Saturday 8 June 2013

Civility in the Comment Box

I am quite a fan of the Huffington Post. It feeds in a lot of news and editorials from other sources, and a lot of them are well written. Of course, there are comment boxes at the end of almost every piece and, as I might have mentioned, I'm a sucker for a good debate.

Problem is, they're not always good debates, or even debates for that matter. I often find that as soon as someone has argued themselves into a corner, instead of either conceding the point (ha, in my dreams) or just shutting up, they have to start flinging insults. At this point I usually take great delight in pointing out this chink in their armo(u)r or just bowing out.

This morning I woke up to read a response to a comment from me, which could have gone either way. The written word is a fairly useless communication tool sometimes, being unable to share inflection and emphasis in a sentence. Thus, a question I had posed as a genuine question rather than a hands-on-hips,
"rhetorical" jab, could easily have been mis-interpreted.

Instead however, I read this - 

What I can say is that you have given me a broader view of this subject via your personal perspective and I could not ask for anything more from normally useless conversation on a chat forum.



6 comments:

  1. I love how (especially on Yahoo) for just about any article, some commenters are determined to go off on a political rant.

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  2. A less than random act of kindness. Good for them.

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  3. I know... it makes all the difference.

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  4. I can't bear to read the comments after most news articles; so I'm impressed that you jump right into the fray. And it looks like you were rewarded this time.

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  5. Isn't it nice when you run across sensible, rational people?

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  6. Gotta be British sarcasm. Dig deeper. :)

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The more the merrier....

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