Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are so obnoxious.
I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.
Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles.
The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment threads are excellent reading.
Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real identities were tied to people's words.
Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is a great way to say what you actually think.
A radio industry forum did that a few years ago - fed up of the vitriol being spouted anonymously, the forum owner closed it down and reopened it with a verified real name policy. You have to register with an employer email address and the forums are invisible to all but the registered users.
The result? The forum is quiet and discussions very boring - for a start, Google isn't picking up the topics to pull in new users and besides, no one wants to say what they think when they know either their current boss or a potential employer is reading it under their real name. (The British radio industry is a small place.)
Worse still, you get the odd threat. "I know such-and-such a radio boss and you're never going to be employed again if you keep posting that station X is pants." It's just not a pleasant atmosphere.
I couldn't agree more. I've lost count of the number of times I've read an interesting article on the Guardian website only to have hundreds upon hundreds of dull comments and irrelevant arguments squeezed down my meagre internet connection. I go to the newspaper website to read the newspaper's writing and opinion, not that of thousands of internet pundits. Every article about economic recovery, for instance, currently attracts hundreds of doom-laden comments. It's enough to make you slit your wrists.
It's the overwhelming volume of comments at the bottom of national newspaper articles that gets me. A Guardian piece can get anything from 100 to around 500 comments before it starts to fizzle out. Who has the time to read through all that? It's just a racket - noise at its worst catering to the very few participants and irritating the many readers. What was wrong with letters pages, with that same noise filtered and edited by editors for hundreds of years?
I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.