Online commenting has become largely misused in the recent past as discussed in the article ‘The Loud, Ugly World of Online Commenting 7x7SF’ by Benjamin West. People are becoming obsessive regarding their comments, thus diverting the initial intentions meant for a posted topic. SFGate’s post on a story about a bill that would require United States’ presidential candidates to prove their citizenship saw BobCr comment obsessively about it. Many more comments on that topic and others are similar on the same site and many others; an action creates a lot of questions about humanity (West 1). Even on 7×7.com, the comments received are no different.

The emergence of online commenting in 2005 enabled a lot of people to give their views, which BJ Fogg says it is reinforcing. However, Morford says that the quality of feedback received has deteriorated due to anonymity. People use Yahoo, Gmail, and other social media platforms to create nicknames which they in turn use to give comments which they could never give face-to-face.

Many sites are making efforts to enforce rules that will put boundaries to unfavorable commenting, such as the use of abusive language, obscenity and profanity among others (West 3). SFGate removes abusive comments while Huffington Post is converting its community into a self-moderating forum. Many other sites are doing their best to remove anonymity in commenting, by setting rules that their users must follow. However, paying for staff moderators is expensive to some sites (West 5), hence monitoring remains at bay to them.

In support with the discouragement of anonymous commenting discussed in this article, I would support that the different sites set rules that will require people to give their true identity. This will discourage the use of obscene language, profanity and many other undesirable comments that anonymous users post. Identity will make online commenting take the right direction.

Work Cited

West, Benjamin. “The Loud, Ugly World of Online Commenting.”7x7SF, n.d: 1-5. Web. n.d.7x7SF