Christopher Allen has a nice contribution on this topic. I personally get really annoyed by some of the discussions you can read about in online news forums such as e.g. Lightreading or Heise Online. Often a mixture of sloppy writing and business interests are voiced. In fact I think that very often it would be better to entirely block the comment section and extinguish any flaming attempts. What is the point of giving some rednecks a platform to insult others or just pursue their own business interests?

If they want to do so they can start their own e.g. blog site and hope for anyone to come and read their junk. The other part of why flaming happens is the inherent limitation of what can be communicated with a text-only medium. We will address this one a bit more in detail later since it is indeed an interesting, also online marketing related, topic.