So, he performed an experiment. Using a equal number of solar cells, young Aidan laid out the solar panels side by side in sunlight. One, the typical flat panel that people use today, and the other his unique “tree” design – a metal structure shaped like a tree branch. Young Aidan hooked up a meter to each, and to his surprise, he saw a higher voltage reading from his tree design. It was a remarkable finding, he thought.  So he decided, with the support of his parents, to enter it into a national science competition – and he won.

The Internet Attacks Dreams

What happened next is something that those of us that have been on the Internet for a long time now would not find very surprising. The story about the science competition hit the Internet, and everyone from PhD researchers to armchair scientists took a look at young Aidan’s design, and the flaming began.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Aidan’s introduction to the world of online commenters didn’t go too well.

“Commenters and bloggers attacked Aidan with vitriol usually saved for political enemies and the Kardashians. Blogs decried his experiment as ‘bad science’ and ‘impossible nonsense.’ Someone called him ‘an alien—a cool one, though.’”

Reading the article made me remember some of the stories that I used to write about years ago, such as science scams and other silly claims throughout the fields of Ufology and the paranormal. I’ve always felt justified, as an engineer, in my online attitude. In fact, I’ve been one of those vitriolic writers before, trashing poorly designed scientific theories and various silly claims like alleged “free energy” findings.

Here is a blog post of mine in 2006, publicly ripping apart a guy who constantly claimed there were connections between UFO stories and the CIA and other government agencies.

I called him an idiot, a moron, liar…

This was back in 2006, and in the next 5 years, I gradually – for lack of a better word – “matured”, to some degree. And writing for MUO helped, because I started noticing what it’s like to be at the receiving end of all sorts of nasty accusations and cruel comments.

Why People Feel the Right to Be Cruel Online

The truth is, I really don’t think that I would talk that way to people in real life. I don’t think many people would. The guy I was slamming above – if we were sitting together in some cafe having coffee – we would probably have a pretty interesting intellectual conversation – disagreements and all.

But there is just something about the Internet that feeds hate and anger. For me, it’s people that flip out and draw premature conclusions over so-called scientific “discoveries”. I’m sure that’s what angered the many PhD academics and skeptics in Aidan’s case. But do we have to be so cruel about it? Even here at MUO – a community that I consider to be very intellectual and mature – there is a contingent of people that have a certain arrogance, and feel justified in calling someone they don’t even know a moron.

Here’s an MUO Answers commenter calling the questioner stupid.

Or this commenter in another article calling another reader retarded.

And yet another spat between commenters on another article, issuing pretty nasty jabs back and forth.

What has scared me the most, since writing and reading posts and comments from other writers here and elsewhere on the web, is that the cruelest comments that I’ve read remind me….of me. It is a sobering realization, and one that dampens my comments as the years go by, although I am still known for losing my temper with others now and then. I don’t know if it’s genetic, or maybe just a curse.

Mistakes Lead To A Pig Pile

What I’ve noticed is that two things seem to incite a greater level of vitriol, the likes of which poor young Aidan had to experience. The first is making a mistake. Online folks are very unforgiving when it comes to making mistakes. Aidan’s mistake was that in his entry into the science competition, he only measured voltage. Unfortunately, voltage alone doesn’t equal overall power – so his findings were questionable. That one single mistake led to an influx of attacks and name-calling.

The other factor seems to be anonymity. Anonymous posts are almost always particularly harsh…cowards are always so brave with their words when they don’t have to use their real name. Would those same people have spoken those same words directly to the young boy’s face, in the presence of his parents? I doubt it.

And if Aidan goes on to accurately measure the power of his test contraption, and he is proven correct in his theory, will all of those arrogant, nasty people respond again and apologize to young Aidan? Will they be remorseful for attacking a young child that is motivated enough to explore science at such a young age? Probably not.

Why do you think people get off on trolling and posting hateful comments online?  Have you ever done it yourself and regretted it? Let us know your thoughts and insights in the comments below.

Image Credits : Wall Street Journal, Shutterstock

I love our commenters. You guys ask me questions, give me tips and generally help make this site what it is. It’s particularly true over at MakeUseOf Answers, where for the most part it’s our readers providing the best solutions for technical problems. It’s true on most tech-oriented sites – people just help each other out, outside of the occasional Mac/Windows/Linux flamewar thread.

It’s a different matter elsewhere, however, including newspapers and YouTube. People type what’s on their mind before they think, and certainly aren’t trying to be helpful. Frequently they’re not even talking about anything relevant. This post from NPR sums things up nicely, but it gets much worse than that. XKCD offered one solution for the problem, but if you’d rather not wait for that fix to take hold I highly recommend Shut Up. It’s a simple installation and works so well you’ll forget it’s there.

Get Rid Of Them!

First things first, download Shut Up from the Chrome Web Store. Once the extension is set up you’ll see a new icon on your extension dock; click it any time you want to turn comments back on for a particular site. Like I said before, Shut Up will remember which sites you like seeing comments on.

How well does this work?  Very well. I tested it on a variety of sites, and found that comments simply disappeared. For example, here is YouTube with comments:

Hurray, arguments! Here’s how the bottom of a YouTube video looks without comments:

The noise is replaced with white space, allowing you to watch videos without someone stating that they think one girl is hot or calling the uploader a homo. Brilliant! For some reason you can still leave a comment. Don’t.

Similarly, if you’re sick of nuanced news articles being followed by an in-depth discussion of which politician is the biggest douchebag, you can create white space below newspaper articles as well:

Voila! The comments box remains, but the comments are gone, meaning you can continue believing in the intelligence of mankind.

By default, Shut Up remembers which sites you turned comments on for. You can change this simply in the settings:

That’s about it for this extremely simple plugin. It worked for me on a vareity of blogs, including MakeUseOf and Lifehacker. It also worked on every newspaper I tried it with.

Give it a spin yourself and feel free to let us know if it works for you. In the comments (ironic, I know).

The Futility Of Comments

I’m all for people being able to speak their minds, and there are certainly examples around the web of comments sections being helpful and engaging. It’s certainly not the norm, though, which is why I like this plugin.

Of course, this tool can also be used to remove MakeUseOf’s comments. It shouldn’t be. Our commenters are, for the most part, awesome. Sometimes Dave LeClair says something stupid, but that’s worth putting up with for the sake of the rest of you. Speaking of Dave, he recently wrote a half-decent article about extensions for Chrome that clean up the web. It’s pretty good, considering who wrote it.

Do you know of any other cool tools to block website comments? Suggest them in the comments below. I realize you probably won’t, because you’ve blocked our comments, but whatever.

Two new iPhone apps have emerged to provide their own unique approach for rating and recommending stuff we like and don’t like. Unlike Yelp, the new Oink is set up for users to not only rate places but also the items inside those places. Kinetik, on the other hand, is a Twitter-supported app for recommending apps you like to your social network followers.

How the Oink Social Network Recommendation System Works

Oink is a pretty well-designed iOS app that invites you to rate and comment on products and services in places and businesses you have visited. The main menu of this app starts you off with popular places near your current location.

You can of course search for particular items and businesses within a specified location radius, but unless someone has used Oink to rate an item you’re looking for, the app may not be of much use in this area. You will probably have better luck using the Discover menu which displays items and businesses that have already been rated by Oink users.

You can discover items from 1 mile to 100 miles of your location. Or if you’re a world traveler, you can request a global search of rated items. A 5 mile discovery in my area revealed items ranging from Wonton with BBQ pork and egg noodles, to free tire rotation at America’s Tire Company.

Oink users are encouraged to photograph and tag the items they rate and review.

You can also use your personal contacts, and Twitter and Facebook connections to see who else is using Oink. There is also a list of suggested users to follow consisting of popular bloggers, writers, developers, and social media experts.

The best way to get the most out of Oink is to dive in and rate stuff you are using. Items are not limited to places you visit. Many users comment on computer software, games, and entertainment shows. In fact, the success of Oink will depend upon large and wide user activity.

Rating Apps With Kinetik

Kinetik is similar to Oink, but has narrowed its niche to recommending iOS apps. Although there are a plethora of iTunes Store apps to choose from, sometimes our friends and social networking followers can recommend apps we’ve never heard of.

Kinetik works in connection with Twitter to see what apps your contacts and followers are recommending. There is also a updating list of “Trending” apps, as well as apps listed by categories – including finance, productivity, navigation, news, games, travel, and utilities.

Sharing apps you recommend is similar to posting tweets on Twitter. You simply do a search for your app and then write a 140 word or less comment or review about the selected program. You can post your recommendation on both your Twitter and Facebook account, or simply post it on Kinetik.

You can discover contacts on Kinetik, which includes a list of users who share your same interests, or people who are the most active users of the app.

If you come across an app you like, Kinetik can link you to it in the iTunes store.

What makes Kinetik somewhat different from the user ratings and comments in the iTunes Store is that Kinetik users are sharing and recommending apps they like. So depending on who your followers are, you may very well discover some useful programs for your iOS devices.

I should add though that some users have complained that Kinetik doesn’t provide a way to edit reviews you post on your activities list. I experienced this problem when I tried to post my first review. I accidentally tapped the share button before I had a chance to finish writing my comment. There is no way to delete your comment once its posted.

Let us know what you think of Oink and Kinetik, and similar apps you use for rating and recommending stuff you like.

I wrote a while ago about 8 Proven Ways To Make Your Blog Popular, but let’s take a look today at 3 ways to encourage users to comment on your blog through the clever use of plugins.

Let Users Create An Account

One thing that puts me off commenting a lot of the time is having to type in my name and website relentlessly. I have something to say, but I don’t want to fill in the whole form – let me create some kind of a user account to remember who I am!

I showed you how to this with Janrain, which gives you a set of social buttons where users can log in with their social credentials to automatically create a local user account on your WordPress blog, but creating accounts within WordPress isn’t the only solution and not the best solution if you just want to use it for commenting.

The Disqus comment system is a good alternative, which we use here at MakeUseOf. Disqus completely replaces the built-in WordPress comment form with its proprietary system, and instantly enables existing Disqus users to comment without creating an account, as well as making the process of creating a new account easy from within your blog. In fact, none of the accounts made through Disqus are stored locally in your WordPress database – but the comments themselves are.

There’s a few advantages to this method:

• Disqus handles spam pretty well, so you don’t have to.
• With an account, users are able to keep track of any replies to comments they posted, something which WordPress doesn’t handle by default.
• All the comments are synced with WordPress, so if you ever decide to change back you won’t lose a thing.
• Users are presented with a variety of account creation and login options (including social) if they still want to be anonymous.

• Image previews and uploads – if users post a link to an image, a little preview is automatically pulled in. Uploads are also optional.

• @mentions: This is an incredible feature whereby you can “bring people in” to the conversation by mentioning them, even if they aren’t currently in there. This blog post explains it better.

I’d recommend Disqus if you only want to create user accounts for commenting rather than taking user story submissions or such. The only downside is that it complicates any other commenting-related plugins, and customising the form display isn’t possible without a developer license – the basic system is 100% free though.

Add A Link To Commenters Latest Post With CommentLuv

Very simply, the CommentLuv plugin adds a link to the commenter’s latest blog post if they’ve left a website URL, so it’s certainly an effective way of getting more comments as users are always looking for some free self-promotion.

The downside of this is that you might get a page full of mindless comments if you’re not careful, so make sure you’re as vigilant as ever marking those spammers. There’s even sites around dedicated to finding and sharing blogs that have dofollow CommentLuv links activated.

CommentLuv works within WordPress, and is not compatible with a third party service like Disqus.

There’s also a premium version about to be released soon, but as far as I can see it’s nothing worth getting if you’re only after the basic functionality of linking to a users latest blog post.

Thank Your Commenters

Thank Me Later is a unique WordPress plugin that attempts to solve the problem of users commenting then never coming back. While it isn’t technically going to encourage new readers to comment, it will keep them there once they’ve started (hopefully). It automatically thanks commenters for participating on your blog, and can be easily customised with your own templates. After a pre-defined time since commenting, it will pick one of the templates you provided, and email the commenter.

You can use this to encourage the commenter back to your blog, or perhaps take the opportunity to tell them about the RSS feed or your Twitter account – the possibilities are endless. While some might consider this spamming due to their automated nature, I think if you limited it to one email per visitor (there is this option) then you should be safe. You should also be able to use this plugin alongside Disqus, though I haven’t tested it in practice.

Of course, another great way to encourage comments without using plugins at all is to just ask for it! Speaking of which….do you have any other tips for encouraging comments, with or without plugins? Let us know in the comments!

If you’re a beginner or pro blogger alike with the WordPress system, be sure to check out our growing archives of WordPress tutorials, and keep a look out for our upcoming Best of WordPress Plugins page, coming to a MakeUseOf near you very soon!

With that in mind, I typically try to be kind, and furthermore, I try to remember this wise adage that a good friend once told me – “Don’t feed the trolls.” Basically, it’s always a good option to take the high road. However, it’s fine to occasionally vent off-site, right?

So, here’s taking a look at three types of Reddit commenters that drive me up the wall.

Irrelevant Commenters

I don’t understand it, but every once in a while, a commenter will pop up out of the blue with something that only halfway relates to the Reddit post. I’m not quite sure, but this is a character that I dub the “Irrelevant Commenter”.

The Irrelevant Commenter shows up in the strangest of places, and sometimes, he’ll even venture away from Reddit onto other sites, leaving his comments that have virtually nothing to do with the link. Strangely enough, when someone responds to his totally irrelevant comment, he seems to disappear without even an explanation of his actions. But no matter where he is, he always leaves a comment that barely has anything to do with the subject that is being discussed.

You may actually link to this article that you are reading right now on Reddit, and you may even earn sweet karma for it! However, if the Irrelevant Commenter shows up, he will leave something like, “I just love MakeUseOf – particularly that American writer J. Lockhart. He looks so good in that tie!”

As you can tell, the comment is somewhat connected to the link. Unfortunately though, it provides zilch when it comes to constructively contributing to the conversation. Despite my distaste for the Irrelevant Commenter, I find him just a little more forgivable than the other two.

Grammar Nazis

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a writer, and yes, I know quite a bit about grammar, proper spelling, and the various other twists and turns that the English language likes to take. I’m certainly not perfect with every single thing that I put on the page (to my editors, I apologize), but I’d like to think that I have passed the stage of being a novice when it comes to writing.

However, with that in mind, even I don’t have a problem with the occasional grammatical error on a Reddit post. The purpose of the site is to share information and ideas with other people – not be online masterpieces of literature. Despite my fear of the English language’s eventual demise, I can usually let it slide when it comes to Reddit (and yes, even Facebook).

Unfortunately though, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. The action in this case is my flippant attitude towards grammar on Reddit, and the reaction is the guy that likes to pick through even the most important of posts and point out the minor grammar errors that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. That being said, Grammar Nazis are simply not my favorite Redditors. We’ve got better things to worry about, my friends.

Repost Hall Monitors

The Internet is full of recycled information, so what ends up on your monitor is typically going to end up on another person’s months from now. Heck, it’s even more likely that whatever is currently on your monitor was on someone else’s before even that. People come and go on Reddit, and it’s a given that users are going to repost stuff that they have just discovered.

There are quite a few folks who tend to complain whenever there’s a repost on Reddit, and for some reason, I don’t have an earthly clue as to why. Part of my curiosity stems from this question – are they on Reddit that much so that they know each and every time a link is reposted? C’mon.

Sure, you can check to see if a link has already been submitted using the site’s search function before posting. However, when the last time that same link was posted months ago, it might be okay to bring it back. Beyond that, even the creators of Reddit ask the users not complain about the reposts through the Reddiquette – the law of the land for all things Reddit.

The irony of the matter is that those who are complaining are the ones that are actually in violation of the website’s usage policies. Some of them complain that the “original posters aren’t getting the karma that they deserve”. I say that the Repost Hall Monitors are probably worrying more about the karma than the original poster.

(By the way, you may have noticed that the Reddiquette also says not to complain about complaints about reposts. Good thing we’re not on Reddit, right?)

Conclusion

These are just a few of my pet peeves about Reddit users, and I’m definitely not trying to get all “holier than thou” on you with the three mentioned. However, some people tend to take the site just a little too seriously. That’s all it is, though – a website.

What are some of your pet peeves about Reddit? What other sites have users that drive you nuts?

In Scandinavian folklore, a ‘troll’ is a supernatural creature that lives in the caves and mountains. On the web, a troll is nothing but a pest who thrives in the anonymity that it provides. The Urban Dictionary has quite a few definitions lined up. But – one who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument – is the most point blank.

So, how do you take the war to the Internet trolls? First, by reading the pugmarks and recognizing a troll from a guy who just wants to start a one-off flame war.

Putting A Troll In The Crosshairs

Fortunately, it’s easy to spot an Internet troll from a distance. They have their own sets of socially unacceptable behaviors.

• Trolls generally use provocative and confrontational language. A clever one will mix it up with relevant and friendly posts.
• Trolls hardly ever stick to the topic; they beat around the bush with the intention to confuse the reader.
• Trolls of the subtle variety flag off their attack with innocent questions. You will often find them dressed up as new members of forums and chat rooms.
• Trolls lack understanding of a topic. They will not respond with a proper answer to a proper question.

• Trolls (especially the clever variants) use catch phrases to win sympathy. For instance, they may portray themselves as victims or specially challenged.
• Trolls use web addresses or fictitious online identities that lead to dead ends.
• Trolls may make desperate efforts to make themselves liked. Sugar coated responses or overt-flattering comments are signature troll moves.

There are different types of trolls. Most are hit-and-miss and are far easier to deal with. Some are more strategic in the way they embed themselves online so as to cause maximum mayhem with minimum fuss. Identifying an internet troll is half the battle one. You can only count on your experience to get one early before you are baited by them. Now, comes the relatively easy part of dealing with these internet trolls.

Surefire Ways Of Dealing With Internet Trolls

Thankfully, you don’t have to call 911 to deal with Internet trolls. No destruction of property has been reported yet. Effective troll management calls for equal parts of caution and common sense. Here are a few guideposts to follow.

Avoidance is the best policy: If you can catch them shooting their mouths off, totally ignore remarks left by trolls. Don’t feed the trolls should be stuck up on a yellow sticky always.

Avoid arguments: If you do get on a one-to-one with someone you suspect to be a troll, keep your remarks to an absolute minimum. State your facts and move on. Put the ball in their court. By the second remark or so, a troll would have identified himself.

Don’t let them flatter to deceive: There is a high chance that a troll will pay a compliment or two to ingratiate himself before he starts his attack. This is a tough one as there are many real admirers who do sugar coat their comments.

Ask For Supporting Data: To net a troll in the anti-spam net, you can ask for data that can quickly verified like an email address or domain name. Genuine commentators usually have an online persona to back themselves.

The power of the webmaster: You can use blacklists and whitelists to separate the bad from the good. IP addresses can be tracked and persistent attacks from an IP or a range of IPs can be effectively blocked.

Did Einstein know a few trolls when he said – “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe.”

Where do you fall on the Internet troll scale? Check out this infographic for a light-hearted look at internet arguments. Cracked.com has its own list of ways to deal effectively with internet trolls. There are quite a few other resources if you ever fall short of advice on how to tackle this cyber-menace. Like the ones in our Geeky Fun section:

• Guide to trolling
• Typical Internet Troll
• The 4 Levels Of Internet Trolling
• Troll Your Facebook Friends
• Epic Troll Video

How do you deal with trolls? Do you have a magic potion to use against them? Do you think they are a menace or do you believe that it’s all harmless fun? Tell us (but don’t troll) in the comments.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons; xkcd; Flickr(openfly)