Most online 'discourse' I come across these days takes one of two forms:

• Comment threads attached to news articles.
• Comment threads on social media posts (sometimes branching, à la Reddit).

I struggle with this style of discourse. On the surface, the pitch is sound: community engagement over a presumed shared interest in the content. Mostly, however, I experience comment threads to be unhelpful at best and mentally & spiritually poisonous at worst. Yet I have a deeply-reinforced habit of seeking them when I'm consuming online articles and social media.

Online comments strongly appeal to our primal instincts, in the recesses deep down where survival hinges on social fitness. Sometimes, my rational mind will jump in and justify reading comments - "maybe I didn't understand the full point of the article/post...". Even with this flimsy layer of justification, I understand my comment-seeking to be borne primarily of subconscious motivations, my yearnings for social validation, drama, and at worst the sharing in outrage.

In my worst doom-scrolling moments, comments feel like some eldritch curse; no matter how much I know these comments are likely to wear down my soul and my sanity, I cannot resist reaching out for them.

So, unfortunately I have no answers as yet for how I successfully avoid online comments & threads.¹ Obviously this would be an ideal long-term solution.

As long as I subject myself to online 'discourse', I have developed a survival strategy in the form of questions I consider whenever I find myself consuming a comment thread.

Take these as a sort of heuristic for answering should I stay or should I go?, surviving for another round of exposure as a denizen of the increasingly toxic web:

• Why am I reading this thread? Do I have anything to gain from this?
• Is the subject matter in this thread relevant to the site it's on?
• Given the site & subject matter, how likely is it that any given comment is made by...²
  • a bot?
  • a troll?
  • a Russian troll?
  • a lunatic?
  • an actual person, genuinely participating?
  • an expert, giving referenceable information?
  • a confident ignoramus?
• What incentives & disincentives does a commenter on this site have:
  • For being insightful?
  • For being funny?
  • For lying or misleading?
  • For bullshitting?
  • For trolling?
  • For rage-baiting?
  • For sympathy-baiting?
  • For dogpiling?
  • For prompting extremism?

The thought I keep weighing is this: Are the negative possibilities likely enough to affect the value of the content, or my reason for engaging with it?.

I'm curious if anyone out there has other strategies for navigating online discourse - or for simply avoiding it altogether!