First! This is a piece about internet comments which means, inevitably, that some readers are already at the bottom of the page in the hope of being the first to offer their view/mention that they dislike my byline photo/indignantly ask why this has been published in the first place. If ignorance was an Olympic event, the heats would be held in the comment sections of national newspapers.

Though there are obviously many intelligent and interesting people who take the time to express their views on articles (a lot of them on Telegraph Blogs), comment sections are actually frequented by a very small minority of readers. Industry averages suggest less than one per cent of the readership of any given article will comment.

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.

There’s an old sporting adage “play the ball, not the man”. That sentiment gets absolutely no traction online. There is no quarter in the world of online comments. The assumption of many regular commenters is that they could do better than anyone who plies their trade as a writer; they see through the “agendas” of those they find so abjectly infuriating.

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. Suler splits that aspect into two categories – “It’s All In My Head” and “It’s Just A Game”. Suler says: “People may feel that the imaginary characters they ‘created’ exist in a different space, that one’s online persona along with the online others live in a make-believe dimension … separate and apart from the demands and responsibilities of the real world.”

That view is supported by the work of Emily Finch, a criminal lawyer who has studied online identity theft. She posits a theory that some individuals see their online lives as a game where the norms of every day life do not apply. That seems clear in the case of the most mischievous and aggressive commenters who, when unmasked, are often revealed as rather mild-mannered.

I have been writing professionally for eight years – feel free to add your comments about getting a real job at this point. Working on a range of titles, I have seen the level of online debate get progressively worse. The situation is particularly bad for female colleagues who have the temerity to write or, worse, appear in a YouTube video. YouTube is home to the elite imperial guard of internet idiocy.

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.

Very few publications are free from the desire to gussy up traffic and that also leads to an environment where ever more incendiary positions are promoted. Every newspaper has its electromagnetic columnists, whose writing is charged in just the right way to attract the aggrieved and those who wish to write crazed praise. In the world of online comment, the contrarian is king.

One national newspaper section editor proposed a thought experiment to me recently: what if newspapers printed comments along side the hard copy versions of their stories? His belief was that comments would be gone within weeks, the sheer insanity of them poisoning the well when placed in such a prominent position.

The sanctity of the right of anyone to comment on anything isn’t shared by the entire web. Metafilter, the popular community blog, requires members to pay a small fee to join and earn the right to comment. If they are banned from the site, they receive no refund.

Others, most notably John Gruber of Daring Fireball, simply do not allow comments at all. In Gruber’s case, his posts still have a huge readership and are widely commented upon, it’s just that those comments don’t have a home on his site. He has said of the current climate: “Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”

I’m inclined to agree. 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?----

Source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100007520/comments-are-the-radioactive-waste-of-the-web/