In the wake of Popular Science's decision last month to ban comments from its website, Maria Konnikova looks more deeply into the psychology of online comments. "Removing comments also affects the
reading experience itself: it may take away the motivation to engage with a topic more deeply, and to share it with a wider group of readers," she writes. Still, "incendiary rhetoric has long
been a mainstay of public discourse...
" she writes. "The medium may change, but people do not. The question instead is whether the outliers, the trolls and the flamers, will hold
outsized influence..."
Read the whole story at The New Yorker »
