This article is obviously about blogs written by professional journalists and often under the names of the mainstream newspapers they work for. Before reading the article, bear in mind the quotes I give here that particularly strike me.
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.
Going by my blog statistics, that is about my average.
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.
We find an attempt at a psychological explanation, which is interesting:
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 (…)
The problem in anonymity, dissociative anonymity.
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.
It is all a game for some of those people. They make a new identity for themselves and they feel absolved from morality found in reality. Some of the worst commenters can prove to be good-mannered people. It is not unknown for university graduates with good jobs to go and dress up as football hooligans and go round committing vandalism and beating people up! Perhaps the two are related in terms of psychology.
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.
How true!
There are various ways mainstream media sites deal with commenters. One is to have people pay for the right to send comments. If they get banned, they lose their money. I couldn’t do that here, and my blog just isn’t in the league of big newspapers and their blogs. Another way is not to allow comments at all.
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.
How minds think alike! I believe in the importance of discussion and negotiating agreements when such are possible. But, no blog is obliged to host bad comments and have to weed out the bigoted and the loony fringe.
Has anyone here learned anything from a string of comments, or have they just had the effect of making us angry or depressed?
The Blue Flower 
Well, I’ve learned or at least reflected a lot, dear Father, especially when yours comments were involved in the list.
I’m an internet contributors since 1997, I have frequented BBS, Usenet, forums, blogs and any conceivable form of online communication since (except facebook and twitter, that I take voluntarily at bay). It’s true that anonymity takes the worst outside human beings; I often considered anyway that forums and blogs have at least a great social value, i.e. keeping busy sociopaths that otherwise would thrash others’ lives in reality and not only virtually. It’s a sort of therapy similar to let fools cry aloud in speaker’s corner, but without the actual noise.
I’m not in the 1% commenters because my English skills wouldn’t allow me to properly participate in the debate, but I read with assiduity. Maybe it’s the same for others around here.
All the above just to express my solidarity with you for the ignominious attacks that you suffered; I would have express this also privately but I’m not sure your email account is still active.
Be assured of my prayers,
Simone
I have learned a great deal from good threads in the comments section. Sometimes they can be great. But nothing can ruin a comments section faster than zealots who chime in with the same discordant note no matter what the discussion was initially supposed to be about and who tempt others to react to them in a similar fashion. Nothing ruins a comments thread than nasty personal squabbling. Don’t feed the trolls.
I entirely agree with Foolishness, so to speak.
Father, I have indeed learned a lot from comment threads on what are either well-policed blogs, or else perhaps on blogs that simply haven’t had the bad luck of attracting some of the more vicious kinds of trolls. When they begin to appear regularly on a given blog in order to spread their poison, I stop reading and reluctantly go elsewhere. I call Internet comboxes “schools of brutality”, and imagine at least some angry young people are there to prepare for their future occupations as guards at national Gulags for the Stubbornly Religious.
I have about 10 e-mail addresses on my “banned” list and one on “moderated”. The banned messages are treated as spam and put into the “spam” list. They are kept off the blog but I see them on the administrator’s page. None has attempted to send a comment recently. Most of the “trolls” and persons who can be assimilated to such who bother me personally are on Fr Smuts’ blog. Fr Smuts is reluctant to introduce a “policing” policy, as he has said in a posting, but will undoubtedly have to. Some are religious cranks rather than cold-blooded trolls, nutters, call them what one will. They are just the kind of people who would revel in living under a totalitarian regime, as they would get advantages for denouncing their neighbours to the secret police.
I only have a few elementary notions of psychology, but I would suggest a dose of sociopathy, a morally responsible personality that has complete disregard for other people, no moral conscience, shallow emotions, etc. A milder form is narcissism. Religion is for these people merely an ideological weapon to make other people squirm and be unhappy. On the other hand, Jesus in his supreme altruism and empathy for others intended us to be happy in spite of our redemptive suffering in union with him on the Cross.
I keep policing down to the minimum, but I will ban trolls surgically and just make no fuss about them. I do not not recognise them as Christians or even as human beings except in that they are morally responsible and need to be punished.