Where To Find The Smartest Commenters On The Internet

Find out how educated you'd need to be to understand the comments at Fox News , Gawker , Slate , and more.

Internet comments get a lot of flak, but some may be more intellectually challenging than others. BuzzFeed gathered comments from 15 news websites and ran them through Online-Utility.org's readability calculator, which uses tools like word choice and sentence length to determine what grade you'd need to be in to understand the text. To get a representative sample for every site, we collected the top five comments on each of five current front-page stories — sites without enough comments (BuzzFeed, whose visitors respond more often with reaction buttons than with text, was one) were excluded from our analysis. The comments we looked at ranged all the way from a fifth-grade reading level to a tenth-grade one. Below, the sites we analyzed, in ascending order of comment complexity:

Via: itschaosoutthere.tumblr.com

15. Huffington Post

15. Huffington Post

Grade level: 5.33

Sample comment: "That American 'dream', it's a nightmare.."

Via: huffingtonpost.com

14. TMZ

14. TMZ

Grade level: 6.11

Sample comment: "well said it Omarion! He should be ashamed of himself. Money is the root of all evil!"

Via: tmz.com

13. Gawker

13. Gawker

Grade level: 6.27

Sample comment: "Hmm...what? Yeah whatever, print media is dying..."

Via: gawker.com


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