The Internet Is A Terrible Place

Don't get me wrong.  I don't hate the internet.  In fact, some of my best friends are the internet.  But the internet has a lot of bad people on it, and I'm using the word "people" lightly.  I'm pretty sure that if you were to print out the internet and try to sell it as a book on Amazon, not only would you get the same treatment as the guy who was selling a how-to for pedophiles, but you'd be summarily burnt at the stake when people found out where you lived.  And nobody would ever feel bad about it.

The classical site that everyone thinks of when they're trying to come up with the dumbest places on the internet is Yahoo Answers.  It's full of legendarily moronic posts.  But I don't think that sort of description really does justice to how terrible a place it is.  I think of it more as the star witness for the prosecution when humanity is brought up before the Galactic Court on charges of crimes against sentience.  Not much even the highest-paid defense attorney could do in the face of that other than give us a pat on the shoulder and say "May the gods have mercy on your species."

Another place full of the more egregious idiots online is YouTube.  Not just the comments section, mind you.  That's a pretty commonly-known source of brain-melting lunacy.  It's also worth noting how gargantuan a percentage of the videos on there are just things that make you want to reach through the tubes to strangle the uploaders.  I really don't think your "parody" version of some already bad fan video to a terrible singer/movie/cat/small glob of gunk in your nose is something the world needs to see, thanks.

On the topic of video sharing sites, all I will say about LiveLeak is that unless you're a member of al-Qaeda, don't go there.  It hurts.

There are also the online communities that aren't merely content to be wrong in their own corner of the internet.  No, they need to go preach the Gospel of Wrong (also the Gospel of Ron, but thankfully those guys gave up trying to get Ron Paul elected president in the '08 election sometime in the summer of 2010) everywhere else on the internet.  That, of course, means that when the trolls filter in to any given website to convert everyone to whatever brand of bullshit is currently in vogue, there will be counter-trolls.  Poe's law is the common description of how bad this can get.  As for me, though, it's more of a case of Schrödinger's Troll.  You don't know without personal observation of the poster whether they're serious or not, but you really hope the radioactive particle decays soon and triggers the flask of acid to kill the bastard.

If you have high blood pressure or have taken a feat giving you berserker rage, reading the comments section on any news story, no matter how innocuous, is a terrible life choice.  It could be a story on how kittens are cuddly and some douchewagon will be calling for the Jews to be stuffed into blenders and made into milkshakes.  Then another dickmonger a few posts down will be insulting the aforementioned douchewagon's sexuality and saying that all Muslims should be catapulted into gigantic jet engines.

I am increasingly becoming convinced that much of spam email has no human responsible for it anymore.  It's now self-aware and has gone feral, and we will never be able to contain it.

To conclude this rant, I actually think that the "assholes of the internet," like 4chan and Something Awful, are really pretty innocuous compared with some of the places I've mentioned above.  The denizens of such sites may well be monsters, but at least they realize that and largely stick to their own cesspools.  If you accept that going in, you're safe.  I have more issues when I'm trying to read up on the latest mass murder in some far-off nation and there are hundreds of assmonkeys screaming about how we should turn the gays into tiki torches.  Somehow I'd rather know I'm in a cage full of venomous snakes than walk out my front door one day to suddenly find that all my neighbors are Jeffrey Dahmer.