I’m asking for opinions not a debate. That’s why the post appears here. And if you’re opinion is that my perception is off, hey, I’m open for that.
Many sites offer a comments section after their news stories. These sites attract a certain amount of extreme views from both sides of the aisle. AOL seems to have a handful of more liberal comments than many (perhaps because they’re reading Huffington Post news?) MSN seems to attract more conservative commenter’s, but many appear to state a position and back it up. Then there’s Yahoo.
Run an AP story that mentions “Obama” and here comes a pile-on train wreck. Look for comments about socialist, communist, Kenya, birth certificate and by the way–Ron Paul for President.
Is this just my perception? I’m open for correction. But if you seem to feel the same way, please enlighten. What is it about Yahoo that would attract this type of user? It seems like any other site.
The stupidest people aren’t really able to range very far afield on the internet. So they don’t go many places other than Yahoo!, and when they do, their eyes are caught by those bright shiny news feeds that are aimed at them based on prior click-throughs.
What I’ve noticed lately on yahoo news, is that any given article will get a whole slew of ultra-nasty-right-wing-let-the-uninsured-die type of comments, or else a whole slew of lefty liberal Obama-can-do-no-wrong comments, rather than some mixture of those. Why? I think it’s yahoo’s new strategy of displaying comments in order of most-thumbed-up by default. I think if people see some strongly slanted (either way) comments, they will tend to up-thumb it and post another similar comment of their own. Thus, some strong remarks will tend to “seed” the thread leading to more similar. By showing the most up-thumbed comments all together first, I think this effect gets concentrated.
I was reading a story on Yahoo! about Johnny Depp (please don’t judge me), and was amazed at how quickly the comments turned to Obama hating and socialism.
We need a six degrees to Socialism thing. Hell, it probably could be reduced to two. That Kevin Bacon dude always struck me as lazy to need six steps to accomplish anything. Typical of Hollywood Socialists hig-paid stars.
Pretty much every news site’s comments area is littered with grammatically incorrect, politically wacko comments that range from unreadable to VERY unreadable. The only thing worse is YouTube’s comment area, which reads like the comments in a public bathroom - except the YouTube comments are worse.
Regular newspaper Web sites are filled with right-wing vitriol, usually basic talking points. For example, connecting such things as high school bullying and local zoning decisions on Obama and “socialists”, etc.
Youtube is probably not worse, but it’s on my radar more. On every single Bollywood song posted, a fight breaks out between Hindus and Muslims. Despite the fact that in any given song, there is probably both Hindu and Muslim influence. It’s insane.
