Skip to content

The worst comment sections on the Internet: ranked

The ranking for the worst comment sections on the Internet are as follows: 5. The Weather Network I spent three summers in a row working in a visitor centre where I had to check the Weather Network website every day.

The ranking for the worst comment sections on the Internet are as follows:
5. The Weather Network
I spent three summers in a row working in a visitor centre where I had to check the Weather Network website every day. I legitimately love reading the comments there because you wouldn’t expect it, but it’s full of conspiracy theorists. I remember reading an article about clouds or something and one guy was going on about chemtrails. So they have the worst comment section in that the people are crazy, but it’s not that bad because they’re also hilarious.

4. Reddit
I’ve written about Reddit commenters here before. They aren’t near the bottom because they at least use proper grammar. However, I can’t fully enjoy Reddit because of the explicit and implicit racism and sexism. Commenting there is like commenting in a minefield. I’ve been pretty lucky the few times I’ve commented (I recommended a mac and cheese recipe, I got into a fairly benign argument about the Kite Runner, and talked about how much I disliked the movie version of Ella Enchanted and Lorelai from Gilmore Girls). I feel like more would be pushing my luck. Women who post pictures of themselves with anything (God forbid) get ridiculed. One man who posted a funny picture announcing that he and his wife were expecting their fourth child got hatred simply for procreating again and a woman who posted before and after pics when she was in drug recovery got ridiculed, despite the fact that a man posting the same thing did not. It’s a rough place to be.

3. Huffington Post
While I enjoy Huffington Post the most out of all the websites (and had the best internship ever there with free beer and free massages) their commenters are run of the mill idiots. I wonder if only dumb people are compelled to comment on things? Commenters there can’t spell, can’t use grammar, and get in petty fights.

2. Yahoo
Yahoo’s commenters are similar to Huffington Post’s, but seem to skew younger, making them a) dumber, and b) less grammatically correct. Yahoo’s commenters add nothing to the stories. Personal anecdote: a friend works at Yahoo and he once wrote a story about Nutella, referring to it as a chocolate spread cum breakfast paste (or something similar) and there was a riot in the comments as confused commenters wondered why Yahoo was now using such vulgarity, apparently not realizing the existence of the Latin language.

1.    And the worst comment section on the Internet? YouTube, of course. Comments with awful spelling and grammar, self-promotion, sexism, racism, the list goes on. Videos of animals will have scores of commenters talking about how the videos obviously show abuse. Videos about feminism will have people talking about how women should get raped and die. There will be pointless arguments. Hilariously, my friend and I watched a video of an owl (not sure, why not?) and there were dozens of poetic (and misspelled) articles about how “owels” were majestic and beautiful and mysterious. So I guess what I’m saying is sometimes YouTube is not all bad. Just mostly bad.

I heard a story on the radio about how publications were considering turning off comment sections. I had never thought about this before, but it’s a great idea. People will talk about censorship and free speech, but come on: it’s not like the comments add anything anyway.