Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in the first place.
I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.
The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment threads are excellent reading.
Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real identities were tied to people's words.
Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is a great way to say what you actually think.
"Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles."
The result? The forum is quiet and discussions very boring - for a start, Google isn't picking up the topics to pull in new users and besides, no one wants to say what they think when they know either their current boss or a potential employer is reading it under their real name. (The British radio industry is a small place.)
Worse still, you get the odd threat. "I know such-and-such a radio boss and you're never going to be employed again if you keep posting that station X is pants." It's just not a pleasant atmosphere.
It's the overwhelming volume of comments at the bottom of national newspaper articles that gets me. A Guardian piece can get anything from 100 to around 500 comments before it starts to fizzle out. Who has the time to read through all that? It's just a racket - noise at its worst catering to the very few participants and irritating the many readers. What was wrong with letters pages, with that same noise filtered and edited by editors for hundreds of years?