Comment Section Scavenger Hunt

The Internet is an amazing tool. It has single-handedly changed the way we interact with the world and jump started a second Industrial Revolution. It connects communities, streamlines commerce, and helps to save countless lives every day. It is more prolific than planes, trains, and automobiles, and it’s only 25 years old.

An anonymous, unregulated internet is the greatest social experiment of our time (of all time?), and the ways in which we use it are a reflection of our real beliefs and values. Some people exemplify our collective capacity for Good, while others are probably evil. Most people simply articulate the absurdity of our current approach to work or play jokes on people who are just trying to do their best.

That that internet is a quirky, creative, amazing place is probably best summed up by the fact that when you Google “picture of the internet” you get various iterations of this more or less helpful and well-intentioned diagram:

And this not-at-all helpful but certainly amusing picture of, well, I’m not really sure what I’m looking at:

We all use the web, and we all use it for slightly different things. It has changed the way we do pretty much everything we do, not the least of which is get our news.

The twice daily newspaper gave way to the daily, and for years weekly news magazines offered a distillation of what was going on in the world. The weekly magazine was, without knowing it, foreshadowing its own demise by providing what the people really wanted: a curated meta-analysis of current events.

But the world was made smaller by the internet. The news cycle shrank from a week to the more or less continuous barrage of Breaking Headlines and Not-Quite-Journalism that we have today, and consumers needed a more effective way to make sense of it all. On the one hand, we have Buzzfeed. On the other, we have the comments section.

These pithy tetes-a-tete offer glimpses at Our Collective Id as denizens of the internet lurk behind their keyboards and spew whatever detritus that comes to mind as the gospel truth. The comments section on news stories is essentially the Cliff’s Notes to the internet. It’s a symphony of ideological clashes, xenophobic rage, and honest misinformation, seasoned with a handful of trolls just trying to get your goat.

It’s a beautiful thing, the comments section, and I frequently skip the story all together just to see what We The People think about it. I encourage you to give it a look, if you haven’t before. But because it can be a bit overwhelming, I’d like to guide your efforts with a brief scavenger hunt. If you can find a news story with a comments section that contains everything here, please share it!

Online Comment Section Scavenger Hunt