I saw the weakest minds of my occupation destroyed by blog comments, hate-eating hysterical shivering, dragging themselves through message boards at dawn looking for a troll to fight. I started writing professionally about eight years ago, just as comments became less a curiosity and more a given. But many of the journalists I met who'd been in the business before the arrival of comments could already become flushed with outrage about the very existence of reader feedback. Their faces would get red and they'd scream—and, yes, sometimes sob—about every mean thing someone left in the wide-open space below their stories.
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