These days, you cannot watch a single video on YouTube without reading some ludicrous comments at the bottom. Somehow: a music video, a video of a dog with its owner, and a speech from a university valedictorian all devolve into nasty -usually racist- battles between net bloggers.

KIH has seen its fair share of net debate. And it got us thinking about the anonymity that the internet provides. Are we really all just saying what we want to say but are too afraid to say? Or is it just fun to get a rise out of someone clearly taking their role as custodian of the internet just a little too seriously? Anas and I had a deep conversation about this. We thought we'd share it with you all.

Anas:  so we got people commenting eh
Me:  oh MAN, do we ever.
Anas: it was a little saddening.
Me: The issue of article lengths in my Iran Politics article and the issue of shisha and sin took a decidedly mean and divisive turn
But it looks like they are both "resolved", if you check out the latest comments
Anas: Thank god Fareedah's amazing article on Afghanistan got comments
Me: I know!!! I was like come one ppl... and "reader" had a good comment too – I’m interested to hear her response
Anas:  The entire week, I was thinking, stop taking swipes at me and comment on the article that is actually good!
Me: me too :) But I was talking to my sister and she was like a) this is to be expected and b) this is to be encouraged
 Anas:  I hope Fareedah wasn’t disheartened by the comments we got
 Me:  though its painful to read sometimes, it’s what we asked for
 Anas:  yeah I knew it was coming
 Me:  we asked for traffic, and we sure got it lol
 Anas:  but really i nvr expected to be personally attacked... that girl "Maria" under my shisha article doesn’t even know me. I know khaleeq was attacked before, too.
Me:  no, Inshallah Fareedah will see that she is getting intelligent comments
Anas:  Then u had the bout with "Lawyer" and "Mark".
 Me:  No, that was intelligent, in my opinion. Painful, but still intelligent. But with maria - lol now you know how I was feeling before when I got those comments under my Che article and my Immigration politics article.
Anas:  Ahhhhh that. That was harsh. It’s cuz ppl cant read. They see words that don’t exist in the article
Me:  But the person who fought with you – we can’t discount them altogether. It’s fair to assume that it’s clearly someone who has had a bad experience with MSA. They were irrational but it has to be understood.
Anas:  Yup us MSA Freaks who center events on judging ppl... exactly what we do
 Me: Hey, maybe not you personally – but she might have had a bad experience with someone else at the MSA. It doesn’t justify it, but it might explain it. You handled it with class, though.
Anas: It comes with the job
Me: remember what Spiderman's dead uncle said
Anas: his dead uncle said something? but if he is dead how does he talk?
 Me:  his uncle said something before dying: "peter... with great power comes great responsibility."
Anas: ahh. Ok.
Me: well, on the plus side, someone thinks you are adorable! Did you see that comment?
Anas:  *blushes*
 Me:  hahaha! lol I think one of the issues is that our high school readers have a blunt, angry way of talking and our college readers don’t. So it causes a lot of mistaken strife
That’s just my very rough kind of estimate. Like in the length of article issue. I think Asma wasn’t necessarily attempting to be mean either, but she came off short.
Me:  And on the other hand, Safeeah's tone of speaking was very polite, though arguably it was kind of harsh of her to make public a criticism that she could have expressed to us personally by email, if it was indeed a criticism of writing style and not a debate on the content of the article.
 Anas:  And same with zainab... she got into the heat of the debate and didn’t realize what she was inferring in her comments
 Me:  All in all, it's a positive learning thing
 Anas:  except Zainab will nvr comment on an article again
Me:  I hope Zainab is not discouraged. Essentially this is a lesson you and I have had to learn the hard way - when you write something that is so personal and so intimate you have to wary of how its going to look from all million angles
Anas:  but I'm happy we got people talking.. it's good. Like how boring wld it b if every1 was like awesome! You’re right!
Me: I’m pleased with my article... I wldnt change it
Anas: Same. But yes, it is a learning experience for everyone esp. on how to portray ur argument and how to portray yourself.
Me:  There are only winners here, I think. We've all been the winner of a debate, and we've all been burned.

Just stay classy lol