As the Columbia Journalism Review describes in a post on the project, Climate Desk not only found and interviewed their comment troll — a 57-year-old insurance executive named Hoyt Connell — as part of a video series called “The Secret Life of Trolls,” but also profiled a scientist who spends much of her time engaging with trolls on the topic of climate change. In the final instalment, the scientist and the troll met each other via Google Hangout.

The CJR post criticizes the Climate Desk series because “it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have,” since it doesn’t go into detail about why Connell latched onto climate change as a topic, or what drives him to comment so aggressively (fittingly enough, Connell comments on the CJR post himself to try and clear some of this up). But what impressed me was how normal this mega-troll seemed once he was interviewed.

Comment trolls are people too

I found the same thing — and I think others did too — when Gawker Media outed a notorious Reddit troll named Violentacrez last year, after attention was drawn to several offensive sub-Reddits he created. Although clearly much of his behavior on the site crossed a line, the interview showed him to be a more-or-less normal, and in some ways even sympathetic (or possibly just pathetic) character. Not that this justified his conduct, but it helped to explain some of it.

We’ve written before about how the value of comments transcends the occasional troll, and how the best way to maintain a civil dialogue is to engage with readers directly, a point blogging pioneer Anil Dash also made in a post a couple of years ago. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have shown that commenters can be much more than just a noisy distraction — in some cases, they can actually become collaborators. The Climate Desk series is a good reminder that trolls are people too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Jeremy King

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“We’re still chugging along steadily in revenue, and we are brainstorming about new sources of income (stay tuned),” Sullivan wrote. The site had raised $680,000 as of Tuesday, up from $653,000 as of March 25.

“The most passionate readers have already joined. It gets harder after that,” Sullivan wrote. As he noted at the paidContent Live conference in New York last month (see video below), he is not taking a salary for the first year.

The Dish has already tweaked its payment model a few times. Initially, the site charged a minimum of $19.99 per year for unlimited access to premium content; in March, it lowered the meter and added a monthly payment option.

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Popova’s presence at the center of these ongoing debates is one reason why we are delighted to announce that she will be joining us at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17 to talk about these and other topics. The Bulgarian-born curator will be appearing alongside Andrew Sullivan and financial blogger Andrew Ross Sorkin, who runs the DealBook site for the New York Times, and you can find out more information about the conference here.

Andrew Sullivan took the media world by surprise before 2013 was even a week old, when he announced that he was leaving The Daily Beast and launching his own site, and would be relying on monthly fees from readers to support him and the team behind his blog The Daily Dish. He raised more than $300,000 in just a couple of weeks, and some readers donated far more than he was asking — as much as $10,000 in one case — to become members of the site.

Readers vs. advertising revenue?

In a similar way, Popova has said she prefers to rely on readers for support, although she uses a donation system rather than a monthly subscription. Both Sullivan and the blogger/curator have said they would rather be supported directly by readers instead of subjecting those readers to annoying advertisements, and that commitment is one reason why Popova’s use of affiliate links triggered some controversy — although the blogger has said she sees them as a way for readers to support her as well (and she has since added disclosure about them to her site).

Meanwhile, the broader debate over how writers should be compensated, and the impact of new content models, continues unabated: Is going solo like Sullivan or Popova have done something that only a select few superstars can do, or is it theoretically possible for many? How does that change the relationship between writers like Sorkin or analytical mastermind Nate Silver and traditional publishers like the New York Times? What are some of the ways traditional media outlets — and/or the writers who work for them — can take advantage of this disruption?

These and other questions are going to be at the top of the agenda for paidContent Live in New York, where we also have a broad slate of other fascinating panels and fire-side interviews to offer. If you’d like to be part of the group Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience,” you can register and buy tickets here.

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It should probably come as no surprise that Gawker Media is in the latter camp, since founder Nick Denton has a penchant for zigging while others are zagging, and is more than happy to rip up much of his existing network in order to try something new. The latest new thing is the Kinja discussion platform, which Denton talked about with me last year just before it launched — describing it as the core of the Gawker empire’s future. The latest version of the platform was just rolled out to users at Jalopnik.

Every commenter now becomes a blogger

As Tim Carmody at The Verge describes in a post on the new features, the platform essentially turns every commenter into a blogger. Prior to the latest change, readers had a profile page that showed their latest contributions, but now they have what amounts to a full-fledged blog with publishing ability — complete with their own custom address at Kinja.com. And editor Matt Hardigree says that the site, and by extension other Gawker sites, will be looking at the comments as a source of content and even future hires:

“If you want, you’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.”

It’s worth noting that Gawker already has a history of hiring writers from its comment section, something that the political blog network Daily Kos has also done a number of times. And it’s not just blogs: Yoni Appelbaum, a PhD candidate in history, commented so intelligently on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic that he was eventually made a guest blogger.

Denton’s plan with Kinja isn’t just to create platforms for Gawker readers to hold forth on whatever they wish — the new system is also designed to function as a potential marketing vehicle, with advertisers and brands encouraged to participate (and possibly even sponsor) discussions that begin in the comments on a story. This is just one of a number of revenue-generating experiments that Gawker is rolling out over the next little while, Denton says.

Others also want to turn readers into bloggers

And Gawker isn’t the only new-media entity that is trying to reinvent reader contributions: The Verge, which is published by Vox Media, has turned its discussion forums into content hubs of their own, and often highlights them on the front page (Note: Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The question-and-answer site Quora, meanwhile, has launched something that is like an amalgam of Gawker’s approach and The Verge’s: the site recently turned its reader forums into blogs — which means that every contributor to those forums now has a blog page. And as my colleague Jeff Roberts recently described, The Huffington Post has launched a “Conversations” feature that gives popular discussion threads their own webpage.

In a sense, these efforts are just an evolution of the approach that the Huffington Post took when it first launched, which was to give almost anyone who wanted it the ability to publish a blog post. Will these new players produce anything valuable, or just a lot of sound and fury?

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Pew Center

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Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue.

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round of financing).

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,” because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Content farms appeared on the scene several years ago, as publishers tried to figure out how to drive search traffic to their websites, since Google had become one of the top traffic sources in the industry. As SEO or search-engine optimization became a crucial part of the business, some took this principle to its logical conclusion and started creating content specifically to attract Google and profit from advertising keywords (Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative methods of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in April).

Content farms had an explicitly financial motive

One of the most prominent players was Demand Media, which owned eHow, an early attempt at SEO for content. The model was simple: pay a large stable of freelance writers very small amounts of money (often as little as $2 per article) to create or aggregate “service oriented” content around specific ad-heavy topics. This version of the business was more or less killed by Google via updates to its search algorithm, which pushed low-quality content further down in search results.

Walk argues that Medium and Quora’s new blogging platform (which converted what were message boards into individual blogs) as well as the blog network Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencer program share many of the same features as early content farms. Among other things, he says they offer:

• Article-based construction: In other words, a blog-style layout and format with multiple, dated posts written by an individual author
• Cross-promotion: Visitors come to one blog post and are shown others by the same author or different authors to try and entice them to stay
• Easy to use publishing tools: Medium and some other players offer lightweight content-creation features that make it easy to write and publish

For me at least, the main difference between what Medium and Svbtle and Quora seem to be doing and what “content farms” did is the lack of an obvious financial motive. True content farms were designed to maximize the search traffic so that they could generate advertising revenue (at one point, 30 percent of Demand Media’s revenue came from Google ads). But Svbtle and Medium, for example, don’t have advertising of any kind — although of course it’s possible that they could decide to turn on ads at some later date, once their traffic numbers justify it.

The rise of content farms for good?

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Images courtesy of Flickr user D. Miller and Shutterstock / Gl0ck

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In the book, Anderson — who was also one of the co-authors of Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, a recent report on the future of journalism published by Columbia University — looks at the evolution of the media industry in Philadelphia over the past half a decade. In particular, he describes the rise of community-led journalistic efforts such as the Philadelphia Media Network, and the simultaneous decline of the city’s twin bastions of traditional journalism, the Daily News and the Inquirer.

Collaboration blocked by journalistic hubris

These two themes are inextricably linked, Anderson argues in an excerpt published at the Nieman Journalism Lab, because the traditional media failed to see the potential for collaboration with new digitally-focused entrants, and maintained that they were the only ones who could reliably fulfil the goal of informing the public about the news. As Anderson puts it:

“In particular, local journalism’s occupational self-image, its vision of itself as an autonomous workforce conducting original reporting on behalf of a unitary public, blocked the kind of cross-institutional collaboration that might have helped journalism thrive in an era of fractured communication.”

Anderson says his research shows that legacy systems — both the mechanical and other systems that were used to publish the city’s traditional newspapers, as well as the management systems that governed their behavior — made the news organizations he studied “behave in deeply irrational ways.” And one of the underlying concepts that made the situation even worse, he says, was the idea that traditional journalism had to consist only of reporting original news.

Anything else — including curation, aggregation and other practices common to digital-first media outlets such as blogs and social media — was seen as a lesser form of journalistic life, Anderson says, and scorned by most journalists working for traditional outlets.

“My research demonstrated that the practice of original reporting was far from being either pure or unproblematic. The kind of work that constituted “original reporting” seemed increasingly difficult for journalists to define. Reporting existed side by side with other forms of newswork such as blogging and aggregation, often within news organizations that heaped rhetorical scorn on these so-called lesser practices.”

Roadblocks to a post-industrial version of the news

The author — a journalism professor at the City University of New York — also describes another roadblock to change: namely, the newspaper industry’s devotion to the traditional industrial approach to the news, which he says one executive in a 1970s study of the business by Herbert Gans called “screwing nuts on a bolt.” This assembly-line process is one of the reasons why the Columbia report (which Anderson helped write with media theorist Clay Shirky and Tow Center director Emily Bell) said the industry should be thinking about “post-industrial journalism.”

The road to this kind of post-industrial future has been filled with potholes and detours, Anderson says, and a big part of the problem has been the inability of traditional outlets to collaborate with new members of the digital-media ecosystem, which they invariably see as not worthy of their attention:

“Developments in the local Philadelphia news ecosystem seemed to be creating a situation in which it made rational sense to ‘network the news’ through institutional collaboration, hypertext linking, and formal and informal partnerships [but] such collaboration and innovation not only did not occur; it seemed to be purposefully thwarted.”

As newspapers and other traditional outlets have continued to cut back on staff and resources (layoffs and buyouts have been announced recently at The Guardian, the Financial Times and the New York Times, among others) there has been more of an effort in some parts of the industry to collaborate and find new partners or models — although some of those, including the Chicago Tribune‘s experiment with a journalistic outsourcing service called Journatic, have been problematic.

In some cases, collaboration has been beneficial for both sides, as American University’s J Lab recently noted in an in-depth study of some new-media ecosystem efforts in San Francisco, Portland and several other cities — although coming up with revenue models continues to be difficult. And just like Anderson found in his research, the J-Lab report said that hostility towards non-traditional sources was a huge barrier to collaboration in many cases. Until mainstream media can find a way to shed those kinds of prejudices, real adaptation or collaboration will be difficult.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime, George Kelly and Jason Parks

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There’s no question Business Insider has grown substantially since the last time Blodget opened up about his company’s performance: almost two years ago, he released some public numbers, and at that point the site — which was then about three years old — was pulling in 8 million unique visitors per month and had revenues of $5 million. The site even turned a minuscule profit in 2010, Blodget said, of about $2,000 (that’s not a typo).

In the latest update, the Business Insider founder says the site has boosted its traffic substantially, and now gets an average of 23 million unique visitors per month, or more than a million on the average day — growth that he says puts it ahead of giants such as Businessweek, Mashable and TechCrunch.

While that’s impressive, however, Blodget hasn’t provided us with some of the most important data a media company needs in order to prove its health: namely, revenue and/or profitability metrics. It’s probably safe to assume that revenues are higher than they were almost two years ago, or the site would have shut down by now — and they may even be dramatically higher, since pageviews and unique visitors are still popular measurements used by many advertisers to determine success.

But as Blodget himself notes in his presentation, the profitability of digital advertising has been plummeting over the past few years. The amount of advertising is still growing rapidly, and ad revenues are also increasing, but it’s a little like the Red Queen’s race in Alice in Wonderland: media companies are having to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place — every incremental pageview is worth less and less.

This is the same dilemma that almost every media entity is facing, from traditional players such as the New York Times to newer stars like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Some of the newer entrants like BuzzFeed — and even the more entrepreneurial of the old guard, such as The Atlantic and Forbes — are trying to use more “native” advertising formats such as sponsored posts and marketing-related content to combat this problem.

It’s not clear from Blodget’s presentation whether Business Insider is doing much of this, although he does say that social “is not the be-all and end-all” for digital news sites, and that the importance of social as a referrer of traffic is “grossly overstated.” And it isn’t clear what the site is doing instead of social or native advertising — which makes it almost impossible to say whether the company is financially healthy or not.

Huge pageview or readership numbers are nice to have, but they are not enough for a business in and of themselves (just ask Tumblr, which has 20 billion pageviews a month and yet is still facing questions about its business model) unless of course you are planning to flip your business to someone much larger who already has a business model. Business Insider is going to have to answer those kinds of questions somehow, whether Blodget wants to tell us the answers or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / TechCrunch

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One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens not to post the details of attacks or troop movements on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram because they might inadvertently reveal the location of specific targets. One political blog that was briefed by the IDF as part of its media strategy wrote:

“Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook friends of Israel were reminded by our IDF contacts not to say exactly where rockets have landed or even when/where alert sirens have blared… The siren and landing reports are helping the terrorists hone their aim, making it a bit easier to target/kill civilians.

It’s one thing to say the troops are building outside of Gaza, and its something totally different reporting that you saw a tank moving down main street at 3pm… that information can tell Hamas where (and when) a land action may be coming.”

Information flow has been democratized

Anyone over a certain age or with a knowledge of military history will no doubt see the similarities between this and the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” propaganda campaigns of World War II, which warned citizens of the U.S. and other Allied countries that spreading specific information about military attacks could threaten the war effort. But that was aimed at a much smaller phenomenon — namely, people talking to others who might have connections to the military. Now, anyone with a smartphone is capable of publishing not just a few sparse details about an attack but specific longitude and latitude co-ordinates, images, video and more.

Think about what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals targeted Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan: a computer programmer named Sohaib Athar spent a couple of hours live-tweeting details of that attack without even knowing what he was doing. If the Navy had been involved in a more prolonged attack, those details could have easily helped Al-Qaeda determine how many troops were involved, what types of aircraft, what kinds of weapons, and much more. That kind of data can change the nature of a military campaign, especially when combined with “big data”-style algorithms and mapping technology that is now commonplace.

Every war is now a social-media war

And while the Israeli military may think that it is somehow controlling the flow of information with its live-blog or its Twitter account or its Tumblr propaganda campaign, it is just one stream in a giant ocean of data flowing from individuals who are both observing and participating in the attacks — including soldiers who are posting photos of themselves to Instagram and Facebook, pictures of drone missions that are being aggregated through a site called Dronestagram, and many other similar examples. Everything that is geo-tagged becomes a potential source of crucial information about the Israeli action and the response by Hamas.

Part of my interest in this phenomenon is just the way that the media we use helps shape the world around us, but I’m also fascinated because my father was a Canadian Air Force officer who worked with NATO on designing what are called “command-and-control systems,” including the military version of modern information theory — in other words, figuring out how information flows can affect military strategy.

In the not-so-distant past, crucial information flowed primarily from the top down, and battlefield data was hard to accumulate or distribute efficiently, apart from the usual word of mouth and rumor-mongering engaged in by soldiers. The internet and social tools have altered that structure significantly, however, despite the military’s best efforts to regulate them. And during a real-time campaign, social media may be a great way of distributing the government’s marketing message about the conflict, but it’s also a great way for anyone involved to publish what could be critical details of an attack — and that is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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These are questions that seem to be coming up more and more frequently as we live increasingly large parts of our lives online: When is it okay to publicize someone’s identity for things they said on Twitter, and what kinds of consequences do we think are appropriate for online bad behavior?

The post by Jezebel co-founder Tracie Egan Morrisey — which was entitled “Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets About the ‘Nigger’ President” — was a followup of sorts to a previous post that highlighted a number of racist tweets posted to the service following Obama’s election victory on Tuesday night. None of the users who posted them were specifically identified, but in the more recent piece, Morrisey identified several students at a number of schools in the U.S. who posted similar comments. The story also went into some detail about them, noting that one student “plays football for Xaverian High School, a private Catholic prep school in Brooklyn, NY,” and that others also play sports for their schools.

What is an appropriate response for a single tweet?

The point of doing this seemed to be that most schools have codes of conduct, particularly for those who represent the school on sports teams, and racist tweets would appear to be in contravention of those rules. But is publicly identifying these students — who are legally children — on a website like Jezebel really an appropriate response to what in some cases was a single tweet? In an email, Morrisey said that she felt there was no issue with writing the story, since the students in question had already publicly identified themselves through Twitter profiles and Facebook profiles:

We actually did not “out” the identities of these tweeters — they did, through their public Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles. They used their real names, listed their schools and their locations, and thus broadcasted these details to the entire world by virtue of putting them on the internet.

We chose to get in touch with the school administrators who are charged with educating these individuals because the institutions not only have mission statements about their educational goals, but they also have student conduct codes.”

Some commenters on Jezebel clearly disagreed with the site’s decision. One comment that got a lot of votes from other readers asked “Is this what we’ve come to?? Internet shaming children, blasting their crimes across the web?” And others who specialize in online behavior, including sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of North Carolina, also said they found the public shaming troubling:

@mathewi Wow. Publicizing racist tweets like this is not healthy or good for combating racism, or educating teens or letting them grow.

—
Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 09, 2012

Many of those who took part in a Twitter discussion of the issue with me on Friday believed that the students in question should have to face the consequences of their actions — after all, the internet is a public place, they argued, and even children need to realize that making such comments could affect their lives. Others said that public shaming of racism is the only way to effectively fight such beliefs, and therefore what Jezebel did was appropriate.

@mathewi the Internet is not anonymous. Online comments have real world consequences. Best kids learn that lesson early.

—
  (@kathodgson) November 09, 2012

Is there no room for online mistakes any more?

One of the things that troubles me about this incident is that it shows how quick we can be to judge a person — especially someone in high school, who may be acting badly for all kinds of complicated reasons — without any real understanding of what is going on, or what the repercussions may be. Making people face the consequences for saying things online is a noble goal, but is there no room even for children to make mistakes without the full force of the internet being brought to bear? As far as I can tell, Morrisey didn’t even try to contact the high-school students she profiled, or their parents.

@pwthornton @mathewi @AdrienneLaF Or maybe they're just clueless kids who think it's cool to say wild stuff without grasping implications?

—
Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) November 09, 2012

A quick internet search of one of the individuals mentioned shows that this incident is the top result for their name. Maybe that will fade over time, especially since some of those involved seem to have deleted their accounts — or maybe it won’t. Couldn’t the same thing have been achieved by calling the schools to identify the students, without doing so in the article itself? Morrisey denied that there was any attempt to “shame” those involved, and yet the headline talks about forcing these students to answer for their alleged crimes. Is this kind of online vigilantism really going to solve anything?

@mathewi These Tweets are hateful & vicious but Jezebel could've made those calls without publishing names and school affiliations.

—
Liz Pullen (@nwjerseyliz) November 09, 2012

Similar issues came up during the recent public outing of a notorious Reddit “troll” named Violentacrez, who was profiled in a Gizmodo post, and the similar revealing of a Twitter user who went by the name ComfortablySmug, who posted inaccurate information during Hurricane Sandy. The Reddit moderator was seen as fair game by many because he created threads devoted to child pornography and other offensive content, but ComfortablySmug was a less obvious case — as we noted in a post and an internal debate that we published about the issues raised by such online lynch mobs.

Both of those individuals were adults, however, and presumably understood the consequences of their actions before they engaged in them. How much should we expect high-school students to suffer for what might have been an offhand comment or an attempt to impress their friends? How much public ridicule or online condemnation is too much, and when does it cross over into outright bullying? These are issues we are going to be confronting more and more as we live out our lives online, and the answers are not obvious.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

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