Researchers in Europe studied three popular forums on the BBC website. They found that long threads of conversation are driven by a few, negative people.
A Troll Case Study
Courtney Stanton posted some thoughts in a blog post. 900 comments later, she had an interesting Ignite talk about the nature of Trolls.
Stupid is as stupid does
There is an effort underfoot to filter stupidity from Internet discussions. Seriously. Although it sounds like it could be a headline from The Onion, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are actively collecting a corpus of data in the hope that some Bayesian analysis will generate a reliable tool to intervene before a commenter makes their stupidity public. StupidFilter got BoingBoinged last month without much reaction but popped back up in the blogosphere this week with some ferocity.