The trolls are winning... :-(

My faith in humanity has been lowered ;-;

 

Yep. Another example of people being absolute jerks.
It's pretty degrading.

 

Interesting article, somewhat sad given that this is so true.

 

Why you show me this ._.
http://m.memegenerator.net/instance/41614730

 

That article got quite a bit political in this paragraph, I highlighted the key sentence in red:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

So in my opinion it's not just trolling, it's that they consider wide swaths of scientific topics "touchy subjects" that may NOT be debated on their website. Their website, their rules. I wonder how much of this is combating trolling, and how much of this is wanting to stay purely on message of their own worldview.

 

I'm just saying they are taking the tack of "Science cannot be questioned because it is undeniable Truth, so we are no longer going to tolerate your questioning of our science. Your attempts to undermine our Truth are offensive to us. Go take your rabble-rousing to a television debate channel."

 

One of the studies they cite showed that people were influenced by extreme comments either for or against the issue, comments that were simple attacks with no reasoning included.

They are saying that they would rather remove this kind of influence even if it means that intelligent arguments are also removed from the comments below the article. I'm inclined to agree with them... there are other places people can go to discuss freely.

 

Yup, I agree they have the right to do it. It's their website, so they make the rules.

 

But you think it would be better to take the good with the bad when it comes to comments on articles?

I have such a low opinion of the average person, that I'd rather not be exposed to their views more than I have to be.

 

Since their goal is to promote a "pure" vision of science, they are better off keeping other worldviews off their website. This decision is the right one, from their point of view. Whether it is good in an overall sense is less clear.

 

The comments section on YouTube videos are notoriously offensive and disturbing, but YouTube has chosen to use filtering, rating, and sorting to try to deal with the situation, rather than banning comments system-wide.

YouTube is actually just rolling out their new implementation of the commenting system, I was just reading about it yesterday. Hopefully we can turn a corner, in a good way

 

That's a good point, I do like systems where people can self-moderate.