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You might not be aware of this, but there are a lot of male reproductive organheads on the Internet.

Since this phenomenon seems to get worse with the size of the crowd, it is theorized that we will reach a critical mbum; an bumhole Apocalypse, if you will. That’s when casual Internet users—and the corporations who want their business—will step in.

There are ways to solve this crisis, but I’m telling you now, you won’t like some of them.

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But first, the problem…

Right away let me shut down everyone who’s snorting derisively into their can of Mountain Dew and saying, “Trolls will be trolls!” You should know that there are billions of dollars at play here. The trolls are driving away business, and that simply won’t be allowed to continue. I’m not saying I’m rooting for it—I’m saying that’s the economic reality.

There are two huge, growing industries at stake: social networking and online gaming.

Social networking is at the heart of “Web 2.0,” the future of the online world, the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter web where users create all the content and their parent companies make billions just for hosting it. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

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Or it would be, if they could only convince everybody to use it. But they’re finding that lots of users will communicate online with people they know (virtually all use email and 37% use private text messaging), but only 8% use message boards or blogs or anything else that exposes them to the Internet’s bumheads.

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Hell, look at this site. We just had an article that was read by 305,396 unique users in a few days … but fewer than 100 of them joined the conversation down in the comments. That’s .002%, folks. It’s not that the Cracked comments are mostly very special or nasty; it’s that for a normal person, the memory of getting called a ****tard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-****tard comments. It’s human nature to remember the ****tard.

It’s the same in gaming. There are reports that most people who give up online gaming aren’t frustrated by the games themselves or technical issues. It’s the sheer number of ****wads they have to play with. Even on the most popular online multiplayer game, World of Warcraft, 70% of new players stay in modes where they don’t have to interact with anybody else.

So there is a clear barrier to entry for the vast majority who haven’t joined the Web 2.0 party, and that barrier is a moat full of dip****s. How can we bridge it? I see five ways: