Here are the worst comment threads on the Internets:
3. Facebook Discussion groups. They may no longer be extant, and I don’t dare check. Some intelligent people and some of the most ignorant babbling fools on earth.
2. I Can Has Cheezburger comment threads. I love lolcats, but the comments are unreadable. So cute, you’ll think you’re diabetic.
1. YouTube comments. So many morons, it fills me with despair and makes me want to kill myself.
I don’t know why I bothered, but I made a comment on this YouTube thread, a video about someone whose car was crushed by a truck, but walked away. Believers are hailing it as a miracle. It’s pretty surprising, but in this wide world full of accidents, it would be more surprising if we didn’t see this kind of thing once in a while.
So, me commenting as ‘fontor’:
A miracle? So that would mean…
Thousands of people die in accidents every year. God could rescue any of them, anytime he wants… and for some reason he refuses?
What a jerk!
Response 1, from ‘gorgouesprincess15’:
ur the jerk but dont worrie ur surly going to hell have fun there loser
Response 2 from ‘adriennexxxx’:
yeah ur right
the reason god does this is because its time for us to go to heaven and live happier!!
instead of living in this shitty world!!
ur right gorgousprincess15!!
fuck u fontor!!
watch ur going to hell!!
Hateful of life and gleeful of torment. Behold: extreme Christianity.
8 July 2008 at 2:10 pm
Even worse than YouTube comments: the RvB episode comments (you have been warned).
That’s 10,364 comments and counting on one episode, that FWICS have less than 2 bits of entropy each (when you base your coding on the corpus as a whole, since there’s not a lot of variety). On the bright side, no appeals to religion, and less ad hominem.
9 July 2008 at 12:02 am
Well Daniel I hope you learned a valuable lesson (cue slow theme).
Don’t stand in the middle of a Cornball High-Five no matter what form it takes…
What I find worse, and especially true of the comments on the board of what Dean linked to, is that most of the comments are about comments.
I’ve been doing external courses through MacQuarie and I have to contribute to the boards there for my grade and its a nightmare. People will will type ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ at every opportunity, with no irony at all! The grammar is a mess too. You taught me well Daniel to not be prescriptive, but flippin’ hell, when you can’t make heads or tails out of what someone is saying, it makes me want to crack teh knuckles! Shit!
9 July 2008 at 2:47 am
Ted: Well, that just means you need to l34rn teh language, n00b. LOL
Dean Scarff: How did you calculate the entropy? I’ve wanted to understand this better ever since being mystified by Chris Manning’s excellent MaxEnt tutorial.
11 July 2008 at 5:56 am
Daniel: mostly facetiously on the basis that 70% of the comments have the total semantic content of “lolz”, 5% are an allusion to some dialogue involving “nubbin” (or “nubbit”?), and most of the remaining are fatuous. -lg 0.7 = 0.51 bits, etc.
I haven’t been exposed to any maxent stuff before, but it seems like a neat way of turning several models into a constrained optimisation problem and popping out a distribution as a result.