The Dirtiest Job On The Internet

Someone has to sanitize websites' comment boards. The toil and thick skins of online moderators.
In a cabana in Progreso, Mexico, overlooking the blue waters of the Gulf, Canadian Chuck Dueck cracks open his laptop and logs into the comment forums of several news websites. Over at cbc.ca, home to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., an article on child obesity has drawn this gem, “It is VERY simple. People who are FAT eat too much. There were no fat Jews in Auschwitz—they did not have much food. Stop eating so much!” At npr.org, one comment is directed specifically at Dueck. “GO F- -K YOUR SELF A- -HOLE, You are making me hate this site!!! F-G!”

One by one, Dueck, a professional online moderator, deletes these comments, scolds the people behind them (either on the forum or over e-mail), and, if things really get out of hand—say, in the case of repeat offenders—bans their accounts. Over the course of each day he chips away at the cussing and swearing, the spammers, haters, and trolls, temporarily restoring civility to his corner of the Internet.

Since the first messages were posted on bulletin boards some three decades back, comments and free discussion between anonymous users have been a central part of the Internet’s appeal. Sites such as Gawker and the Huffington Post built their empires on page clicks driven by endless streams of commenters and flame wars. But what’s good for Gawker isn’t always great for established brands, and as companies have embraced the Web and eagerly interacted with their customers, they’ve often been overwhelmed by the response. A lethal combination of anonymity, opinion, and the safety of typing from a remote location all but guarantees that comment forums get out of hand, falling prey to the Hobbesian tirades of the Web’s most nasty, brutish, and vocal denizens—hence, the increasing need for moderators such as Dueck to intervene and sanitize sites’ comment boards.

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