I spend a vast majority of my online time reading. Mostly blogs, the occasional long article that catches my interest, that kind of thing. I think this is generally a good use of my time, but occasionally I make the mistake of reading the comments that follow the article, usually looking to see if anyone else holds the same opinion I do, or if if anyone has interesting points to make. What absolutely floors me is how readily people will either directly criticize the article itself, or the subject of the article, or another person’s comment, or any combination of those three.
I don’t know why this amazes me so much, and at the same time it bothers me. It’s not the fact that the readers have differing opinions – that’s a given. But the mean-spiritedness on so many message boards is really depressing to me. Because I’ve been really watching coverage of them lately, I’m going to bring forward the example of the next-generation consoles launching. There are people who’ve already decided they don’t like the PS3, or the X360, or the Revolution, but they don’t know why. Apparently they’re judging by appearance, and while that certainly plays a part, it’s absolutely not the standard by which consoles should be judged. Honestly, you can’t base most things on appearance, although as a deciding factor it varies in importance.
But it saddens me to see posts proclaiming the PS3 sucks and Sony sucks when they more than likely haven’t even seen it in person, much less played it. If you like the Xbox, you’re an MS fanboy. If you like the PS3, you’re a Sony fanboy. What if you like both? Isn’t that possible? Won’t there be a ton of people (myself included, probably) who own at least two of the next-gen consoles? I don’t have a problem with people who don’t like certain companies. I don’t like certain companies. But if you can offer a solid reason why as opposed to just saying the company sucks, chances are people will respect you a little more and you won’t just be starting arguments for no reason.
Of course, I’m probably just on another one of my naive ramble. That’s not generally how things seem to work on the internet. Creative / constructive criticism is rare – instead it’s just people trying to make others feel that they’re stupid and wrong for liking something (eg “I can’t believe you like the iPod! You’re just another Apple fanboy!1!!!”)
Sometimes I think it would be fun to have some PHP and maybe comments on this page, but the problem is nobody reads it anyway, and they would all be like that one above