Someone should petition Yahoo! to close their comments section...

[Drunken Irishman]

It's vile, utter trash. The fact they allow anything to be said there undercuts their legitimacy as a real news source.

There was an article (I'm not going to link to it because it does no good) on Sarah Obama, Obama's step-grandmother living in Kenya, who was in a pretty bad auto accident.

Every comment attacked Pres. Obama - his family, the grandmother, demanding to know why SHE has bodyguards and how dare THEY pay for 'em (uh, no, you're not paying for them) and then a few "send him back to Kenya!" crap posts that get a ton of thumbs ups from the moron, inbreeding Yahoo! reading base.

It's nauseating.

Just needed to vent. Thank you.

[janedrake]

I tend to feel the same way when I read the comments sections of online sites like Yahoo, or even WaPo. What's even more frustrating is that the people who tend to post at these sites are the face of the nation to anyone reading the comments from outside our country. One could easily get the idea that everyone here is twisted with racist hatred, illiterate, and overall, mentally disturbed. I've noticed that one or two sites seem to require a Facebook "real-name" account in orderto post a comment, and that seems to be having a winnowing effect on the yapping hyenas.

[Born_A_Truman]

(02-07-2012 09:00 AM)janedrake Wrote:  I tend to feel the same way when I read the comments sections of online sites like Yahoo, or even WaPo. What's even more frustrating is that the people who tend to post at these sites are the face of the nation to anyone reading the comments from outside our country. One could easily get the idea that everyone here is twisted with racist hatred, illiterate, and overall, mentally disturbed. I've noticed that one or two sites seem to require a Facebook "real-name" account in orderto post a comment, and that seems to be having a winnowing effect on the yapping hyenas.

Yes, the FB comment decision was added to our local RW rag. It brought much howling and gnashing of tooth (no, that's not a typo) but the most idiotic knuckle draggers just made up a phony FB page to comment. Easy to spot though.

[Drunken Irishman]

(02-07-2012 09:00 AM)janedrake Wrote:  I tend to feel the same way when I read the comments sections of online sites like Yahoo, or even WaPo. What's even more frustrating is that the people who tend to post at these sites are the face of the nation to anyone reading the comments from outside our country. One could easily get the idea that everyone here is twisted with racist hatred, illiterate, and overall, mentally disturbed. I've noticed that one or two sites seem to require a Facebook "real-name" account in orderto post a comment, and that seems to be having a winnowing effect on the yapping hyenas.

Someone remarked on that story last night that he thought it was curious how so many people seem to hate Obama, yet he won in '08 (hinting that he didn't win legitimately).

Uh, no. People forget this is a nation of three million plus. Most people have more to their lives than to troll fucking comment sections on Yahoo!...

Born A Truman, I actually kinda sorta like them adding the FB option to commenting on articles because it puts a face to the name. The internet is filled with so much anonymity that so many people say bigoted, racist, ugly stuff they would never say with their name attached to those words. Sure, you'll find people who just don't give a damn, or others who, like you said, create fake profile accounts, but in the end, it's far better than the Yahoo! policy that allows for the most basic profiles to comment on articles.

Ideally, they'd drop the reader input. It's not a message board - it's a news article. When I'm reading about the death of someone, I don't need to scroll down to see the death is a Jewish-Obama conspiracy to overtake the f'n world.

[KonaKane]

I couldn't disagree more. The Yahoo! comments section does a huge service to our nation by allowing right wing racist mental cases to expose their pathology to all. Very little out there does more to make our case.

[DFW]

As it was a paper to which I had many personal connections once upon a time, I still get the electronic version of the Washington Post, and see the comments there. It appears to me that there is a hard core of professional (as in paid to do this) radical rightists who always post on sites like this, all day long, and always with the same line, never varying. All stuff practically repeated verbatim from Fox, which leads me to think that Ailes or someone like him pays these guys to do nothing but this. They each have several identities who always say the same thing with the same syntax. There must be a range of real people out there who share their sentiments, but it also looks very much to me like there is a paid core of pros out there, probably lurking on a dozen or more sites who are paid to do nothing post the Fox line day in and day out. Sort of a troop of blog-resident O'Keefes. If I had the time, I'd spend a day registering their various identities, watch their syntax, and start replying to them using the names of some of their other identities just to faze them.

But who has that kind of time, and who wants to waste it on the likes of them?