Online comments

Some French chick was talking about online vitriol. The focus of the interview: “Is comment moderation censorship?” The lady’s point was pretty cool. She said you can make the same comment, but in one call someone an idiot and the one with idiot in it will set people off in an opposite direction from your point. This will incite a flame war on the forum.

Basically “This is my point.” and “This is my point you idiot.” cause very different responses. I do hope they didn’t spend a lot of money finding that out.

Just recently, I switched my comments on YouTube to “approval”. This is a preemptive strike against people who have not yet caused me headaches. The group of people on YouTube who comment is transforming from a group of people wanting to learn and contribute to a cesspool of people attacking one another just to get a rise out of each other. I wish there were a way to block any account that is less than a year old and they have to have at least 5 videos uploaded.

I’m sick of online anonymity. I have no expectation of privacy walking down the street. I shouldn’t online either. I say this as someone who must deal with assholes online every day.

They also covered the idea that Google and other search engines have the opportunity to intercept how people learn things and present their ideas on how to answer questions and search results. In the case of Google and other search engines, they are not interested in the truth, they are interested in traffic. That is, they don’t care if you learn truth, they want you to keep coming back to their search engine to do future searches.

What is your opinion?  Leave it in the comments.