. Some of the flaming is actually pretty clever in its vileness, and leads me to think that maybe these guys are doing some sort of performance art. It reminds me of the movie “The Human Centipede,” or the book “Hogg,” which have no literary or creative merit other than being the most disgusting thing the minds behind them could imagine.
I must admit, reading those comments can get addictive! I even laughed a few times. I came to the conclusion that most of those guys don’t actually hold the opinions they express on their comments, and are just participating in an elaborate trolling scheme.
I do think some of the people are just trolling, but I do think a lot of the stupid comments on Yahoo are from genuinely stupid people.
No matter what the topic of the story is, the comments are always just so totally infuriatingly stupid and misinformed. It becomes so frustrating after a while to read them…but yeah, I still do.
Sometimes I read Yahoo news comments just for kicks. They’re almost universally idiotic, so it’s not like I’m checking for informed and even basically sane commentary. I just want to shake my head at the trainwreck. The comments are racist about almost any black person featured in an article. I remember reading about some kids winning at a track meet, and it devolved into racist bickering immediately, and another one about some American Idol singer, and same thing.
It’s dumb, but not shocking. It’s like that widely-circulated cartoon that basically says you put some clown behind the anonymity of the internets, and you’re going to get endless streams of garbage.
I do read the NYT commentary for the actual commentary, and not for the hahas. Am I the only one who gets giddy when my comments are chosen as the editor’s pick?
I’m often surprised at the over the top comments which indicate that there is a large number of hateful, racist bastards out there or lots of folks get their jollies playing the part of Trolley McTroll. Either way, it’s best to largely ignore.
It does serve once purpose though - it makes me appreciate the genuinely good job the moderators do here and the SDMB community as a whole which shows little tolerance to such nonsense.
Isn’t this just the inevitable result of giving everyone from everywhere the ability to communicate freely with total anonymity? It used to be people would either keep these things to themselves or only share them with people who they already knew agreed with them.
When you give everyone a voice, it turns out very few people have anything to say.
there are two thousand posts… I assume that’s a representative sample of the population.I only read about 3 hundred of them. But each and every one was reasonable (i.e. no crude insults, no wild rants).Some make silly or simplified comments like “the economy is doomed”, with no further explanation, but the general level of the writing in most of the posts is above high-school level. Many of the readers quote statistics (no cites provided,so it’s not Doper quality-but the posts using those stats draw logical conclusions based on the numbers). The general tone of the thread is right-wing and anti-Obama, but not rants. Some of the posts are satirical. One poster named “sarahP” writes “How’s that hopey/changey thing working out for ya?”
Those comments are worthless. 95% of them are typical Obama bashing like you can hear on any one of dozens of radio talk shows. Some typical responses:
Sprinkled in are several spammers hyping websites. There is no discussion of the article or the information contained in it.
Yeah, the Yahoo comments are just buckets and buckets of FAIL.
If you ever want to weep for America as it is, just spend a short time reading those comments. Your answers on why America is so fucked up and why we can’t find common sense answers to the issues of the day will be spelled out in big bright STUPID all over those pages.
I realize that this is an old thread. I’m looking for forum threads that deal with Yahoo News comments, to post a solution for hiding said comments, so that people searching in the future can find the solution.
Comments are made by four main categories of people. Some people fall into more than one category:
Those who actually have something worthwhile to say.
Thumbs-up whores, who look for the most clever ten-words-or-less comment to win the thumbs contest for that news story.
Haters and those with an agenda, who will hijack every story with their rants, whether or not said rant has anything to do with the story.
Trolls and flamers who are there to cause trouble.
Right wing groups and racists are the current trends (racists always have been; the Liberal/Conservative groups on the comments vary by who’s in power—they hated on Bush when he was in office).
Unfortunately, there currently is no effective add-on for Firefox or extension for Chrome that will hide Yahoo comments (I tried all that I could find, including everything on the Chrome and Firefox pages, Greasemonkey and Userscripts). For those who can’t simply ignore the comments when they pop up while scrolling down the story, you can hide them.
On Chrome or Firefox, if you’re using AdBlockPlus (the one with the icon of the letters ABP in the red stop sign), go into the filters section and add this to the block list:
That will NOT block the entire Yahoo News site, as the filter would suggest. Everything still gets through EXCEPT the comments. They’ll appear to be “Loading,” and it will stay that way and not appear. As far as I can tell, everything else appears.
I run my browser (Firefox) with JavaScript disabled all the time (except when I really need it). I’ve noticed with recent months that Yahoo news pages don’t display any comments at all any more. (And a lot of other crap doesn’t show up either.) I’m assuming that this is some recent update to their programming, such that JavaScript is required to display comments.
Whatever the reason may be, it’s a vast improvement. Other than that, every time Yahoo “improves” their stuff, it gets worse and worse. Particularly their e-mail service, which I’ve finally totally given up on.
Sometimes I troll those people by injecting logic into their arguments. It won’t help them, but I love pissing them off and making them realize there are other people out there that don’t agree with them
