We wouldn't know anything about that here, would we?
A new species has risen from the shallows of the Internet: the angry commenter. Sure, there is a long tradition of inspired cranks and interested retirees who have always written letters to the editor, but something in the anonymity and speed and stamplessness of the Internet has unleashed a more powerful and uncontrolled vitriol. I am not here talking about the thoughtful, intelligent comments, which also abound, but rather the bile unloosed, flashes of fury and unexamined rage that pass as “comment.”
[. . .]
One of the offshoot pleasures of angry commenting seems to be getting angry at the other angry commenters. There is an element of what one might call socializing, a sort of happy hour of nastiness and sniping. Is this joyful little flash of human friction and fraternizing the best they can hope for? As one non-angry commenter writes to some other angry commenters: “I'm sorry your life is so empty that you find it necessary to try and pick fights with random strangers on the Internet.”
Ah, yes, the good old days. I am sometimes nostalgic for the time when all I had to deal with were the inspired cranks and interested retirees taking their grubby ballpoints in hand to send scribbled rants to the newspaper. I could hold on to them for weeks and weeks before finally putting them in the paper, with everything I didn't like taken out so that what was left sounded like gibberish. Then I'd sit around at laugh at the poor dunces all day long.
At least that's what they thought. And now they're online. Ticks me off.
