The comments he quotes sound most likely to be fake rather than genuinely confused people. "I got the Internet from my dad so I can get the pokemons" is the sort of thing an internet denizen is more likely to say sarcastically, than an internet newbie is likely to say genuinely.
I remember seeing that page the other day during the RWW facebook thing and being pretty sure it was going to fill up with those sorts of jokes.
Real users are way funnier than troll-wannabes could ever be, because they sometimes manage to mangle and misunderstand things in a way that reveals that they live in a completely different universe than you do.
Yes, frequently, especially attached to intelligent blog posts! For instance, good, well thought-out articles linked here have insightful comments that sometimes people even point out here.
I've seen good discussions in comment threads on various political-themed blogs for my local area. One that springs to mind is the Seattle Transit Blog. They have a good (bad?) number of trolls. However, they don't tend to overwhelm the discussions about the history of regional transit policy and how it relates to municipality X's service imbalance.
If you know that your browser has a box into which you can enter an address, and use it regularly for that purpose, you're in tiny, tiny, tiny subset of all web users. Ditto for knowing what a "web browser" is (in the abstract sense, not in the sense of "the Internet button, that one that looks like a blue E".
If you know that there's such a thing as a "secure connection" to a web site (knowing the name "SSL" or not), again you're in a very small subset of users. If you also know which user-interface cues your browser presents to show you when you're using a secure connection, shrink that subset significantly further.
I could go on and on about this, but hopefully the point is clear: the way you use the web is not the way most people use the web. They're not "stupid" or "idiots" or "illiterate" because of this, they're just people who've never had to learn these things. And the disconnect between what various small subsets of the population do, and what everybody else does, is one of the most important things you can know about in this business; if you don't understand how the rest of the world surfs, you'll never be able to effectively reach them.
(and don't even get me started on how this informs successful business decisions made by companies which HN readers regularly vilify...)
