The news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death this week was shocking, tragic, awful. Emotions were raw — until the Internet, as it usually does, found a way to return to its default emotion: outrage.

Actor Jared Padalecki tweeted a (not entirely unreasonable) comment about the nature of Hoffman’s death: “‘Sad’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe a 46-year-old man throwing his life away to drugs.“ ‘Senseless’ is more like it. ‘Stupid.’ ”

With that, he was anointed the whipping boy of the day.

The “Supernatural” actor’s tweet was picked up by the blog Jezebel, where a blogger proclaimed, “I don’t believe in massive online pile-ons when people make mistakes like this,” then proceeded to fan the flames of commentators doing just that, trashing the much-less-esteemed actor’s career while decrying his inability to understand that addiction is a disease.

Padalecki deleted the tweet eventually, but the shaming goes on: furious tweets about him are still pouring in.

And so it goes, in our age of ceaseless, monotonous outrage. Another day, another lone target for collective shaming. As I pondered one example after another from recent months, I kept picturing a stoning. Contrary to that old biblical admonition, these are high times for rock throwing.

I hate to say it, but one leading indignation arena is online feminism. In December, folk singer Ani DiFranco was shredded for planning a songwriting retreat at a plantation that had (as most plantations do) a slave-owning past; when she cancelled the event and published a somewhat cranky apology, she was doubly pilloried for not being abjectly sorry enough.

And after The Nation published an article by Michelle Goldberg, ironically chronicling feminism’s infighting, both she and the magazine came under intense fire for various slights.

In the case of DiFranco, I was genuinely shocked there wasn’t more leeway given to an artist whose entire career has been devoted to activism, particularly that of women’s rights. In today’s screechy online environment, it’s one strike and you’re out.

Meanwhile, outrage roiled on the right last week when guests on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC made jokes about the black grandson of Mitt Romney, prompting a series of tweeted apologies from the host: “I am sorry. Without reservation or qualification. I apologize to the Romney family,” she wrote.

Needless to say, that wasn’t enough for some.

But outrage knows no political affiliation. It is everywhere. Conservatives shamed married couple Beyoncé and Jay Z for daring to sing an erotic duet at the start of the Grammys late last month. Liberals hit Jerry Seinfeld with both barrels last week after he said he doesn’t prioritize diversity when selecting guests for his show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

“Who cares?” he told CBS. “Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.”

Gawker translated this into “ ‘Who cares?’ about diversity, says Jerry Seinfeld,” even though that isn’t what he said.

Twitter, far from fostering debate and broadening minds, has turned us into a hive of scolds. Angry mobs wait on the sidelines to strike and then bask in the glow of their moral superiority.

Sci-fi author and astrophysicist David Brin framed this phenomenon recently in terms of addiction, saying “there’s substantial evidence that self-righteous indignation is one of these drug highs. We’ve all been in indignant snits, self-righteous furies. You go into the bathroom during one of these snits, and you look in the mirror and you have to admit, this feels great! ‘I am so much smarter and better than my enemies! And they are so wrong, and I am so right!’ ”

In October of last year, a Tufts University sociological study of media backed up that theory, finding an increasing number of viewers are actually getting their news from “outrage-based” shows, on both the left and the right.

“These venues offer flattering, reassuring environments that make audience members feel good,” the researchers wrote.

We’re addicted to outrage, and to what end? The Onion summed it up with, “New Blog Post on Woody Allen to Settle Everything.” Our howls of indignation mostly serve as self-congratulation, nothing more. An apology that is (virtually) beaten out of someone does not equal a changed mind.

Legitimate causes are, of course, drowned out in this, just more noise in a sea of small-time, small-minded name calling. When everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal.

It’d be nice to think we’d learn to pick our battles and reserve our outrage for places it could actually be useful. But I’m sure some people would be outraged I even suggested it.