Proposed alternative title: "This post is not about climate change"

A couple of weeks ago, an article was published in Science about online science

communication (nothing new there, really, that we have not known for a
decade, but academia is slow to catch up). But what was interesting in it,
and what everyone else jumped on, was a brief mention of a conference
presentation that will be published soon in a journal. It is about the effect of
the tone of comments on the response of other readers to the article on which
the comments appear.
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I have contacted the authors and have received and read a draft of that paper.
Since it is not published yet, I will not break all sorts of embargoes by going
into details, but can re-state what is already out there. An article about
nanotechnology, a topic most people know very little about and usually have
no a priori biases for or against, was presented to the test subjects. Half the
people saw the article with (invented) polite, civil and constructive comments.
The other half was given the same article but with uncivil comments -
essentially a flame-war in the fake commenting thread. The result is that
readers of the second version quickly developed affinity for one side of the
argument and strongly took that side, which affected the way they understood
and trusted the original article (text of which was unaltered). The nasty
comment thread polarized the opinion of readers, leading them to
misunderstand the original article.

The assumption is that on hot topics, like climate change, readers already
come to the article with pre-concieved notions, and thus the civility of the
comments would have no effect on them - they are already polarized.
Choosing nanotechnology as a topic was a way to see how comments affect
"virgin minds", i.e., how the tone of comments starts the process of
polarization in new readers.

They specifically chose a topic about which most people know very little and
do not already have any opinion. Neither the article nor the comments contain
sufficient information to turn the readers into experts on the subject. So they
have to use mental heuristics - shortcuts - to decide what to think about this
new subject. Uncivil, aggressive comments resulted in quick polarization.
Readers, although still not well informed about the topic, quickly adopted
strong opinions about it.
1-9-90 rule
As many of you may already know, there is this thing called a 1-9-90 rule of
online participation. In any given online community, about 1% of the
participants produce most of the content, another 9% participate regularly by
editing (e.g., on a wiki), commenting (on blogs and articles), occasionally
producing new content (in forums, etc), and the remaining 90% are 'lurkers'
who do not publicly participate but only read (though these days, many of
them participate a little more publicly, if not creatively, by "Liking", tweeting,
and otherwise sharing the content in ways that are visible to others, but
without adding any thoughts of their own). The exact proportions vary from
site to site, but are usually close enough to 1-9-90 for the general rule to hold.
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For sites like this one - a media organization and a blog network - the 1% are
pre-ordained: our editors, staff, freelancers, network bloggers and guest
bloggers. In other word, they are selected, not self-selected, and many of them
can do it only once or very rarely. The 9% are active commenters, and the 90%
read and perhaps share, but never say anything on the site itself.
Where are the comments?

Many people have noticed that the quantity of commenting, especially on

blogs, has sharply decreased over the last couple of years. One reason is that
discussion of the article or a post is now happening elsewhere - on social
media (Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus...) or online communities (Reddit,
Digg, Fark, Slashdot...), and are not physically attached to the original post.
The trackback functionality is disabled on many sites due to enormous
amount of spam.