The Comment Section

Word Count: 692

If you're ever feeling like humanity hasn't let you down, just head over to any comment section and your lack of faith will be restored. For this particular assignment I looked around a few different news sights until I found an article with comments. The website was "MSN News" and the article (which had been posted 5 hours prior) had a drop down comment section where about 21 people had responded. Immediately you could see that people had resorted to flaming, one slight disagreement and comments like "are you stuck on stupid?" and "ur a PHUKTARD" emerged. There's no attempt to understand the statement that was made, or even to argue against the statement in any intelligent way. It's just, "you said something I found disagreeable and are therefore an idiot..." One commentator even told the person he disagreed with to "stay in the mountains where you belong becuase you clearly don't know what you're talking about" (notice the ironic typo--these are direct quotes--you'd think if you were going to insult someones intelligence online you'd at least use spell check).

It doesn't even matter what the argument is or what the other person said, because none of these people are actually trying to counter that argument. You could go to a comment section and type in "I love cheese" and people would call you an idiot, or tell you to "go back to the mountains where you belong..." I honestly think a lot of these people get off on the drama of it, on being a bully. I mean, if you truly disagreed, wouldn't you try and make an intellectual argument as to why the person was mistaken--rather then immediately jumping onto the you're an idiot bandwagon?

I found that sometimes people responded to these "attacks" with similar tactics, and but most of the time these negative comments were ignored. I didn't find anyone having an actual productive argument--but then again I think it is extremely rare for the comment section to actually provide anything of value to the reader. Perhaps once in a blue moon you'll find an informative comment, but most of the time, the comment section of any article, or photograph, or video, is filled with praise, junk, or hate speech (and I think its mostly the latter).

I also noticed that the nicer and more docile comments received fewer responses, for example, this article was about the death of a politician, one person remarked this:

"this was the heinous murder of one of the nicest female politicians,wife,mother,daughter and friend to all...gun crimes are a rarity in Birstall,West Yorkshire..so sad."

She received six "likes", one reply, and zero arguments. Compared to the comment I was referencing above which stated: 

"Shooting and stabbing an unarmed woman. What a big brave Nazi. Bunch of cowardly wussies. Thats whey they all have to group together to feel powerful.." this comment has 14 likes, and 14 replies, most of which are "flaming" comments. 

They are both basically saying the same thing, that it's sad that this woman died, yet one is filled with angry comments and the other isn't. The second comment seems a bit more provocative than the first, and received negative attention because people started talking about whether or not this was a hate crime. Yet again, no productive argument is made, it's just people disagreeing and calling each other stupid. So again, what's the point? I mostly try to avoid the public comment section on something whenever necessary, and I only respond to something when deeply provoked. Even then, I try to only comment when I actually have something productive to say, or have a real argument to make, one that is backed up by facts or figures.

Click here for the news article that I was referring to...

However, there are some comment sections that are simply filled with joy, and that is mostly any comment section that has to do with dogs ^.^ For example, Doug The Pug's Facebook is filled with likes, and hearts, and cute photos of other dogs. So I don't mind reading those!