Internet forums and comment pages are sometimes dangerous places to go. They are certainly frustrating locations if an intelligent conversation is sought after. Everyone knows about the problem of trolls, those malign folk who set out to deliberately provoke outrage. You don't need to be smart to be a troll, though a little cunning might help you to find the best spot to get the biggest bang, as it were. There is nothing honourable in trolling, even if there is something to be gained from setting a cat amongst pigeons. Moreover, most trollish comments tend towards a kind of cruelty or meanness of spirit that conjurs the idea of a self-loathing poster, occupying an ever-diminishing psychological space. It is hard to fathom that kind of nastiness.

Then there are the tranches of posts in which posters have failed to read properly an article or a previous post, constructing so many straw men as they go. Corrections go unheeded or are followed by abuse, nonsequiters or plain nuttiness. Maybe none of this matters in the long run, though these posts could theoretically last for centuries. Imagine a distant civilisation which had recovered primary source fragments from our time and those in our own past. They have a copy of The Analects of Confucious, Plato's Republic, Augustine's The City Of God, Dante's The Divine Comedy and Darwin's The Evolution of The Species. They also possess a huge pile of random pages of contemporary internet forum sites/social media and such-like commentary. They might quite reasonably conclude that a terrible regression had occurred, perhaps a natural disaster, plague or war that had sapped humans of their vitality and a significant chunk of their IQ.

The democratization that the internet had promised has probably come to pass. Any person with a smart phone or computer can create content for themselves and express their opinion however they like, whether or not they have anything worthwhile to say. There are no real standards and very little moderation. It is a wild west zone where everyone is a publisher and truth setter. That could be a good thing in the history of ideas and human development, a thriving digital democracy. It could also be an endless race to the bottom.

Somewhat off topic, but I like its cleverness: