I received an email from a reader a while back who tossed out some pretty pointed adjectives in describing the comments posted on the Herald’s free website, www.bakercityherald.com.

The reader referred to recent comments as “endless” and “mindless” and “insulting.”

I appreciate a person who makes a point succinctly and without hedging — particularly, as is the case here, when that point is valid.

The comments section on the Herald’s website often is not, I must concede, a sterling example of reasonable debate.

Indeed it strikes me sometimes as closer to the digital version of what happens in college football stadiums after all the flasks have been drained and the home team is down by three touchdowns. And it’s raining.

The Herald is hardly unique in this respect, of course.

In fact, based on what I’ve read on the websites of publications with much larger circulations, such as The Oregonian, the banter on the Herald’s site seems to me rational by comparison.

Although this might reflect the great difference in volume between our sites rather than the temperaments of our commenters.

Another of the reader’s complaints is beyond dispute — that a relative handful of commenters dominate the discussion.

A recent count showed that three users were responsible for the previous 21 comments.

I doubt the reader would have pointed out this disparity had that prolific trio engaged in the sort of thoughtful debate you would expect from, say, a roundtable moderated by William F. Buckley.

Alas, readers of the comments section are instead treated to such childish puns as “Trumpublicans,” and an argument, which would be amusing if the commenters didn’t seem so earnest about a triviality, centered on who coined the nickname “Rodeo Kody” for erstwhile Baker County Commission candidate Kody Justus.

Whatever entertainment this sort of thing might supply for readers is, I fear, of the most fleeting sort.

I was excited — naívely so, I’m afraid — when the Herald’s owner, Western Communications, added the comment feature to our website several years ago.

Whether this yielded highbrow intellectual conversations or not (I suppose I wasn’t hopelessly naíve) I figured it would provoke responses and reactions to the Herald’s stories and editorials that we wouldn’t get otherwise.

And occasionally that’s been the case.

But unfortunately these illuminating instances constitute the minority among comment threads.

The typical progression instead is that one person posts a comment that is at least tangentially related to the story or column or editorial or letter to the editor in question.

Then someone else responds to the initial comment with a combative non sequitur, and from there the disintegration is all but assured. By the bottom of the page no one could discern, by reading the latest comment, what actually precipitated the argument. Almost certainly it wasn’t anything published in the Herald.

Which, of course, is the purported purpose of the comment feature.

As the administrator of the comments section I can delete any comment. But I almost never do so — certainly fewer than 1 comment in 200.

(Not all comments, however, are posted immediately. The comment service hosting company, Disqus, occasionally diverts posts into a “pending” folder, typically because they contain links to other websites. This is not a conspiracy to suppress comments, as some impatient posters have claimed.)

I justify this laissez-faire approach by noting that these comment wars, however inane, at least constitute additional content to our site. And it’s free content at that.

Users can skip the comment threads they find silly or uninteresting, of course — a point the reader who sent me the email conceded.

But I understand that readers of websites, like readers of newspapers, are a fickle bunch with an attention span measured in angstroms. And I can well imagine a person, after four visits to the comments section, none of which turned up a single thought worth pondering, would not click a fifth time.

The reader who emailed me cited another complaint, and it’s one I’ve heard from several others over the years — that the anonymity afforded by the comment feature encourages people to be less thoughtful rather than more, which ultimately degrades rather than elevates the debate.

I can’t measure this numerically, as I can the prevalence of a few commenters, but I believe it to be a true statement nonetheless.

Which is why we don’t publish letters to the editor submitted anonymously.

I have on occasion, when challenged about this inconsistency in standards between our printed paper and our website, argued that the online forum is a wilder version of the Opinion page, and that both have their place in a world where technology has made it easier than ever for people to exchange opinions.

But as the months and the years progress, and I detect no significant improvement in the quality of the discourse online, this explanation seems less convincing to my own eyes, and ears.

The person who sent the email suggested I poll readers on this topic. I think this is a wise idea, which is why this column occupies this space today.

Do you frequently read the comments posted at the bottom right corner of the Herald’s website?

Do you find the comments enlightening, at least on occasion? Do you contribute to the discussion?

I’d like to read, or hear, your answers to those questions, and anything else related to the comments feature on the Herald’s website.

You can send me emails at news@bakercityherald.com, or call me at 541-523-3673.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.