What determines if a comment section/message board is crazy and racist and on fire or not?

Thing I've wondered about lately is what are the factors determining if a comment section is worth reading or not or if it's filled with folks posting a world where everybody is "crazy, racist, and on fire"? Does it have to do with the subject matter of the website, or the audience it aims at? Or the age or number of years of Internet posting experience of the average user?

For example, any news site is filled with insane racist unfiltered fuckwads, from CNN to Yahoo to your local newspaper. However, other sites aren't, like us or Gawker or the AV Club. Why?

Does it have something to do with the Net saaviness of the user? Or that certain kinda boards have a posting style replete with a layer of snark or irony? The ideas argued about may be held as passionately as any other, but the language use is modulated. Why?

News sites tend to get 'policed' by fuckwads 'correcting' librul feminazi socialist groupthink. Gawker commentors wouldn't feed the trolls so much as zing them.

gawker and AVC comments aren't really much better, the awfulness is just shrouded in understandable, complete sentences. i think it has to do with age and internet savviness -- yahoo/cnn/local newspaper sites have older people who care less about internet culture shouting into the abyss while AVC/gawker is younger and/or nerdier, more community-minded, interested in starting conversations and not just arguments, etc.

LOL CANCERAIDS

Surely the ability to post anonymously is a major factor as well...

i've learned my lesson w/r/t reading any story on yahoo or CNN that involves race (or even has someone non-white somehow involved in the story in any major way) and scrolling down to read the comments.

avc and gawker comments sections are eons better

AVC commenters are good with the deeper stuff like classic TV reviews, but the news articles etc are the worst

Not really; it's always great fun when Atlas Shrugged would get name checked in the Newswire. People fall all over themselves to rip into it, and mock its defenders.

It's a lot like the stories they ran about Piers Morgan coming to CNN, where every UK av club poster immediately had to post how much of a cunt the guy is.

avc and gawker comments sections are eons better

i suggest (er, rather, maybe don't) you reread the gawker comments on any Trayvon Martin piece, they are just as horribly racist as other comments sections, just with proper grammar and spelling

xp yeah but i remember that sort of atlas shrugged shit was still filled with the same whiteboy misogyny that's everywhere else in nerd spaces. and i loathe rand as much as anyone but it's easier for me to stomach lunatic commenters shouting incomprehensible offensive things on CNN articles than nerds thinking they've achieved every level of superiority by getting all sexist against the "right" target.

lol i have not read any trayvon martin news story comments section and will not, every time i read a story my scroll bar's size on the right indicates an extremely long and depressing series of replies. i'm not saying those comments sections are perfect or filled w/nothing but thoughtful decent non-prejudicial people but they are better.

gawker has a weird commenting system involving "approval" and "stars." first-time commenters can comment, but their comments will be invisible to most readers until theyve been "approved" by ppl w/ stars. (who can see first-time commenters.) once youve been approved, your comments are visible to anyone who's logged in to the site, but not to anyone else. gawker staffers can give out "stars" to the best of the approved commenters; once you have a star, your comments are always visible to everything, and you have the power to approve red/invisible comments

just what the internet needs, more popularity contests decided by nerds and shut-ins

imo, comments sections are just the web's version of flypaper. they only exist in order to suck you in and keep you glued to that website.

ilx has much the same psychological effect, but it has no commercial agenda, no owners or stockholders besides ilxors themselves, and good moderators to shunt the sickos aside. therefore ilx is much more benign addiction than any comments section on a commercial site.

Is there anything that sites can do to actively promote a more reasoned culture in their comment threads? The Gawker system seems overly complicated but does overt top-down moderation ever help? Are comment sections under articles less shrill when the writers engage with their readers?

I know some people who have run popular blogs and have managed to promote reasoned culture in their comments threads through relentless, unapologetic moderation/banning. This has worked well for the most part, except the people who ran the blogs completely burned out having to wade through a comment moderation queue full of "Fuck you for deleting my comment. I hope you get raped to death, you fat bitch" delightfulness.

Who was it, somebody(Slacktivist, I think) posted a list of tips of what to do to keep your site from attracting douche comments. Something like forbidden anon posting, putting a login to see any comments, putting the comment post box at the very bottom of the comments, not right after the article. The more work you put in for people to actually put in to post, the less off-the-cuff reflexive fuckheadedness gets thru.

I hate gawker commenters as much as the next guy or gal, but comparing their awfulness to like, yahoo news commenters is pushing it too far imo.

i wonder how much the hairpin deletes comments? It seems to have a very strong comments-box culture, very normative, practically self-policing, but you'd think that might be catnip to trolls who aren't there to make friends. (mind you, i think the site also uses most of kingfish's avoiding-douche-comments design tips)

i guess this is this thread for my recent kind of obvious observation of yet another red flag for identifying xenophobic/racist commentors on news sites: the spelling 'moslem'. (is it that the archaism sigifies how ~backward~ they think Islam is? is it that they think writing 'muslim' is modern politically correct cowardice? is it because they think it's prettier? who knows)

Never been sure about that but I'd thought that might be a generation thing in the same way as the spelling 'Rumania'

which prob ties in to a conservative xenophobia as the original english spellings of both were initially preferred and the later spelling changes would have been journalistic decisions which were probably slower to take root in conservative media outlets (change would have been in the 60s at a guess?) - either way i'd say a high % of those commentators are of that age

i've never read "moslem" in a non-derogatory context i think. "muslin" too.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Zpc2k712AtE/SH0PdnbrI_I/AAAAAAAAAoQ/ElO0PMeiTW8/s320/8024l.jpg

Little Moslem's Series - Written for the Muslim child, most especially living in an English-speaking or Western country, featuring Twins Tarek and Jana.
Meet the twins, Tarek and Jana. They are six years old.

Join them and their friends on a journey of discovering what it means to be a little Moslem and learn about the five pillars of Islam.

A beautifully illustrated book, good for parents to help explain religion. It raises issues such as why Christmas is not celebrated by Muslims, and what is celebrated, while teaching the basic pillars of Islam.

i looked up moslem/muslim in fowler's modern english usage and it's very definite that spelling it 'muslim' is sheer didacticism and we should still be using hindoo and suttee and amuck and nom de plume. but that is, after all, from 1926.

here is a google ngram: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=muslim%2C+moslem&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

You still see the occasional 'Mussulman' and 'Mohammedan' which, i feel, is true commitment to the cause.

Mahometan is hardcore

i love "Mussulman", will still use for lols

"muzzie" sometimes used by seasoned British racists also

C#, you have to capitalize in Ngram (same basic results, though).

Anyhoo, thread title stolen from Patton Oswalt or somebody who once mentioned that Yahoo commentators & the like seem to be posting from a world where everybody is "insane and racist and on fire"

"Hindoo" sounds like a trademarked spelling mistake for some Web 2.0 photo-sharing site or something

Yeah, I think the journalistic standard now is Yahu.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niggard
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abortion

why does merriam-webster.com have a comment section now? trolls like the ones above are somewhat rare (it's mostly just polite banter about word usage and people asking for homework help), but I don't understand why anyone would want to turn a reference site into a community of puzzled googlers. some sites just shouldn't be interactive.