6 Reasons the Comments on This Article Will Be Useless
Cracked has written about commenters before: we've cataloged the different types of commenters available on the market today, listed which sites on the Internet have the worst commenters, and even provided advice on how to write more effective spam comments. But we haven't yet tackled the more fundamental question of whether there's even any value in allowing barely sentient ass-breathers to put words on the Internet.
The Problems
So, with a good comment defined, let's look at all the ways this ideal is ignored, and itemize some of the ass nuggets routinely posted in its place.#6: Anyone Can CommentObviously this is also the main appeal of comments; that everyone has a voice. To comment on a Cracked article you don't need a M.Sc in Applied Comedic Sciences - a 6 year educational odyssey which few people complete, largely thanks to the Slapstick requirement's 30% mortality rate. Airing the opinions of not just the experts, but also the great unwashed is widely thought to be a good thing, especially amongst people who have never actually met the great unwashed.But, it turns out that a great benchmark for whether someone is worth listening to or not is whether they've convinced an editor and publisher and spell-checker that their ideas aren't dribbling birdshit. If someone hasn't broached those barriers, it's entirely likely that they're not worth listening to. The only way to tell if a comment is stool or not is to read it, making finding useful comments in a comments thread a bit like hunting for a needle in an outhouse. If there's one thing I know about readers on the Internet, it's that they don't have a lot of patience wading through crap to find the good stuff. This is the land of tl;dr, and expecting someone to shovel through three hundred misspelled racial slurs to read a good point about Ray Romano's balls is expecting a lot.
The So-Called Experts' Solutions
A few solutions have already been developed around the Internet for dealing with these issues. All of them have some problems though, which I'll snipe at safely from my chair of Not-having-to-do-anything-about-it.
My Solutions
The problem with all of the above solutions is that they've got no balls. To remedy this, I've come up with the following solutions for whipping more sense into a community of misanthropes, gleaned from my experience amusing misanthropes. These are all solutions that I intend to bring up during the next Cracked Quarterly Budget and Laffs Review meeting.