Oh, look, it's kinda like old-school blogging.

Respondents who say "just don't look" or "just go elsewhere" not only are lacking in basic reading comprehension skills (she says she has, and interviewed others who have, done both), but they are typically missing the point.

If we can agree that, at some point in the last X number of years, the internet became, for whatever % of the poetry-writing population, their primary location of interaction with their peers on whatever level (critical exchange, professional networking, or plain old silly socializing, usually in some combo), and we can now say that some of those people, who found the promise of the internet exciting and enriching in any of these ways, have now become re-isolated, in a pre-poetry-on-the-internet fashion, thanks to tons and tons and tons and tons of bad behavior, what is the then that follows?

We're not making this up. Contemporary sociologists and grad students galore are writing about Internet Disinhibition Disorders and Cyberbullying and etc. There will be work in these fields to follow about this other side of the coin, this re-inhibition of, well, whatever is the complement (not to say opposite) of the CFB.

Yeah, OK, we agree that poetry is not the only niche to suffer here. That is a duh point. And yes, the Huffington Post or Eschaton or Drudge or fill-in-your-blank daily newspaper may indeed be "worse." But what's your point there? I am not counting on political spatting on the internet for making culture. I am not counting on that for anything. (The internet and social networking are politically relevant and were instrumental in getting Obama elected (for instance); but it wasn't the snarky bullshit parts that did that; the CFBs and other toxic BS do nothing but exacerbate fatigue and wear out the good-faith participants.)

It remains interesting (and I'd also say important) to consider, though, who "just doesn't look" and where they can go when they "just go elsewhere."

I know some of these answers, personally. So do you.