How Sturgeon's law silences women in internet comment sections

Theodore Sturgeon's claim that "ninety percent of everything is crud" has aged into something sharper in the era of user-generated content. Applied to internet comments, the law suggests that the vast majority of replies beneath any article are noise, boilerplate, or worse. When that ninety percent is overwhelmingly hostile toward women, the comment section stops being a public square and becomes something closer to a gate. Women writers across Australia and beyond have learned that engaging with the crud is a losing game, and many decide to stop playing entirely.

The silencing is not always dramatic. Often it is the slow accumulation of dismissive, sexist, or off-topic noise that makes the cost of participating feel higher than the benefit. Sturgeon's Law gives the chaos a tidy label, but the gendered mechanics underneath deserve closer examination.

Reading Sturgeon's Law in the replies

Sturgeon wrote his defence of science fiction in the 1950s, arguing that the genre's reputation for mediocrity masked a vibrant core of genuinely interesting work. The internet comment section flips the ratio. The crud is not a fringe surrounding a worthy centre; in most cases, the crud is the bulk of what appears under an article, and thoughtful replies are the minority. Moderation filters try to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but they rarely succeed for long.

The structure of comment platforms encourages low-effort participation. A reply requires nothing beyond a username and a string of text. This low barrier floods the space with crud. For women writing about feminism, politics, or personal experience, the crud clusters around their gender, their appearance, or their right to speak.

The gendered shape of the crud

The crud is not evenly distributed. Studies consistently find that women, especially women of colour and queer women, receive a disproportionate share of hostile replies. In Australia, the eSafety Commissioner has documented patterns of gendered abuse targeting female journalists, with women in sports media and politics reporting the highest volumes of vitriol. The crud repeats the same script: accusations of hysteria, demands for citations, and personal insults.

This script does not need to be believed to be effective. It only needs to be visible, repeated, and unanswered. The woman reading the thread sees what is being said about her and calculates whether responding is worth the hours of arguing with strangers on a Tuesday arvo. Often, the honest answer is no. That calculation is the silencing.

How Australian women writers cope

Australian women in media have developed a vocabulary for this exhaustion. Conversations in Melbourne newsrooms and Sydney freelance circles turn to the practical question of whether to read the comments at all. Some describe a rule they call "never look under the line," a discipline that protects mental health but insulates them from useful feedback.

Common tactics include:

• Setting firm windows for checking mentions, then closing apps entirely.
• Drafting replies in notes and waiting twenty-four hours before posting.
• Delegating moderation to a trusted colleague.
• Using blocklists and keyword filters as a first defence.

The eSafety Commissioner offers pathways to report image-based abuse and persistent stalking, but most comment section crud falls below the threshold for formal intervention. The ABC has experimented with sign-in and pre-moderation on sensitive stories, yet the crud migrates to social media where moderation is patchier. For women writing about race, trans rights, or domestic violence, the move to Twitter or Threads often feels like trading one hostile comment section for another.

The pile-on and the slow logout

When a woman publishes something that touches a nerve, the crud multiplies into a pile-on. The dynamic is familiar to anyone who has watched a hashtag spiral on a Sunday arvo, with replies piling in faster than the original post can be read. Australian feminist writers describe the moment when a piece goes "too viral" as a turning point, after which the inbox fills with abuse and replying becomes an unpaid job.

Many women respond by logging out, deleting apps, or retreating to private accounts. Some abandon public writing altogether. The cost runs deeper than the personal. When women with expertise leave public conversation, the discourse becomes poorer, and the remaining voices are increasingly those willing to absorb the abuse.

The chilling effect on public discourse

The withdrawal of women from public conversation creates what researchers call a chilling effect. Potential writers see what happens to those who speak up and decide the risk is not worth it. In Australia, this is visible in coverage of childcare policy and gendered violence, where female commentators have become harder to find in major mastheads. The comments themselves are part of the story, signalling that speaking carries a permanent tax.

The chilling extends beyond journalists to academics, activists, and ordinary readers. The crud teaches everyone that participation carries a high price. Some learn to lurk rather than post. Others scroll past feminist articles altogether, which is its own form of silence. The crud drowns out the women it targets, and it conditions everyone else to stay quiet.

Platforms that profit from the crud

Sturgeon's Law persists online because the crud is profitable. Engagement metrics do not distinguish between a thoughtful reply and a slur. Both count as activity, both keep users on the platform, and both generate advertising revenue. Platforms have little commercial incentive to invest in slow, contextual moderation that would raise conversation quality. Moderation work is expensive, and the women bearing the brunt are not the platforms' primary customers.

The counter-argument that women should simply ignore the comments, or that thick skin is the price of public life, treats the crud as natural rather than designed. It is the predictable output of a system optimised for engagement without accountability, and it falls hardest on those told to make themselves smaller. In some regions, women face extra barriers to accessing feminist spaces online, and writers navigating Bonus: Restricted Countries often find the crud follows them across borders.

What better moderation could look like

The crud will not disappear, but its volume and visibility can be reduced. A few approaches have shown promise:

• Pre-moderation queues for first-time commenters on articles about gender, race, or sexuality.
• Slowing down reply threads so pile-ons cannot form within minutes of publication.
• Platform accountability for repeat offenders, with bans that follow users across properties.
• Funded, independent moderation teams trained in gendered abuse and cultural context.

These changes are not technically difficult. They are politically difficult because they require platforms to spend money and lose some engagement. The business case has to be made by readers, advertisers, and regulators who recognise that a public square drowning in crud is not worth visiting.

If you have ever closed a tab because the comments felt uninhabitable, you have already felt the silencing that Sturgeon's Law describes. Support women writers by subscribing, sharing their work, and demanding better from the platforms that host the conversation. The crud will always be there, but it does not have to set the terms.