Yahoo! Is Aptly Named

The average Yahoo! commentator.

For several reasons, I have Yahoo! as my homepage.  One is that I like seeing the stupid stories about Lady Gaga giving Justin Bieber a makeover, and Yahoo!'s version is quicker than the New York Review of Books.  Two is that I'm too lazy to change the default setting.

Anyway...

I was stuck on duty - too sick to grade papers - and was browsing through the stories about the cursed megamansion in LA and the eight things your doctor wishes you knew when I came across a piece about a French sculptor who made a piece that looks like a sinking ship, so much so that people occasionally come to try and help him.  Kind of clever.

The comments were full of bile and vituperative attacks on him - especially his Frenchness - and seemed to verify all the things we hear about how awful people are on the Internet.

I frequent a few places on the Internet. For instance, I've been part of a community of Braves fans for about ten years dating back to a board at ESPN.  I comment a fair amount at Balloon Juice.  I have seen the face of trolls.  Ugly, nasty trolls.

"Don't feed the trolls" is a primary rule of Internet discourse.  It's not a problem here, because, well, no one comments.  But you learn to ignore the Phillies phan who shows up to trash talk.

What's striking about Yahoo! is that it appears to be all trolls.

There's a really good Falcons board I frequent there, and I've enjoyed the threads - especially the game threads - that you can find on a variety of topics.  Living in New England, it's great to have a venue to discuss your team with other fans.  So it's not all of Yahoo!, just the main page.

And it goes without saying that the opinions expressed on the page are the sort of Fox News fueled anti-intellectual, anti-global, anti-liberal sound bites that you would expect from a site called, well, Yahoo!

I first noticed this after the Giffords' shooting, when the ugliness crept in there even at that time. And it's not argumentative discourse, it's just viciousness.

I really like the Internet.  It's a wonderful font of information and revelation, inspiration and communication.

But there are some pretty nasty sewers in here, too.