Commenters offer an unfiltered look at what people think about a story or a website, but they are sometimes more of a headache for a site, than a benefit. While insightful discussion does happen in the forums, as this piece in Politico notes, the anonymity of commenters allows for racist and prejudicial inflammatory remarks that wouldn’t ever fly in another setting.

“Nobody would tolerate if, at the end of ‘Meet the Press,’ if a bunch of weirdos stormed the studio and started screaming weird racist stuff,” says Wonkette editor, Ken Layne. “They’d call the police.”

The overwhelming crudeness of some comments has led some sites to take cautionary monitoring measures. One statistic jumped out at me.

At the left-leaning HuffingtonPost.com, which got 600,000 comments last month, the site has a paid staff of 30 full-time and part-time moderators who work in shifts around-the-clock to filter each blog comment. They also “post-moderate” the comments attached to news stories appearing on the site.

So, to sum it up: Journalists are being fired left and right; papers are closing; and Huffington Post, which doesn’t pay its bloggers, is paying 30 people to moderate the junk that people write in the comments for free. Feel free to comment.