the unbelievable stupidity of reader comments on news stories

Once in awhile I try looking at these things again, but it’s just hopeless. Look at the reader comments on any major media news story, and you will generally find an unremitting parade of stupidity. I’m in favor of democracy, but I’m also in favor of editorial power to ensure quality.

*Many of the comments, of course, are deliberately offensive, quite often completely racist or filled with crude sexual innuendo about one of the people in the article photographs. Sure, you can complain to the monitor (I sometimes do in extreme cases) but in the meantime these dolts are getting the same worldwide audience of millions that CNN or the NY Times are getting. Democracy does not mean that a potty-mouthed, racist 19-year-old (and perhaps 14-year-old) in mom’s basement deserves an audience of millions by coat-tailing on the infrastructure of mainstream media.

*Even the non-offensive comments are often mediocre, pointless, and ill-informed. Again, I don’t see that that’s what democracy is all about. There should be space for reader feedback, letters from outside, and so forth. But I don’t see what’s wrong with having an editor sift the wheat from the chaff. Is the worry that an editor might censor unpopular political views? All right, I can understand that fear. But website comment threads are not exactly teeming with alternative political models in the first place. They’re just a hangout for mean-spirited twits who in some cases actually make fun of people for dying in horrible accidents, that sort of thing.

This was a predictable side-effect of the new ease of publishing one’s thoughts anywhere at any time, and my guess is that new mechanisms will evolve to counteract it, but in the meantime we’re having the experience of going to read articles at some supposedly respectable newspaper’s website, and scrolling down to the reader comments and reading calls for genocide (with many “likes” clicked on them) and jokes that belong in some 3 AM Bangkok cabaret, as well as a few user photos that might pique the interest of the FBI.