17 Comments Add your own

• 1. John Proffitt  |  June 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am

  Simply throwing open comments and accepting everything is no way to engage a community or foster thoughtful discourse. That takes work. And if newspapersvor others aren’t willing to do the work, then they should shut off the comments.

  My own local paper does the same thing –just open ‘we up — and the results are just what you described. It’s really quite simple: either you want good comments and work for it or you just let it go and throw up your arms and say there’s nothing you can do.

  It strikes me that traditional newspapers, with journalists that view the public as morons to be civilized, may be using open comments and safe harbor in an attempt to prove that only they, in the ivory tower, can be trusted to say smart things. Oh, and they deserve to be paid for it.

• 2. John Proffitt  |  June 29th, 2008 at 10:51 am

  (sorry for the typos… writing on an iPhone)

• 3. db  |  June 29th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

  It’s easy to complain about cesspools of comments, but it’s hard to find a good solution.

  Smaller sites can get away with approving every message before it is posted; larger sites simply cannot do that. People like to talk about having the community police itself, but that still begs the question of how that mechanism would work.

  An interesting case study for comments is Slashdot. They have put a lot of time and effort into creating a system where the community can police itself, and it works pretty well (at least, compared to other sites). However, there is a lot of complexity involved: occasional random distribution of limited moderation points to users with high “karma”, moderation review by “meta-moderators”, etc… Like every self-policing system, though, it requires a sizable base of hard-core users that are wiling to put in some time.

• 4. tdc  |  June 29th, 2008 at 12:26 pm

  thedailycamera (dailycameradotcom) makes it easy… flag the comment for deletion and someone on-staff will take a look at it.

  i guess if you’re offended enough to flag it they’ll probably take it down.

  odd as this may sound from me, i’m all for ‘outing’ anonymous commenters when it comes to threats, intimdation, slander and such.

  open comments and open season are two very different things.

  of course, those who want to maintain the sq can try to confuse the two.

• 5. Liz  |  June 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

  People need to remember that they are not completely anonymous on the internet. Even when they have to give up contact information in order to post their thoughts, they still often behave as if nobody knows who they are.

• 6. Anonymous  |  June 29th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

  As was yours, sometimes is and that’s a matter of editorial caveat.

  Netiquette can do a lot LESS for blogs than it helps.

• 7. Anonymous  |  June 29th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

  The lawsuit you need to watch is AutoAdmit when it comes to setting precedent and legal limits on anonymous online discussions and the rights of their authors to remain anonymous.

  The crux of the arguments in this case pits the right of posting anonymous personal opinions online against the right of a few female law school students who were on the receiving end of what they viewed as defamatory comments and learning the names of these anonymous posters so they can file libel lawsuits against them.

  If these women can’t learn the names of these posters, their potential secondary lawsuits are DoA.

  In some way, I’m for outing anonymous comments if they are of a libelous nature, but one runs into the slippery slope if the courts are not careful, of creating precedent on allowing outing of anonymous whistleblowers, critics and political commentary.

• 8. db  |  June 29th, 2008 at 9:47 pm

  Having users flag inappropriate comments doesn’t work as well as you might think. It gets rid of the worst comments, but it doesn’t help much with the idiotic ones.

  I’m curious — do you think it is ethical to delete a comment at the request of your largest advertiser, even if the comment is just critical and not offensive? What if the advertiser requests the user’s information (without a warrant)?

  Also, given how many sites are doing comments on their news stories, I wonder how many of them have actually created a formal set of ethics regarding them.

• 9. Anonymous  |  June 29th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

  The one local news site in my area that has productive comments also has strong personal voices in its blog, and those people set the tone. Without that, the tone is set by whatever commenter can be the most brash and obnoxious, while the administrators look weak by comparison. And that drives away all the productive commenters who are just revolted by the garbage they see.

• 10. TR  |  June 30th, 2008 at 1:36 am

  This was a very hot topic at the “placeblogging” conference we attended recently in Minneapolis - and it is one in which I am intensely interested as we deal with it on a variety of levels at our hyperlocal site. We do not require registration for comments, but we do for the forum. Our policy on what’s allowed is more stringent in comments, which appear with our news stories, than in the forum, where all discussion is initiated by readers/participants - but right now the forum has a lot of personal drama going on involving the regulars, and while we have let the community be somewhat self-policing within reason (conscientious readers/participants have flagged us to offensive posts and we’ve stepped in as needed), we’ve also had to fire some warning shots. It’s the comments on news stories that concern me most, however, and I think sites have to have some clear policies. One of the local weeklies here has a sometimes-excellent news blog but its commenters are allowed to run wild - they picked up one of our recent stories, a heated meeting on a hot local issue, with a clip of a community member’s emotional speech, and half the comments on that site were crudely remarking on the woman’s sex appeal. Ugh.

• 11. Tripp Fenderson  |  June 30th, 2008 at 3:37 am

  There is a better way to engage the community — and it starts by hiring an experienced community manager.

  Opening news sites up to comments and expecting civil discourse is about as valid of a concept as “build it and they will come”. Have we learned nothing in the last 20 years of building online communities?

  News sites first need to be IN the community they want to create on their site. That means engaging potential members (both online and offline) before they turn on comments.

  Second, controlled growth and deep discourse with their budding community allows the tone to be set before the masses flood the site.

  With those in place, time and attention from a community manager as well as empowering the original members to enforce the community’s social customs aids a great deal in reducing the noise.

• 12. Brink  |  June 30th, 2008 at 5:27 am

  As soon as the first lawsuit is filed against someone who posted an anonymous comment, that’ll be the end of people wanting to leave comments on website boards.

• 13. tdc  |  June 30th, 2008 at 7:08 am

  #8, no. your largest advertisers should know there are haters out there. i would look at most negative comments as a form of advertising (free, too) and would encourage rebuttal if they find it out of line (more free advertising!).

  and no, again, on giving up info on anyone (short of a court order).

  look at all the sniping going on here!( #6, was that pointed at me???)

  ain’t it great?!!!

  and #12, let ‘em sue me. not only will they be sorry, but i’ll post it all online.

• 14. coffee  |  June 30th, 2008 at 8:31 am

  This reminds me very much of Usenet (not that many here will remember newgroups - and many ISPs are getting rid of access to them). Unrestricted posting and a certain amount of anonymity drove some groups into launching moderated versions. For commercial sites, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable approach to require registration to post comments. It’s the website’s party, and they can invite who they like.

• 15. db  |  June 30th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

  Registration, like abuse buttons, provides a limited benefit. It only helps with people who play by the rules.

• 16. Barney Lerten  |  June 30th, 2008 at 11:23 pm

  We’ve generated 1,000s of comments at KTVZ.COM since starting it earlier this year. Sure, a lot of them are inane, but many are thoughtful, respectful, raise VERY good questions that I don’t believe would be asked in any other way, and nothing else we’ve done fosters as much a sense of community.
  Without true “news as conversation,” news Websites seem as cold and sterile as can be. As long as there’s some signal in the signal-to-noise ratio, I’m willing to be the one who throws out the worst offending comments, and take all the whines about “freedom of speech” and censorship.
  And yes, we don’t require real names or registration. Maybe we will, if we must. (Using JS-kit’s system FYI.)

• 17. Barney Lerten  |  June 30th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

  PS-I’d be curious how comments have affected page views, reputation and overall views of USA Today, surely the biggest media site with hundreds of very visible article comments. I enjoy looking at them, and occasionally weighing in.
  We’re also looking at creating a forum, as a way to let flamers and the real rascal argue away from the “main” crowd. But I see downsides to that as well.

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