At their worst, comments are like toxic waste buried under the foundations of an article and irradiating all rational debate with ignorance and aggression. And, like radiation, the effect of the internet commenting culture is spreading. The degradation of discourse online is mirrored in real-world dialogue. Adults who would balk at bullying in school playgrounds are happy to fling snide and often extremely aggressive comments around.
Spend a few minutes reading Hacker News comments and see first-hand how bad the problem is.
In one sense, the source of the rage that flows through the comment sections is simply explained. Psychologists explored theories of deindividuation – the slaking off of self-awareness and responsibility through anonymity – long before the web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. In his 1895 work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon suggests crowd behaviour becomes “unanimous, emotional and intellectually weak” and that anonymity leads to primitive and hedonistic behaviour.
More recently, in 2004, Prof John Suler outlined a theory of disinhibition for online interactions in the CyberPsychology and Behaviour journal. He highlights dissociative anonymity – i.e., it is relatively tricky for others to know who you are online, which allows you to feel your comments are unconnected to your real-world identity. While the unmasking and prosecution of particularly aggressive commenters has become more common, this is still the biggest source of security for ultra-negative commenters.
The paper also suggests there are elements of fantasy to the average hardcore commenter’s approach.
I’d think twice before working with anyone who regularly submits comments to Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge, Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.
Websites keep comments open because, when the system works, each comment spawns responses and the article above survives past the minute-long mayfly lifespan of most internet writing.
The sad fact is that many websites rely on page views for revenue, so the resort to using sensationalist headlines. This encourages even more trolling in the comments.
I believe fundamentally in the importance of debate and the rights of readers to attack my words. But the idea that websites are obliged to host those comments and spend huge amounts of resources weeding out the barmy and the bigoted is wrong. Ask yourself: how often have you genuinely learned something valuable from a comment section? If we can’t have a decent debate, is that debate worth having to begin with?
One of the cool things about tumblr is that traditional comments are effectively replaced by the ability for signed-up members to use their own blogs to reblog or comment on the posts of others.