Chris Lehman, Yahoo’s former news director, writes: Second, by far the most vocal Yahoo commenters were the most dogmatically racist; we’d joke grimly that a Yahoo commenter certificate had to be a complimentary gift to every newly enrolled member of the Klan. Seasoned front-page programmers knew that anytime we published anything touching on race relations in America, the first order of business was to disable comments on the post before it went live. Likewise, the mood among front-page programmers never got more frantic than on the occasions when we managed to push out a post that even mildly challenged the Confederate mindset with the comments still enabled.
To make matters worse, since topical reasoning was not the strong suit of this energized commentariat, its members would occasionally descend on a completely unrelated post en masse and smear it with thousands of imbecilic racist outbursts. On one unfortunate occasion, this happened to one of our posts, and before we could reverse engineer our way out of the hate-fest, the CMS system seized up; we couldn’t shut off the comments, and we couldn’t delete the post. For weeks on end, it just sat there, oozing ugly misspelled racist obscenities and brutally mocking the high-flown civic conceits of let’s-put-on-a-show digital interactivity.
