INTERNET RULE #1: Never read the comments. People are not always their best selves there. To find out exactly how bad the bad behavior is, we partnered with Disqus, an online commenting platform (disclosure: WIRED.com uses it) to quantify the problem. Cofounder Daniel Ha says toxic posts have been an issue from day one, and he sees it as a human problem, not a technological one: "It's never really going to go away." The company analyzed 92 million comments over a 16-month period, written by almost 2 million authors on more than 7,000 forums that use the software. (So sites like Infowars and the Wirecutter are included, but Facebook and Twitter are not.) The numbers reveal everything from the trolliest time of day to the nastiest state in the union.
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