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Yahoo News is one of the most popular news web sites in the world. It has a problem, though. Every major story comes with a generous helping of the most vile hate speech you’ve ever seen.

Earlier this year, Yahoo News restored its long-mothballed comments feature. The given explanation was that Yahoo’s readers demanded a platform to interact with the news. A Yahoo exec told PaidContent.org: ”[T]the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their First Amendment rights.” User engagement is also good for business, since time on site is one metric Internet companies use to set ad rates.

I’m a fan of interaction and free discourse, but let’s face it: Comments on news stories are about the lamest form of user engagement on the Internet. On the some of the more popular sites, comments are a festering cesspool of pure mean. The nastiness comes from two sources. The first is trolls: Creative geeks who make a hobby out of posting the most offensive messages they can think of, to get a rise out of people. The second is true bigots, some of whom post creepy threats of violence. I have a bad feeling that a lot of the people posting comments on Yahoo are not goofing around. This a thriving community of actual racists!

Compared to its peers—AOL, USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—Yahoo comments are spectacularly bad, and they show up in your face, at the bottom of every story. Anyone reading the news, including children curious about the world they live in, will certainly see them.

How bad are we talking about? I’ve collected a few choice comments from Yahoo News over the last few days. Read on. Warning: Rough language ahead.

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Comment: Texas_Dave: blacks….the bodies of humans…the minds of animals.

Comment: Joeg: Too many colored people in office !

Comment: AlwaysRight: If it wasn’t for white people… blacks and browns would still be poking bugs with sharp pointy sticks in thier loin cloths.

Comment: Zorro: Moslems live to kill each other,but they prefer to kill non-muslims, that’s why Pakistan and Afghanistan will never cooperate with the West.We should not intervene and let those animals exterminate each other.

Comment: DISTURBED: I HAVE AN IDEA: WE ERECT A HUGE CATTLE FUNNEL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FENCE WITH A SIGN READING: FREE LEGAL U.S. ENTRY 3 DAYS ONLY! OUR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WILL LEAD THE WAY! AND ON OUR SIDE BY THE OPENING YOU SET ME UP IN A TOWER- WITH FLOODLIGHTS, MY CHAINGUN, AND 5 MILLION ROUNDS! OH AND LOUDSPEAKERS WITH THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER CRANKED 24/7 ! I THINK AFTER THE FIRST DAY THEY’LL GET THE POINT- YOU’RE NOT WELCOME !

Comment: Bigfoot: She is an ugly racist B_itch, hang her and hang her high

Comment: BeRevealer: This is an example of how black people run their country. Not one country with black leadership is without violence on a large scale and poverty of the masses but not the leadership. Could be coming to a city near you the way things are heading in the USA!!

Comment: Burney D: Solution to Border problem, kill all the men and breed all the women, soon they’ll all be white.

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Whew. Welcome back from the worst place in the universe.

But please don’t form your opinion from my sampling alone. Go to Yahoo News, pick any story, and read the comments yourself. As I write this, the story about Obama apologizing to Sherrod has 29,000 comments. The one about unemployment benefits has 44,000.

Yahoo has some filters, including a peer voting system that’s supposed to hide offensive comments. None of the comments above was blocked when I found it. But some are. If you spend any time on Yahoo News, you’ll notice that comments denouncing the hate or affirming a liberal point of view are often slammed with Yahoo’s “thumbs down” button until they are hidden from view. This comment was blocked: “Right-wing corporate media (FOX) loves to lie to the stupit & racist people they will belive anything.” And so was this one: “We need to ban guns from the continent to stop the violence.”

Meanwhile, this comment on the immigration story has 16 thumbs-up and zero thumbs-down:

By now, you’re probably feeling angry. Here’s what I’d like you to do with that feeling. Go about your business and remember that one day you might bump into someone who works for Yahoo News. I want you to make that person a hero. When you see them, ask them:

• Are you proud of the Yahoo News comments feature?
• Are your managers proud of the comments feature? Do they even know about it?
• Do millions of pages of hate speech make Yahoo a better company and the world a better place?
• Wouldn’t it feel awesome to be the person who solves this problem?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This is a poster for the long-defunct Eastern Airlines Air Shuttle. Note the classic Eastern logo in the lower-left part of the sign. How old is this sign?

The Air Shuttle was a ground-breaking, no-reservation, walk-up service that flew every hour between LaGuardia and Reagan National. It began in 1961, and grew into a huge success through the 1980s. A number of competitors began copying the idea, including Pan Am in 1986. With Eastern on the verge of collapse in the late 1980s, Donald Trump bought the Eastern Air Shuttle assets in 1989 for his start-up airline. Trump Airlines almost immediately went out of business, and USAir took over the shuttle in 1992. US Airways and Delta (Pan Am) still operate the popular shuttles between LaGuardia and Logan and Reagan National. I flew the Delta Shuttle once and it was as convenient as promised—plus it was fun to fly out of the old Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia.

Today, this sign is an anachronism. Amtrak’s high-speed Acela started running in 2000, and airport security went to hell after 9/11. Plus getting to LaGuardia is either slow or expensive, and often both. Today it’s usually faster to take the train to D.C. than to fly.

(Historical information comes from Wikipedia and the US Airways site.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Once, this scar on the side of North Beacon Mountain, New York, was an inclined railway. Built in 1902 (toward the end of America’s short-lived funicular railroad craze) it shuttled tourists to a hotel and casino at the top of the hill.

A lot of good times were had on the Mount Beacon Incline, but it always seemed to be catching on fire. And after 70 years of clickity ups and clackity downs, some of the novelty wore off. The railroad shut down in the 1970s, when a disco-happy public found the windy conditions of the mountains a poor match for their polyester clothes, and retreated indoors to play Uno.

The Mount Beacon Incline Railway Restoration Society has lots more information about this failed tourist trap, and their dedicated efforts to start it back up.

Today the abandoned railway stands as a fascinating piece of industrial decay in a pleasant patch of woods at the edge of Beacon. I visited it on a hike last Saturday. A path runs from a parking lot to the ruins of the mountaintop resort. It’s one of those popular overlook trails that every town ought to have. A steep, one-mile climb is just tough enough to feel like an accomplishment, but easy enough for children and dogs. At the top is a panoramic view of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge crossing the Hudson River.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Spotted in a window display: Strawberry and peanut butter M&Ms. Yeech! Did somebody actually sign off on this?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

In the early 1990s, a software company called Apogee released a series of totally addictive side-scroller games for MS-DOS. (See my good friend Commander Keen above.) Since my parents thought a PC was more educational than a Nintendo, DOS was the gaming platform of choice for my brother and me. We played and beat many of these games. Great fun.

One of the best was called Duke Nukem. Duke was some kind of commando with a huge arsenal of bulky, cartoonish weapons. The game was set, as Wikipedia notes, in the “near future” of 1997. A vastly refined and more violent sequel called Duke Nukem 3D came out a few years later. Then, in April 1997, the developer behind Duke Nukem 3D, 3D Realms, announced another sequel: Duke Nukem Forever. It was going to be the best video game of all time.

They’ve been working on it ever since.

This week, various tech blogs including this one at the Wall Street Journal report that development of Duke Nukem Forever is finally over and the game may never be released. 3D Realms has been shut down. The greatest setup in video game history has ended with no payoff.

What happened here? Were they really even serious about this game? Can you imagine working on the same project for 12 years, only to have it be scrapped?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Would you rent a home from a company who’s logo appears to be a home on fire?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Here’s the outline: During the worst economic environment in half a century, a developer is about to open a $2.2 billion shopping mall in northern New Jersey. Insert quotes from area residents who think the building looks silly and retail economists who are sure it will be a business failure. For color, mention the chocolate waterfall, ferris wheel, indoor ski slope and proximity to the New Jersey Turnpike.

For examples, see Time, Business Week, The New York Times, etc.

I agree with the conventional wisdom on this: Wrong idea, wrong location, wrong year. Even if they finish the rail link connecting Xanadu to Manhattan, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which New Yorkers would flock to a shopping mall. That leaves people from Jersey, who already have more malls than they need, or tourists, who will gaze down on Xanadu as their planes land at Newark Airport, and then go somewhere cooler.

This place does hold promise for one group of people, however: Urban explorers, who some day in the future may delight in traipsing across the ruins of this abandoned complex.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

As I write this, Digg is down. Two weeks ago, chaos ensued when Gmail went offline. On Saturday and Sunday, at least 12 hours passed when I couldn’t log into Facebook. TinyURL had a service outage yesterday. Twitter gets overloaded so often that it’s error page has it own fan club.

As they say in the news business, five items make a trend. (Or is it three? Do we still say that? Who knows any more.)

Any computer system is bound to have some unannounced downtime. But these free Web 2.0 services have become such a part of our daily communication that even a little bit of downtime becomes a frustration.

One thing Digg, Facebook, Twitter, TinyURL and Gmail have in common is that there is no conceivable way they generate enough revenue to cover their costs. (We know Digg loses money, Facebook almost certainly does, Twitter generates no revenue, TinyURL might make a trickle of paid advertising, and Gmail is probably a loss leader for Google given the awesome amount of computing power and memory it requires.)

Money is running out. Get used to outages!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Friendster.

The year was 2003. A handful of us hopped onto Friendster and “Friended” each other. We posted our favorite books and movies. We sent each other messages. We self-identified as “Single,” “In a Relationship” or “It’s Complicated.” We posted flattering “Testimonials” of one another. I even used Friendster to find a few dates.

Those were good times. Us and Friendster had a lot of fun. Then, one day quite suddenly, we all got sick of it and moved on. Friendster didn’t. It’s still up there. This morning I logged on and was mortified to see Friendster is still serving up pictures of me and my friends from five or six years ago:

Visiting Friendster is like looking at your high school yearbook. One day, Facebook will be the same way.

But wait, you say. Facebook is way better than Friendster! It has better technology and is a more satisfying social experience.

True. But something will come along that’s better than Facebook. Or, more likely, our computing habits will change in some way we can’t yet predict that will render Facebook less important. We know from watching the Internet develop that nothing stays big forever. When everything is free, users can afford to be fickle.

The only real value of Facebook (and, as part of this same conversation, Twitter) is that lots of people use it, and you can sell advertising to those people. (Even that’s an arguable point – see my post on impressions and revenue).

We the customers should enjoy Facebook and get the most out of it we possibly can. (I use it every day.) But we’re not spending any money on Facebook, or because of Facebook, and that’s a little scary. When the people get bored with Facebook, and we probably will, the company will become as worthless as Friendster. And nobody will miss it.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.