I never post anonymous comments. I'm also not alone. Many other websites have recently opted for allowing comments only from people with Facebook accounts as a way of cutting down unnecessary/misinformed/racist or otherwise offensive posts. These posts are drastically more infrequent when posters are forced to provide their identity because it's very easy to be a trolling malcontent when you can hide behind a wall of secrecy and decidedly more difficult when your blindingly ignorant comments are available to family, friends and co-workers. I posted a blog recently expressing my views on foodies. Outlining my views on the subject of foodies and whether or not they actually exist. That was the sole focus of the blog that was nearly 650 words. I am posting this anonymous comment verbatim so we may all learn from it, and thus better ourselves.
Let's examine this comment shall we? First, it upholds the first rule of anonymous commenting by opening with an insult. The warm embrace of anonymity allows any spineless idiot to feel ten feet tall and bullet-proof because "they'll never know it's me! ha ha ha!" It also ends with an insult because the commenter clearly doesn't feel confident they made their point. Of course, being an anonymous commenter means you're not really confident about anything other than your inner sexual desires towards your family members.
Removing the insults reveals the point of the readers comment. "In your last sentence it should be the contraction 'they're' not the possessive 'their.' Maybe a rant on how Americans can't speak their (see what I did there?) own language?" That would have been a relevant, reasonable and to-the-point comment to make, if say, my original post was about people with bad grammar/spelling ruining society or the internet. As I mentioned earlier, my original post was about foodies.
I also used some form of they/they're/their/there/themselves a total of 26 times in my post all correctly save one time. That's a 96.2% correct grasp of the words. If you see a Facebook status that's a sentence or paragraph long, or a 140-character tweet and all the uses of their/they're/there are wrong, it would be clear the person was ignorant to the different meanings of the words. However, when the very last usage of the word in a 649 total word document that was 96.2% accurate overall and was posted around 2:00 am PST is wrong, I think it's safe to say it was a typo.
The bright side of moronic anonymous commenters is that when they take the time to post something completely irrelevant to the topic in such an abusive and juvenile manner, it ends up completely validating the point of the original article. After all, after reading my blog the only problem they could find was a simple grammatical error. That means they completely agree with me! Wahoo! Call me a self-righteous d-bag and a dumb ass (which is two words, see what I did there?) all you want but without providing any evidence to the contrary, you agree with me. Welcome to the fold, anonymous self-righteous d-bag!
It takes time and effort to write a post of any significant length and send it out for the world to survey and judge. I don't care whether people agree with what is said or not and I love when people have strong opinions because it means they actually believe in something. I also love arguing with people who can defend their beliefs because it means they've actually put some thought into their position instead of just agreeing with whatever they've been told. It also provides an opportunity for the most important part of an argument, listening to the other side and understanding where they're coming from.
The point I'm making is that I fully support comment sections as well as dialogue and debate in general because ideas and information should never be a one-way street. I also believe you sell yourself short by hiding from the world. Step out, be confident, believe what you want to believe but let the world know the real you. Otherwise, how will we ever appreciate you or your input? Imagine if the signers of the Declaration of Independence had all signed with an X?
So I fixed the error. The page is now 100%. Now there's nothing left to do but wait for the next anonymous reader to post an expletive laced comment on how pig-headed I am to insinuate my blog is anything close to the Declaration of Independence.
III,
