By MICHAEL S. MALONE

For 20 years as a reporter and editor, I never worried about comments.

Sure, as a cub reporter, I used to die a thousand deaths every time a letter to the editor appeared in my newspaper that took issue with something I'd written. But it wasn't long before I learned two things:

1. In a newspaper, there isn't much room for letters to the editor -- maybe a half-dozen per day. And very few of them, even after a big, controversial story, were about you; and,

2. The editorial page editor is your best friend. In order to keep a balanced page, he or she is only going to run (at most) a couple letters about you -- and even then will try to maintain a balance between the laudatory and the cutting & and leave the crazies out.

So, for the next 20 years, as a reporter, magazine writer and magazine editor, I never sweated the "Letters to the Editor" page. Even as an editor, unless there was a serious factual correction I needed to investigate, I usually didn't even read the things -- but instead left it to my managing editor to decide what she wanted to print.

That all changed -- oh boy, did it change -- with the Internet. Between this column and the various stories I've written for publications that have appeared online, I figure in the last decade I've received about 10,000 comments. That's the population of medium-sized towns in some parts of the U.S. And fully half of those comments came with a single story -- the one I wrote last October about being ashamed of being a journalist.

For a few years, I went through the same shell-shock most bloggers and other online writers experience. Seemingly overnight, you go from a handful of generally polite printed comments to hundreds of screaming comments by people who not only don't agree with you, but call you a traitor, a Nazi, a communist, too stupid to live, a fraud & and who fervently pray that you will soon die horribly in a fire.

As you might imagine, this takes a bit of getting used to. After all, in daily life few of us regularly encounter people who hate us with such virulence based on such little information -- and when you do, you run for you life.

So, for about the first 1,000 comments, you tend to actually read what the commenters are saying and take it personally. And you start to understand why some really successful bloggers like Glenn Reynolds or James Lileks don't have comments sections. It must be very nice.

Still, you can get used to just about everything, even howling mobs of commenters wishing for your early death.

Then, something interesting happens: You write that column or blog entry that receives zero comments. Then you start missing all of those angry notes -- Why don't they hate me anymore? -- and wondering what you've got to write next time to get them back.

Pretty soon, in a feedback loop between writer and reader never possible in the print world, you find yourself writing on those topics, and in that style, that will provoke the most reader response. It may be craven, but it's a more reader-responsive form of writing than anything I ever had to face back in my newsroom days.

Internet Commenters: From Pretenders to Pervs

By the time you get to 10,000 comments, you've seen just about every permutation of commenter possible & and, as human beings do, find yourself categorizing them.

The other day, I found myself writing down all of those types -- something I'd never done before -- and I thought I'd share them with you. Please don't take them personally. & Actually, do take them personally; but keep in mind that on those occasions when I comment on other sites, I myself quickly fall into one or more of these categories -- and not always the nice ones.

The Troll -- Everyone knows this guy (and it's usually a guy), who intentionally visits sites in order to stir things up, provoke a furious reaction from other posters and then disappear. Classic examples are the Free Republic types who visit Daily Kos and vice versa.

The Droll -- The mainstay of all fun sites, this poster regularly tosses out clever comments, plays on words, one-liners or amusing pictures. There are a lot of these characters on places like Fark.com

The Relentless Pol -- Posters who can't join any discussion without immediately using it to make a political point, i.e., "The current lack of sunspots is the direct result of the Bush administration's failed policies."

The Skimmer -- The commenter, usually sour, who reads only a headline or sentence of a piece, draws exactly the wrong conclusion, and then embarks on an embarrassing rant.

The Trimmer -- A commenter who initially stakes a strong position, and then under withering attack from other commenters slowly backs off until he or she has completely abandoned that original position.

The Angry Man -- We all know this guy. His solution for almost any problem in the world is the summary execution, in as grisly a manner as possible, of every possible perpetrator.

The Dismisser -- The ultimate arrogant commenter, this person never actually engages with the topic, but merely declares it beneath anyone's interest, already resolved, or improperly stated -- and thus hardly worth the bother. The dismisser's only real message is: I'm smarter than you and you need to acknowledge that fact.

The Butt-Kisser -- Famous writers and bloggers get this one. It's the poster who just can't say enough about how brilliant was that last entry, how they wish they could say it half as good, etc. My assumption is that these folks are angling for some kind of personal relationship with the writer. 

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