Ponderance

Maybe I'm just imagining it, but it seems to me that the quality of online discourse has declined at the same rate of improved connectivity to remote areas in red states.

Used to be, when you'd have a debate on some forum or whatever, you'd get a certain quantity of misanthrope trolls, Randian megalomaniacs and far-out space cadets, but overall, things were relatively sane.

Sure, people would disagree, and politics and such were never homogenous, but people knew that a poorly spelled missive with no research beyond "this happened to my cousin's best friend" would earn them a boot to the head. You had to be sharp, coherent and completely prepared to back up whatever you were spewing or you'd be Instant Breakfast for one of the guys who ended up founding Wikipedia or something.

But now that one-horse towns have broadband, all of a sudden, the whole internet's becoming less literate. It's no longer enough to simply avoid users with AOL or WebTV accounts and the back-fence chittering spaces they'd frequent. Any public posting that hits on a topic of interest to mouth breathers with an eighth-grade education and a sincere conviction that gay people and feminists are agents of The Terrorists will, as a matter of course, be flooded with barely readable posts from said numbnuts.

Oh, for the days when it was just the script kiddies, the occasional Ponzi schemers and that one weird guy who kept trying to get you to believe that the Masons are behind everything and you can get free electricity by sticking paper clips into pickles.

And when forums actually had moderators.

Sigh...