#3. Unify the Culture

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Experts agree that the Internet has the magical power to turn normal people into ****wads simply by granting them anonymity and an audience. But there’s another cause that gets overlooked. Specifically, that a comment screen abhors a vacuum and will quickly fill it with bumholes.

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It works like this: Everybody is an bumhole in some cirgreat timesstances, and a nice guy in others. You go to Mardi Gras and scream for a lady to show you her mammary glands, but you don’t do the same when sitting at the dinner table with Grandma on Sunday. As this article put it: “The largest determinant of behavior is the perceived social environment.” But often on the Internet, there is no social environment.

To again use our own site as an example, the Cracked forums are consistently less angry and/or insulting than the article comments. Why? Because when you show up on the forums, you find yourself in an existing community, looking at a long list of threads and posts that establish the culture. Just a few minutes of reading gives you a sense of what is and is not acceptable.

But in the comments under an article (or YouTube video, or blog post), it’s a clean slate. If just one dude comes in and submits “LOL WHAT A FAT ****” as the first post, he’s set the tone for everybody and it will only go downhill from there. That’s why modular post situations, where each conversation is completely isolated from the rest, make for some of the ****tiest posting. A man sees an empty room and says, “Well, nobody here, guess I can flip out my dong.”

So how do you fix that?

Universal Moderation Policy:

Something like this has been proposed by some prominent bloggers calling for a blogger Code of Conduct.

Some kind of guidelines for what is and is not acceptable in the comments would be drawn up, and everybody who agrees can adopt it. Those sites would be marked with some kind of symbol or badge, just as copyright and Creative Commons symbols indicate at a glance how intellectual property can be used.

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In a world where those badges are common and commonly recognized, even looking at an empty comment box would let the poster know what’s acceptable there.

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Not the actual badge

Obviously a Lemonparty spammer won’t see a badge and think, “Oh, you mean you don’t want me to act like a douchebag? I do apologize, kind sir!”

But huge chunks of the population will modify their irritating behavior if you make it clear it’s unacceptable (theater chains that reminded patrons to turn off their cell phones—and kicked out people who didn’t—saw immediate results). For some people, they just need a sign in that empty room saying, “NON-male reproductive organ EXPOSURE ZONE” to keep their pants zipped. Give it to them.

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And if that doesn’t work…