Anonymous online commenters

[frosty]

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/03/0 ... ts-online/

Novelist Anne Rice, best known for her books about vampires, has signed onto a petition asking Amazon.com to stop allowing people to post anonymous reviews. In an interview with the Guardian, Rice says the "anti-author gangsters" make her a victim of bullying.

It doesn't take long to find a cruel, anonymous comment on everything from newspaper websites to Yelp and Amazon.

"That's the stupidest book I've ever read," wrote one person while reviewing a novel on Amazon.

Well-known vlogger, ZE Frank, recently taped a YouTube video responding to online critics. In it, he says: "For example, some young gentleman said he wanted to punch me in the face because my voice was so annoying."

A Pew Research study found 25 percent of people admit to posting anonymous comments online. A communications professor at the University of Houston studying the issue found anonymity contributes to less civil discourse. He looked at online comments in newspapers for more than a year and half and found 53 percent of comments were uncivil in papers that allowed anonymity. That percentage dropped to 29 percent when newspapers required names or links to Facebook accounts.

Since I'm sure we have all been through this before, this could be good to place in the political section for now, for the reason that the comments below the story, in direct relation to the article, demonstrate exactly the point the article is trying to make in a political context.

And since most of this site appears (!) to slightly lean left politically, I'm sure people here would appreciate the right-wing hateful comments that permeate the comment section. It's almost as if those people are too dumb to understand the irony of what they are doing.  =D>

Enjoy the humor.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I don't usually bother with comments that often anymore as so many are written by bitter assholes who seemingly have nothing to offer society as a whole,  but if an auther or anyone wants to be in the public eye it's part of the risk. I'd like to think anonymous posters were on the up and up,  but I know better.  A very large percentage are spammers either selling something or trying to advance some utterly ridiculous agenda.

[darsenfeld]

er.. she's a grown woman.  yes, all humans of all ages can bully (what really is murder, rape, slavery, etc?) but a child cannot fight back, she can.  If she's a novelist, use words or ignore.

No abuse is justified, but then it makes me laugh in all honesty when an adult says s/he is bullied.  They at the very least have tools to manage, cope and resolve it more than any other group out there.

[The Skeletal Atheist]

You all have voices that make me wanna punch you in the face.

[Hydra009]

Meh, I'm not too broken up over entertainers getting nasty reviews.  You do a show or make a book or whatever and put it out there, some people are going to not like it and be pretty harsh about it.  If you can't bear that, then you picked the wrong career.

Anonymity makes people a lot more blunt and candid than they normally would be.  That's just how it works.  I don't think that "anti-author gangsters" (?!) are worth complaining about, either.

[darsenfeld]

"punch in the face" lol..  

I guess people are different, but even in person/in the flesh and not online that wouldn't offend me...