Cracked.com is one of the best humor sites on the internet and the RepDef staff enjoys passing their links around like a bunch of hobos sharing a bottle of hooch. Recently, Cracked posted a well written piece concerning trolls, internet culture and the obscenity online anonymity engenders in the digital age. Of course, being a Cracked article, it is full of curse words and dick jokes. Puritans and readers with delicate sensibilities are advised to move along. But for all the coarse language, the underlying points brought up in the piece are prescient and penetrating. The author, David Wong, proposes a number of ways to fight online trash talking and increase the level and scope of internet comments, from anti troll apps to increased moderation to removing anonymity entirely.

The article is funny and worth a read, but perhaps the key point raised in the post is the chilling effects hate speech has on people’s online and offline behavior. Wong points out that the number of individuals participating in comments is stunted due to the hateful culture of anonymous internet speech.

Social networking is at the heart of “Web 2.0,” the future of the online world, the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter web where users create all the content and their parent companies make billions just for hosting it. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

Or it would be, if they could only convince everybody to use it. But they’re finding that lots of users will communicate online with people they know (virtually all use email and 37% use private text messaging), but only 8% use message boards or blogs or anything else that exposes them to the Internet’s assheads.

Hell, look at this site. We just had an article that was read by 305,396 unique users in a few days … but fewer than 100 of them joined the conversation down in the comments. That’s .002%, folks. It’s not that the Cracked comments are mostly retarded or nasty; it’s that for a normal person, the memory of getting called a fucktard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-fucktard comments. It’s human nature to remember the fucktard.

This last sentence relates to a concept Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik has advanced called “Life Censorship.” What that means is that people who suffer — often or especially at the hands of anonymous attackers — often end up censoring their lives.  They don’t participate in online discussions.  They don’t speak up in class.  They wear different clothes when they go out, or they don’t go out at at all.

Online and IRL, it is clear that trolling hatefullness affects people’s behavior. Finding ways to elevate internet culture while preserving free speech will be a big part of the evolution of digital thought.