I used to be a big fan of comments, or at least the idea of comments. I thought that news websites should allow comments on every story. It seemed like quite a democratic way of doing things, to allow people to discuss an article, point out biases and the like.

However, when I thought that, I was forgetting one thing: most people are bloody morons.

And here is the unfortunate thing for the brave MSM outlets that have decided to allow comments of some form on their website. The number of morons as an overall percentage of participants in a comments thread is directly proportional to the popularity of a website (I’ve not done a scientific study on this, you understand. But we all know it’s true).

It is not difficult to understand the reasons why. Nincompoops can’t be bothered to find any smaller sites. And why bother when you have the opportunity to appear on the website of a very big newspaper or broadcaster and expose to the world your shoddily thought out arguments and even worse English.

There is bad news for us bloggers as well though. Because big blogs also have comment threads containing rivers of word-poo, comment spew and general all-out arse drizzle. Just think of the bigger British blogs. Iain Dale? Guido Fawkes? Harry’s Place? You need to put on a hygiene mask before clicking onto the comments sections.

Smaller bloggers like myself have it lucky. We might not have an audience of thousands, but at least generally good comments are posted here. I guess there is probably a “sweet spot” — probably a few hundred unique visitors per day — where the comments sections are generally good (if sometimes a tad on the short side). I am lucky enough to be there at the moment.

James Higham also counts among those lucky medium-sized bloggers. He has brought to my attention this article one The Age’s website.

Honestly, I’ve had enough.

Enough of the flaming, the trolling, the moderation, the spam, the ‘who’s-got-more’ syndrome, the inanity and the sheer stupidity behind allowing them on sites like theage.com.au.

They devalue our content, insult much of our readership, piss off our advertisers, waste massive amounts of our time and place us at an enormous legal risk.

It is all true. The Guardian’s Comment is free might be celebrated for… something or other. But it didn’t take long for it to gain a reputation of being a loon magnet.

Scotsman.com is also particularly bad. I often find myself scrolling down to read the comments, but I really don’t know why. They are always utter shit. Reading it is just a form of punishment. Do those people have two brain cells between them all to rub together? Doubtful.

I do often wonder if the high heid yins rather regret ever allowing comments on their website. It is an embarrassment to their newspaper and to the nation (ironic given that most of the commenters are nationalists).

Of course, if they ever took the comments away they would be accused of suppressing free speech and avoiding debate and so on. They are now stuck with the situation, having to persuade their advertisers to be associated with those rivers of comment-shit.

It would not surprise me if the other papers were in the same situation. I’ve had a glance on The Herald’s website, but I don’t think I have the stomach to look any further. I have learnt about Bentham’s thoughts at university you know.

Of course, the exponent of the “shit comments on an MSM / popular website” phenomenon is the BBC’s Have Your Say section. Oh my goodness. Have Your Say is so bad that it has now has a blog dedicated to ridiculing it day in, day out.

spEak You’re bRanes is written by a brave person who goes through the pain of reading Have Your Say for the benefit of our entertainment. It has unveiled the different classes of commenter, from those with delusions of grandeur to armchair generals to good old racists.

Every person with any power behind the website of a media organisation should read this blog before allowing readers to leave comments to let themselves know what they are in for. It will be like dipping the bottom of every webpage on their site into an unflushed toilet.

Still, they should not be discouraged from allowing some kind of user-generated responses on their website. The problem is very easy to solve. It has been implemented by many newspapers. The answer is at the bottom of this post, just above the comments. And it is at the end of that piece on The Age website: Technorati widgets.

This has several advantages over comment sections. Morons would have to go to the bother of setting up their own blog. Although setting up a blog is dead easy, it requires much more effort than vomming up some words into a box, which is all they currently have to do.

Also, loons would be two clicks away from the bright lights of the popular / MSM website, which will surely take a lot of the incentive away.

And, as The Age’s James Farmer points out, the conversation would almost certainly be better than what we currently have.

So why not just do it? I can understand that it might be difficult to remove comments sections, due to the risk of being burnt at the stake by all the loons who currently live there. But why can, for instance, the BBC not have a little box of responses via Technorati next to each news story (complete with “The BBC is not responsible for blah blah blah…”, of course)?