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Dip into the comments, the American text genre of the moment, and you can sense the currents that move American life. “The comments are where the real America is,” someone once wrote in a comment thread. Comments also may be the most obnoxious development of the Web, the wild back alleys where people sound their acid yawps. Their tenor is now so bad that last November a game designer, Shane Liesegang, set up a Twitter feed, @avoidcomments, where he tweets things like “I once showed a comments section to a man in Reno, just to watch him cry.” He now has 27,000 followers.

A Q. and A. with Bassey Etim, the community manager at the New York Times.

When we complain about comments, I’ve noticed, we do so as if we’re dealing with some emanation of human nature or the lusty democratic energies of the American soul. But when I went digging into the history of the Web to find out where online comments really came from, it’s clear that they’re the consequences of what was technically feasible at a certain point and how that feasibility was subsequently implemented. We tend to think that comments represent the culture, but in fact the distinct culture of commenting grew out of digital constraints. Given what Web users had to work with, comments were bound to get weedy.

Comments as we know them — lines of text stacked atop one another in chronological order — are direct descendants of bulletin-board systems, or B.B.S., which date to the 1970s; users could dial in with a modem and contribute to discussion forums. The computer code that determined the order in which text appears on a B.B.S. also provides the basic architecture of the comment thread. That code, or script, became the basis for an early commenting function called the “guest book”: a place for simple text entry in which any visitor could type a note. Guest books were attached to the Web site as a whole, not to any specific content on it. This created confusion about the sort of opportunity that the guest book presented. Was it the soapbox of the online world? Or was it a bathroom wall?

Fray.com, a popular Web site started in 1996, which used freeware guest-book script, was among the first to harness the potential of the guest book. A question would be posed, and answers contributed by readers would be published in real time. The Web site was essentially a collection of guest books, each one with a prompt, and the replies were all stand-alone contributions, adrift in a sea of other people who were speaking to themselves.

It’s difficult to give credit for the invention of comments as we now understand them to one specific person or site. An interactive book, “Travels With Samantha,” which allowed readers to submit comments via a form (much as modern comments are), won a Best of the Web award for document design in 1994, which was the same year that a consortium of World Wide Web developers created W3 Interactive Talk to discuss technical matters — on which discussion points were submitted by a form that made them part of a topic page.

There are competing claims about the first blog to offer comments. One pioneer is Bruce Ableson, who created Open Diary in 1998, an Internet journaling project that allowed diarists to respond to one another’s entries. Around the same time, the software developer Dave Winer created a discussion board with a commenting feature. The first comment there arrived on Oct. 5, 1998: “Too bad coders can’t be like rock stars and get their money for nothing and their chicks for free.”

As the Web evolved, the simple top-to-bottom arrangement of autonomous lines of text had a huge influence on the culture of commenting — and it now feels as natural as having sidewalks on two sides of the street. But the typical Web page presents a hierarchy. At the top is the article, post, video or image, while the comments dangle underneath like suckerfish from an indifferent shark.

“Having the comments at the bottom of the page — people feel that; they feel they’re not as legitimate a voice as the original post,” says Travis Nichols, who moderated a Poetry Foundation blog for several years and drew on this experience to write a novel, “The More You Ignore Me,” whose belligerent narrator takes over a cooking Web site with a venomous lament. Commenters show up with an immediate grudge, Nichols observed — they know they’ve been relegated to the steerage class of the public discourse.

As a result, commenters became territorial. “When we had to be more aggressive in deleting comments that violated our commenting policy,” says Bill Adee, The Chicago Tribune’s vice president of digital operations, “I got far more complaints about deleting comments than I did about the level of discourse.”

Circa Now : Nasty Comments on Twitter

When Bill Clinton appeared on Stephen Colbert’s television show in early April, Mr. Colbert expressed surprise that he didn’t have a Twitter feed. Mr. Clinton said he didn’t tweet because he’s “sort of insecure.” So Mr. Colbert set up an account (@PrezBillyJeff) and had the former president dictate his first tweet to him. Mr. Clinton added that he was worried he would attract no followers, saying, “There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter, right?” (He needn’t have worried: an hour after the episode was broadcast, he had 20,000 followers.)

My point: if a household name capable of instantly drawing a crowd is concerned about looking like a loser on Twitter, think of the burden felt by the average Joe. In a milieu rife with self-promotion and self-branding, the inevitable byproduct is insecurity. Insecurity is to bad manners as boat travel is to nausea.

I joined Twitter in February to give myself a daily deadline for writing jokes. But soon the demon of success started breathing fire in my ear. “I don’t have enough followers,” I soon started thinking. “I need to twitter-blitz or to set fire to a small dog.” I felt as if I had shown up at the Oscars in a tux by Giorgio Armandi.

The first piece of wisdom I gleaned was unanticipated. Namely, Twitter fact-checkers are an unforgiving bunch. In March, shortly after Senator Rob Portman of Ohio reversed his position on gay marriage because he has a gay son, I wrote the tweet, “Senator Rob Portman doesn’t have another son who’s poor and 87 and in need of health care, does he?”

When Andy Richter, the actor and writer best known as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick, re-tweeted the joke to his 452,000 or so followers, one response I received was a veritable tasting menu of bad Twitter manners, combining as it did fact-checking (one) with undermining (two) and blame (three). The response ran, “an 87 year old son? @billmaher made that same joke, only funny. thanks for nothing @andyrichter.” Trifecta!

But the most egregious expressions of insecurity on the site, of course, are nasty comments. If Twitter is an excellent shopping mall full of boutiques offering specialized news and wit and opinion, it is also a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain kind of white male rage.

This rage, marked by a hostility toward anything poetic or naïve, reaches its full expression in the comments directed at Jose Canseco’s feed, a highly pleasing outpouring of slightly oddball, gnomic pronouncements. When Mr. Canseco, the baseball player, wrote, “I have blown up bigger engines than the diesel,” one of his followers wrote, “Jose, I think you’re an absolute moron.” Mr. Canseco’s tweet “north korea do the math” drew “I’m also very familiar with mental illness.”

But you don’t have to wield a cudgel to exhibit insecurity; I, for one, turn all my anxiety inward. Every time someone re-tweets one of my jokes, it sets off a spate of fretting about reciprocity.

If the person is a total stranger whose feed I do not follow, then I will look at this feed and consider climbing aboard. I’ll look at the ratio of how many tweets to how many followers that person has: if it exceeds 10 to 1, then I may suddenly feel shy. Because this person is unknown to me, I will feel no compunction to re-tweet a post of hers, though I may be tempted to “favorite” (the equivalent of Facebook’s “like” button) one.

But what if the person who has re-tweeted me is someone I know? Suddenly the pressure mounts. I’ll proceed to follow her, of course, if I don’t already. Then I’ll start feeling very guilty if I don’t re-tweet one of her posts.

Occasionally the disquiet caused by scanning an acquaintance’s home page for a reciprocal re-tweet can escalate. Mr. Richter said: “Sometimes I just cannot pull the trigger. Then I’ll bump into that person in the real world and they’ll compliment me for my tweet. That’s like saying, ‘I saw your jail video on the Web!’ ”

Further complicating these bouts of anxiety about reciprocity is that they tend to happen in clumps. Like other activities rooted in the nonessential (finally reading that back issue of The Economist, say, or trimming difficult-to-reach hairs on your person), Twitter is at its most compelling when you are trapped in an airport hotel in Tulsa. You’ll write 10 tweets that night, two or three of which will catch fire, drawing traffic. This traffic will want managing. You’ll wake up the next morning and discover you’ve got some thank-you letters to write.

Henry Alford is the author, most recently, of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.

Matt Barnes Apologizes for ‘Fa**ot,’ ‘Pu**y’ Comments During Arrest

Matt Barnes
I'm Sorry for Calling Cop
'Fa**ot,' 'Pu**y

L.A. Clippers star Matt Barnes is apologizing for calling the cop who arrested him a fa**ot and a pu**y.  In case you're really bad at "Wheel of Fortune," one word is derogatory toward gays ... the other toward women. 

Barnes tells TMZ, "I would like to apologize for the unfortunate language I used.  I know that certain words are extremely hurtful." 

Barnes goes on:  "I meant absolutely no disrespect to anyone.  This comment, spoken in the heat of a difficult moment, does not accurately reflect my actual point of view."

As we first reported, Barnes and the cop clearly had beef.  The same officer stopped Barnes twice before and waited nearly 2 hours in a Manhattan Beach, CA parking lot last July for Barnes to leave a restaurant -- then arresting him for driving on a suspended license and resisting arrest (see dash cam video below).

Barnes eventually pled no contest to misdemeanor interfering with a cop and driving while not in possession of a license. He got off with a fine and informal probation.

Barnes tells TMZ, "I hope that any and all offended parties can accept my sincerest apologies."