Remember the days when you could read, say, the newspaper without puerile commentary from some jerk? Those days are long over. Newspaper websites are gleefully opening every story to anonymous idiots. As I begin reading a thread, it’s only a matter of time until someone inserts some stupid, obscene, or obnoxious comment and ruins the potential for discussion. What do we call this, the moment when a troll appears and ruins everything? We need a term, like jumping the shark. Here’s my suggestion:
Going under the bridge.
Some examples:
In an SF Chronicle story about a Muni crash, we went under the bridge with this comment:
what you dont see is all the losers jumping ON the train after it happened them calling out “my neck my neck” and being carried off by stretcher so they can collect from muni!
In a story about a Chinese worker committing suicide after losing an iPhone prototype, we slipped under the bridge at comment #15:
He didn’t jump. Steve Jobs flew to China direct to personally throw him out the window.
And in a story about the right-wing delusion that Obama was not born in the US, it was this one… well, all of them, actually.
Once a thread has gone under the bridge, there’s no use in reading further. Just close the page and move on.
