Introduction
Internet Writers and Internet Commenters can have some of the healthiest relationships imaginable - I still think the Free Darko folks' open engagement with commenters was one of the absolute best things they ever did. The FD folks answered every comment (to a realistic extent) and in doing so made intelligent in-roads into creating a community. They essentially created the modern blogging community, or had a large hand in creating it. I have so much respect for them. The Onion's AVClub is another great source of commenting. Deadspin is also excellent. These latter sites tend towards snark and desperate attempts at wringing the worst puns and references out of a situation... but hey, the commenting base is excellent enough, with just enough intelligence and humor to really get a wonderful situation going.
Commenters on general-interest sites like ESPN and Yahoo - whether with specific commenting systems or with Facebook platforms - tend to be awful. The problem is that you get a whole lot of people that don't read articles, don't really give a shit that the Internet Writer is Also A Human Being, don't want to read anything challenging, and also want to sound witty and get "Likes" (or whatever the hell they're after).
The problem is a mixture of audience, culture, content (in commenters' defense, there's no shortage of SEO, clickbait, sponsored articles, and just plain crap out there), and system. Make a nice website with an organic audience, great articles, a beautiful commenting system, and a neat database, and demonstrate again and again that you care about the readers? Comments tend to be nicer. What a concept. Make a site where you really don't give a shit about the "general" reader and are only looking for a select, self-selected group of intellectuals to engage with immensely eclectic content to read you, if anyone? That also works. But most websites with comments - being somehow transient and somewhat exploitative by their very nature - don't have the luxury of doing everything just right. And commenters are an endless well of entitlement. If you show them an ounce of weakness they will pounce. If you show an ounce of entitlement yourself, they will pounce.
Internet Commenters run the gamut from terrible to occasionally better than the authors themselves (who are often constrained by "assignments" and might rarely veer into the next-level content an unencumbered party might be able to reach). At their best, Internet Commenters are the Fourth Estate's Fourth Estate, are the pinnacle of Democracy, are the bane of elitism and populism alike, and command earned respect. At their worst, Commenters make themselves into the worst people that people can be - revealing in one sentence the paucity of their life's ambitions, the banality of their life's thrills, and the demon of destruction towards the souls of others that live in them in place of ambition or thrill. Here are five examples of that!
1. The Catty Correction
Look, everyone messes up from time to time. Internet Commenters that act like they're infallible are insufferable, plain and simple. It's a long and brutal life filled with mistakes. Look at the divorce rate. Look at the rate of car accidents. People make mistakes and people get into holes that take many tears and climbings-out-of. A staggering percentage of the population has mental illness, and those who don't at least tend to have internalized the biases and prejudices of their era. Also, human beings have cognitive biases, heuristics, and the occasional bout of idiocy in-built. Like, since we crawled up from the swamp. Communication is an extraordinary feat of human civilization and the human brain. It's also quite difficult for the aforementioned reasons and others.
Give the writer the benefit of the doubt. The Internet Writer is not exempt from humanity and neither are you. Stop acting like one or the other of these things are true. Thank you for your correction. It will be taken under consideration. You're probably right, and, if you are, then thank you for contributing to the quality of my writing.
Subspecies 1a. The Catty Correction that isn't even right - This is kind of the worst comment ever. There are times when an incorrect Catty Correction is simply a matter of ambiguous writing or reading (sometimes the subtleties of a writer's point are buried in a longer article, or the writer simply forgets to add the context that would make a piece sound), but I'm talking about the corrections that are made and are abjectly, indefensibly wrong.
It's not only arrogant, it's not only written in the voice of someone that never makes mistakes, it's also wrong. Amazing the depths of filth required to reach this level. Extra points for bigotry.
However, there's a 0 multiplier on the evil for a follow-up with an apology or an admission that you were wrong. You're absolved.
Subspecies 1b. The Catty Non-Correction - Even though individual members are usually fairly simple and easy-to-skim over, this is the worst species of Catty Corrections per pound.
"Hire a proofreader" is an acceptable stand-alone comment when there are more than a few errors that affect readability. Within the margin of human error, however, this is the pinnacle of entitlement and arrogance - literally, what you're saying is that "I found at most 2 mistakes, but I'm not going to tell you where they are." Well, thanks a lot, dipshit.
There is utterly no defense for this. Someone spent time creating something for you, potentially for free, and you're not only going to nit-pick without providing your own work as a counter or a substantive critique of its content... you're going to make correction difficult or impossible. Bonus points if there aren't actually any mistakes beyond pedantic grammatical rules that you don't actually understand as well as an amateur Internet Writer.
2. Finding reasons to hate someone's process because you disagree with their results
If an Internet Writer gives Arcade Fire's new album a 6/10 and talks about how the music sounds, Internet Commenters will get upset at the Writer for not talking about how the music made the Writer feel.
If an Internet Writer gives Arcade Fire's new album a 6/10 and talks about how the music didn't resonate personally, Internet Commenters will get upset at the Writer for talking about subjective feelings without talking about how the music sounds.
If neither of those works, the Commenters will accuse the Writer of longstanding bias.
If that doesn't work, the Commenters will tell the Writer he or she can't make music themselves (by the way, height of irony).
If that doesn't work, they'll call the writer a hipster that never really got Arcade Fire in the first place and only listened before because of the underground acclaim.
We get it, you think it was an 8/10. Why don't you share your opinion instead of tearing down another's? And, if you think the writer doesn't get your favorite band, then why not convince them, genuinely critique their process, or - as is your right - leave?
3. "Fire the Author!"
This is a tricky one, because reader consensus on general level of quality and subject matter is why people go to a site - if everyone wants the author fired, then it should probably happen, unless there's a really good reason otherwise.
Still, what I'm referring to is an obvious populist sentiment created by envious miniature politicians below the Internet Writing. These people inevitably have an account and are looking for reputation or karma or up-votes. They rally people around anything they remotely disagree with and call for the firing of the piece's author. (Fun fact: For all the worst parts of 4chan, this almost never happens there because there's no real incentive to get upvotes.).
It's entitled, it's whiny, it's mean-spirited, and it's a way of co-opting a little of the popularity of popular authors or websites. And, what's worst of all - these types of comments are not usually by literal undiagnosed mental patients but, far more likely, by unrepentant and knowing practitioners of evil that rationalize it away by pretending their words have no power. "Hey, I wrote a comment that got a whole lot of up-votes! Haha, well, I disagreed with the author and so I called for them to be fired. It was a lot of fun. Harmless fun, you know, just a bullshit comment."
The problem is that it's not harmless. Unless you really think that the author should be fired, what you're doing is contributing a degree of hostility to the relationship between reader and writers that prevents open lines of dialogue. Think about a reader that enjoyed the piece - do they engage with your bilious insincerity, or do they not comment at all, leaving subsequent readers to believe that the consensus is to fire this author? You've harmed the author's credibility and harmed their ability to connect with fans, for absolutely no reason other than a cheap thrill of an up-vote. Everyone with a sincere opinion, right or wrong, just got swallowed up a little by the audient void created by your channel of pure noise. Maybe you didn't harm anyone much, but do the math: The marginal amount you harmed them to give yourself a marginal thrill is only a ritualized serial killing times one-millionth. You're basically a serial killer, just to a lesser extent. So congratulations on that. Or, at the very least, you probably cut people off in traffic and find a way to justify that too. You monster.
What's more, you've heard of the Boy Who Cried Wolf? If there is actually hostile race-baiting and idiotic half-arguments and a writer that deserves to be fired, even that same writer... well, great job creating a noise chamber in those comments that no one takes seriously, asshole! Sometimes creating this air of pure subjectivity is precisely what is intended by these Commenters. They want to make a level field so that hateful and disingenuous Writers can be all the more hateful and disingenuous and suddenly everyone looks to be on the same plane of right and wrong.
4. Comments written as pompous letters to the Writer.
Dear Mr. Dewey,
Your article on Brett Favre was poop. It wasn't good. It was piss. It was the ultimate bathroom crap. It was not good at all. I hope you take some of that hemp you're smoking and make it into rope and hang yourself in a bathroom and poop.
Sincerely,
Dawn
Dear Dawn,
This letter format doesn't make your comment any less insulting or even formal. It doesn't make it sound more sophisticated or cleverer. It makes it sound like you're having a bad day at work or in retirement, and you disagreed with my article claiming that Brett Favre was literally made of twine. Look, I studied the Wikipedia pages for intestines for six minutes. It's just twine, Dawn. We're all rope. We're all twine. We're all rag dolls made of twine and rag and stuffing, Dawn. Brett Favre happens to be 100% twine because he is a genetic experiment coming out of the Vietnam War. Look, you had a bad day and you disagreed with my rigorous thesis, though. And so you decided to write something to get your anger out, by projecting it at me.
I totally understand why you'd say something like that, because I've been angry and wanted to take out my intellectual foes with a ruthless, mirthful smear, but what you have to understand is that you could easily have pushed your clever mind to produce a solution instead, an alternative, or a real critique. For example, why does Brett Favre appear to age over time if he is made of an inorganic substance? Hell, why does any of us? This should completely dismantle my thesis. Instead, you resorted to juvenile comments and even told me to hang myself! Please refrain from such foolishness in the future.
Alex
5. Comments written by people that clearly didn't read more than the title and author line, but that don't say so.
Unless it's "Adolf Hitler" in the author line* or "Hitler is totally great" in the article's title*, you have to at least try to read the first couple paragraphs. Sorry.
The thing about these comments is that they're ubiquitous and cancerous. Sometimes you scroll down before you read an article on a community where you respect the comments, and one of these people comes along. You read the article and find that wait, that one asshole didn't? Why on Earth did he comment? And you realize that someone has basically taken another person to task for what might have been an editor's after-the-fact SEO-generating title! And your respect for the community wanes a bit.
Also, exemption if these Commenters openly admit it - if the author is consistently a hack, you have every right to say "Nope, not reading this. I can't take the author seriously. Sorry."
*(or thereabouts, obviously; there are plenty of people that shouldn't be taken seriously because of what they've advocated or done in the recent past)
6 (bonus). The comments on this specific article that deliberately commit all the fallacies above.
I'm on to you, you jokester! This is Pearls of Mystery, where we traffic in self-awareness like some such existentialist drug mule.
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