When you get paid to be on Facebook for most of your day, you can’t avoid the comments of all the articles, photos, and videos on your feed. You lose your sense of time and space while you read opinions that navigate from rage to praise, through something that might sound smart and something that’s illegible.

Even the topics that you would consider safe, like recipes, have managed to be polarizing. You’ll read violent hatred from strangers that comment on the headline of an article. These individuals are passionate about nonsense!

There are videos on YouTube that their only appeal is the comments. They are what everyone’s thinking. Comments have become a new measurement on what people think about certain subjects.

What is the real purpose behind the comment section? It’s immediate feedback from consumers. It’s an outlet for everyday life where you can pour your thoughts for someone else to read. It’s to leave a print so small that your comment is more likely to become data than it is to be read. Most of the time they’re word-vomit! Why do we keep shouting into the void? Does it give us peace of mind that our stand on an important issue can be verified on our social media accounts??

This is our nature, to connect with others in any way we can. Nowadays, we spend a great deal of our time connected to a virtual world where we expect interaction. However, a like, heart, or follow are not always enough. So, we leave a comment. We leave it and we wait for notifications to pour in, maybe to continue the conversation, or maybe words that will stroke our ego or violently threaten our existence. We leave them just because we can. We want to exist where no one is held accountable for their words, where today’s comments will be forgotten tomorrow.

Or won’t they? Mainstream media is picking them up to lead their narrative. Trying to showcase the turmoil of trends which only a few can really impact society and others are completely superfluous.

In a comment section, you can read the best and the worst that humankind has to offer. Reading these comments rarely changes one’s opinions about something. Just as social media has given us a filtered glimpse into someone’s life, the comment section has given us an unfiltered glimpse into someone’s mind.

The comment section can be true, crude, sometimes nice and beautiful, full of emotion, but mostly forgettable, inconsequential and fleeting, just like our human lives.