Some of the most vile, disgusting, and utterly nasty comments ever uttered by human beings somehow find a home in the message boards of our favorite websites.
As it turns out, if you don’t have anything nice to say… then you should probably join others in the same boat and begin commenting beneath the articles on you read online.
Fortunately, however, it appears a growing number of online readers are beginning to totally ignore these venom-filled comments.
“I’ve often wondered about the value of website comments, which all-too-often are an ill-informed, venomous echo chamber populated by the same handful of trolls,” Matt Carmichael of AdAge writes.
According to the findings of this month’s Ad Age/Ipsos Observer American Consumer Survey, reader comments posted online are beginning to lose general reader interest.
Nearly two thirds of site visitors are now “uninterested in having comments, photos and videos” mixed in with the news content from the staff reporters and editors of their chosen online publications. Translation: message board trolls and your run-of-the-mill verbal attack artists are driving away readers in droves.
Six in ten readers almost always find the nature of reader comments offensive, and “roughly the same number feel that publishers should do more to monitor the comments on the site.”
