Another Wave of Publications Shut Down Online Comments 226
AmiMoJo writes: The debate about comment sections on news sites is often as divisive as the comments themselves. Recently outlets such as The Verge and The Daily Dot have closed their comments sections because they've become too hard to manage. And they're far from alone. Moderating comments is a full-time job (or several full-time jobs) at many news organisations. Nicholas White, editor at The Daily Dot, noted that "in our experience, our community hasn't evolved in our comments. It's evolved in our social media accounts. To have comments, you have to be very active, and if you're not incredibly active, what ends up happening is a mob can shout down all the other people on your site. In an environment that isn't heavily curated it becomes about silencing voices and not about opening up voices."
Riese, co-founder and editor-in-chief of LGBT site Autostraddle, adds, "I completely understand why The Daily Dot wouldn't want to have comments — or in fact why most websites wouldn't want to have comments. I think 75% of the time they're more trouble than they're worth, and for us it's still a lot of work to keep up on. Not all of our users are necessarily on Facebook or are out as gay on Facebook, or are comfortable talking about queer stuff on Facebook. We keep comments on the site which is a safe space for people to exchange ideas — and that's a big factor for us."
Riese, co-founder and editor-in-chief of LGBT site Autostraddle, adds, "I completely understand why The Daily Dot wouldn't want to have comments — or in fact why most websites wouldn't want to have comments. I think 75% of the time they're more trouble than they're worth, and for us it's still a lot of work to keep up on. Not all of our users are necessarily on Facebook or are out as gay on Facebook, or are comfortable talking about queer stuff on Facebook. We keep comments on the site which is a safe space for people to exchange ideas — and that's a big factor for us."
Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, well, at least fucking Slashdot still allows fucking comments. Can you imagine Slashdot without all our fucking insightful comments?
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Yeah, well, at least fucking Slashdot still allows fucking comments. Can you imagine Slashdot without all our fucking insightful comments?
+1 Insightful
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+1 Fucking Insightful
FTFY
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+1 Fucking Insightful
FTFY
FFTFY
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Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot with comments is dying.
When I first signed up, stories hard hundreds, if not thousands of comments and most where relevant.
Now, it's just fucking kiddy trolls that dont even bother signing up or maintaining their passwords. Stories dwindled down to less than 100 comments, most of which are anonymous garbage.
To save Slashdot, posting as anonymous should require still being logged in. This way, most posts would be accountable to someone and you'd still have the possibility of anonymity for protection against reprisal from peers. (And even that is debatable... not like this is wikileaks).
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Stories dwindled down to less than 100 comments, most of which are anonymous garbage.
Which just means you want a name to attack when you read something that disagrees with your opinions. Ok, maybe you aren't one of those who take that stance to be spiteful, but I've stalked Slashdot enough to know that it happens. I've seen people insta-negged when posting something informative and on topic because in some other discussion elsewhere they offended some people with karma who could not use it in that story due to their own commenting.
I propose an alternate option. No user names associated w
Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
It's not about having a name to attack. It's about self-control. When you sign a post (regardless if it's your real name or an alias like "mouser"), you tend to be more careful about what you post and avoid useless jibber. It also prunes some of the trolls because while one could still create an account for trolling purpose, at some point it becomes bothersome to do so as troll accounts get closed/locked.
Funny comments or even jabs are still doable for as long as they are either on-topic, relevant and not derogatory or otherwise disruptive.
Comment moderation is, also, not about popularity contest. It's about highlighting, in the flood of comments, those that stand out for their insightful, interesting or funny content.
Metamoderation is there to weed out abuse. Admittedly, sometimes it lacks context.
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I propose an alternate option. No user names associated with any post ever.
If you want 4chan, you know where to find it. :)
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Not for nothing, but when you joined up, there were only 3000-odd users. There have been plenty of stories in the recent past with thousands of comments. I joined in (I think) 1999, and I'd say that some of the most pervasive trolling (GNAA, goatse, etc) is at an all time low.
If you want your own slashdot with no anonymity, fire one up and run it. This one is still going surprisingly well.
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Sorry, but that's just not true. Back in about '98, one of my older colleagues (younger than I am now!) complained that he'd had enough of /. due to the dumb comments and flaming. I think the stories with thousands of comments were probably the ones written by Jon Katz.
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It was easy to complain about Slashdot or any web based forum in 1998. Most experienced users were used to USENET where many newsgroups were virtually spam free and kill files could easily suppress asshats and trolls. Plus, if you had any familiarity with newsgroups, web based discussion seemed awful. Terrible navigation, no reading tools and so on. It took a lot of patience to tolerate internet discussion on a web page if you were used to Usenet.
I keep waiting for newsgroups to get rediscovered somehow
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where many newsgroups were virtually spam free
Only the moderated ones stayed clear. The rest were slammed pretty damned hard with spam starting from 1996-1997 onwards.
By 1999 most newsgroups were rendered useless thanks to spam, crap-flooding (e.g. send a binary as 40,000 parts), dipshits and prankster script kiddies who discovered how to build and use a cancelbot, NNTP server ops that still hadn't figured out that maybe they should remove *.test, AOLers who hadn't figured out what a FAQ was (aka Eternal September), etc.
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I remember it being pretty tolerable through most of the 90s, although I think it really varied by newsgroup as the decade moved on. There really wasn't a ton of non-IT access to the Internet before 1995 or so. It was a big deal when the university I worked for in 1992 got us MacSLIP and IP dialup. Did MSDOS have dialup IP access prior to Win95? Most of those technology obstacles would have prevented most people from even getting access to USENET.
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You're forgetting Trumpet Winsock. Good Lord: how did we have patience for all that back then?
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I know.
Just for fun, browse this same day on Slashdot but 10 years ago. You'll see multiple stories with 600 to 800 comments on the same page! Browse almost any day over 3 years ago and you'll find that boring stories had 100 comments, and almost any story worth reading was 300+ comments.
Here are some examples...
http://slashdot.org/?issue=200... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/?issue=200... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/?issue=200... [slashdot.org]
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The heaviest load I recall was 9/11 . A lot of newssites were down and if you wanted to find out what was going on you could go to slashdot , which was holding up with a thousands of comments for each post. IIRC.
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Why do we allow AC posting at all? Our screen names offer all the anonymity we need, with the important property that all comments made by one person remain associated with that person's history. To get rid of trolls for good, eliminate all AC posting, including that by registered users.
The only kind of troll this would not eliminate would be the "Viewpoint differs strongly from mine" definition of troll.
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And most could spell "were"....
Well, at least you had enough balls to log in. But seriously, keep the spelling nazi stuff to yourself.
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I'm doing pretty well for a french guy. Pardon my occasional mishaps or auto-correct.
You also missed "hard" where I meant to type "had".
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot without comments would die.
Nonsense! I bet there's a huge market for poorly-edited summaries of week-old news. And if that weren't enough, they've got Bennett Haselton too!
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Can you imagine Slashdot without all our fucking insightful comments?
Who couldn't? It'd be that blog with one comment every ten posts.
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insightful as shit
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot's not a publication. It's a community with links to articles as topics of conversation.
The raison d'etre of publications is producing articles and other pieces of content. The raison d'etre of Slashdot is the community and the discourse of other people's content.
tl;dr: Without (an effective system for) comments there is no Slashdot.
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If nobody can comment, the time may be ripe for Xanadu. People could download a firefox extention that shows comments overlaid and mark up text on any website, and see others markups. Or people browse meta-sites like slashdot to comment, not bothering with making accounts on every site they want to comment on. Actually this is what people do.
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
the unquestioning stance on climate change and vaccines,
You can't really fault a nerd site for having a pro-science bias.
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
"unquestioning" support is "pro-science"?
I'd contend that there's no such thing as a "pro-science bias". You can either be pro-science or biased, but not both at once.
Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally someone who gets it.
If you aren't questioning you aren't sciencing - it's called religion.
Why question, if you refuse to listen to answers? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you aren't questioning you aren't sciencing - it's called religion.
And when you don't listen when your questions are answered in detail it's not skepticism, it's denial.
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So, if my questions are answered by someone who has financial interest in the answer given should all skepticism be put aside?
Oh look! It's about vaccines, but it has nothing to do with Autism so it doesn't really count. [nytimes.com]
What happens when the historical records are altered to fit the modern imposed belief? But the science is settled. [wattsupwiththat.com] The science was settled when the global cooling scare of the 70's was settled science, we're in an ice-age already, right now. Then the global warming scare of the 90's was
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So uhmmm, Wikipedia is a denier blog.
Got it.
The New York Times is a denier blog, I thought it was a left wing propaganda machine.
As for Watts up with That? I generally referenced it for the collection of references. I don't actually read the site, I did a search for something mentioning the fact that records were altered. The one incident in particular I recall involved people actually getting information directly from a weather station's archives in Antarctica that disagreed with what NASA/NOAA published
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Given an equal say, how hard is it to make the case against those things? If you try to censor people, they just get louder and less thoughtful and less articulate. Let them make their best argument. Refute it if you have the facts on your side.
If you're trying to shut people up, that's a clear sign that your ideas are unpersuasive.
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If you try to censor people, they just get louder and less thoughtful and less articulate.
That is probably not possible. Thoughtless and inarticulate comments generally derail any substantive discussion. Youtube comments are a great place to go if you are looking for thoughtless and inarticulate. If you are looking for a more interesting conversation you probably need some method to filter out the nonsense.
That said, I think the slashdot moderation system does as good a job as anything else I've seen. I'm not suggesting that Slashdot should ban commenting. I'm only responding to the GPs d
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Your comment implies that people are remotely sane or rational. This is a mistake.
You cannot reason with the time cube guy.
And the loud, dumb, obnoxious anti-whatever commenters have about the same attitude. They know they are right and they are impervious to facts, logic or reason. If you don't shut them up they'll just shit all over the comments threads and drive out people who you actually want there.
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You may not be able to convince the guy arguing with you. But if you have a good case, you might be able to convince the other people reading the comments.
"Obnoxious" comments are the easiest the deal with unless the comment system is poorly designed -- you just ignore them.
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No, it doesn't work like that. No one wants to wade through heaps and heaps of idiotic comments. If a new person coming along sees acres of garbage, they'll leave. Through attrition you'll only have nutcases left and you'll lose any community you had.
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...wade through heaps and heaps of idiotic comments...
That's a poorly designed comment system you're describing.
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A pro-science position on climate change would be wanting to have science settle the question with as little interference from politics as possible, while at the same time accepting the engineering consequences, whatever they might be, of science's final verdict on the issue.
As it is, climatology is on the way to becoming as taboo a subject as human genetics: whichever way the science falls, sensitive little toes are going to get crushed and we can't have that.
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I wish more people would question those things and try to prove them one way or the other themselves. At least it would make for more interesting people to socialize with. I would rather have a friend that made their own high altitude balloon to reach the highest levels of atmosphere they could reach just so they could see the curvature of the earth for themselves than be surrounded by people who asked me if I saw Celebrity Apprentice last night.
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=> observation-bias=reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Based on results like these, and other recent ones [slashdot.org] I've wondered if there's some back-door mod point action going on, or If I have a globalist cult following specifically me, coordinating their points together. I have pissed off a bunch of Apple fanboys, socialist and others of left wing persuasion, right wingers in general for not giving them their warhawk excuses and anti-freedom passes, and quite a few other groups. I may have daveloped an "operation clambake" type following.
Oh yeah, and just in case I
Yes, comments are too hard to police. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
Re:Yes, comments are too hard to police. (Score:5, Insightful)
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And no, you don't need to give me a forum to speak my mind on your website - You have every right to host an echo chamber. Just don't act surprised when your "community" consists of nothing but Tumblrinas (or just vanishes altogether).
Re:Yes, comments are too hard to police. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have every right to host an unmoderated forum. Just don't act surprised when your "community" consists of nothing but trolls and people kicked off 8chan.
FTFY.
Not every site has to be 8chan or an echo chamber, there is a middle ground.
Re:Yes, comments are too hard to police. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, at least in the case of The Verge, they are disabling comments to hide their complete lack of professionalism.
If they publish an article which is blatantly WRONG - there's no way for their readers to see that the content is wrong.
https://plus.google.com/+RonAm... [google.com]
Re: Yes, comments are too hard to police. (Score:2)
Never said they did. But those are all examples of a type of echo chamber. And the more restrictive the echo chamber, the more time censoring the comments takes.
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Also you don't have a right to your viewpoints on private property/websites/whatever. As a website owner I don't have to let you speak your mind and maybe I don't care to know why you feel that black people are the superior race or that Democrats are all evil.
The aftermath if correct, but the way you gone there is not.
The guy HAS THE RIGHT to his viewpoints in whatever the place he wants. But the place's owner DON'T HAVE THE DUTY to allow it - it's up to this last guy to decide if this will be allowed or not.
The first guy's rights needs to be preserved. But the former's too.
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Yeah, because a "right" of one person without the "duty" of another person to uphold this right, that is soooooo useful.
Sophistry, that's what your argument amounts to, without any bearing on the actual real world.
Legitimate viewpoint or troll? (Score:3)
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
That would imply there is a viewpoint to be censored instead of a troll just out to cause trouble. I think the latter happens FAR more often than the former.
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Instead, numerous internet communities attempt to shout down dissent by redefining the word "troll" to mean "anyone with a viewpoint different than the consensus". Try advocating for fiscal responsibility rather than government handouts on any "social justice" friendly si
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And yet, we manage to keep the signal over the noise despite that.
We do? I come here to practice looking for intelligent patterns in the signal so I can better do my day job of listening for intelligent life at the Arecibo dish.
Keeps me on my toes.
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They are talking about the removal of harassment, doxxing and other abuse. That's different to removing things that you disagree with.
The ones doing the censoring at the ones doxxing people, creating fake false-flag accounts to discredit them and posting photoshopped porn of them. They are the trolls trying to make readers accidentally open a link to goats.ex. They want to drive everyone else away so that only their own message is heard.
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Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
a comment posted to one of the most notoriously inbred and self-satisfied sites on the web. where the echo chamber rings the loudest.
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Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
I don't think so. It's because of dicks (one of them being a coworker of mine) who goes onto those news sites and does nothing but spew hate towards everyone commenting on the articles. He's a top commenter on many news outlets, including ones where his message is completely opposite of the main demographic for that outlet.
Thanks Soulskill (Score:2)
Thanks for editing the summary Soulskill. You improved it considerably over what I submitted.
Slashdot's Comments (Score:2)
Defiantly the way things should be. Other websites you receive 'karma whores' where they try to farm and get points, I've liked Slashdot's setup because it encourages good thought-out ideas vs who can have the most shock value.
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Except that this leads to a groupthink echo chamber. Anyone speaking outside the hivemind meme is quickly drowned out, regardless of whether the point they were trying to make is valid.
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I actually find reddit to be worse for groupthink.
web site comments are stupid (Score:5, Funny)
I would never post comments on a web site.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I've a lot of sympathy. Some sites - like Slashdot - are all about the comments (for which the stories act as little more than a prompt). But those sites tend to have well-throught-through community structures and moderations in place. Much as we all gripe about Slashdot sometimes, its moderation system remains best-in-class.
A lot of other sites I frequent have been "going toxic" over the last couple of years, often as a result of their comments sections (I'll highlight Eurogamer and Kotaku as partial examples and Animenewsnetwork as an uber-example). The comments threads usually descend into two (or sometimes more) camps of people, yelling "SJW!" or "MRA!" at each other. Over time, the site's editors and authors get pulled into one side or the other and the site stops playing for a general audience and just becomes another factional advocacy site.
Blocking comments therefore makes a degree of sense for sites which want to preserve the quality of their writing but which don't have the resources (or a sufficiently engaged readership) to make Slashdot-style community moderation work. It's actually pretty admirable in some respects, because it is actually incurring an immediate financial penalty for the site, assuming its business model is advertising based. After all, if somebody reads a story once, you get a single page-view. If they reload the story two dozen times to participate in a flame war in the comments, that's two dozen page-views. Indeed, it's hard to read some articles on the sites I mentioned above (and many more besides) and see them as anything other than flamebait designed to encourage high page-view wars in the comments.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
The excuses used by the daily dot for disabling comments include (paraphrased):
* very few people were using what they had
* they were spending non-insignificant amounts of time moderating what they had
* they are interacting with their users via 3rd party commenting systems (reddit, tumblr, facebook, twitter, etc)
* someday, they may bring it back via facebook integration
So, as far as I can tell, it has almost nothing to do with getting rid of a commenting system, but that spreading themselves too thin working on comments on 3rd party sites. I don't know why the fuck they'd do that if they want their own site to succeed.
Personally, I look forward to a day where the 3rd party comments on articles (such as these here) can be interlaced with all/most other 3rd party comments. For example, comments on dailydot would include facebook comments on the article, tweets, slashdot posts, reddit comments, etc. They'd need some intelligent filters (ex. only show slashdot comments; show ones moderated to various levels; ignore anonymous; etc), but it'd allow the interaction to occur where the content lives, and their "moderators" to work in one place.
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Personally, I look forward to a day where the 3rd party comments on articles (such as these here) can be interlaced with all/most other 3rd party comments. For example, comments on dailydot would include facebook comments on the article, tweets, slashdot posts, reddit comments, etc.
I don't know about that. Sounds like worlds colliding to me. I speak differently on /., reddit, and FaceBook because the audiences are different. /. comments seen without the context of the /. audience can make one look like a psychopath.
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I'm entirely with you. I think the consequence of what GP was suggesting would be to drag all participating forums down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
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Sometimes, I wonder where the idea of putting comments at the bottom of an article comes from. It seems horribly inefficient from all perspectives except the commentator's, and a low barrier to commenting is counterproductive to any meaningful discourse.
Whatever happened to forums?
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It's largely about page views and gathering metrics for advertising. For instance, if a newspaper site uses a general forum, then it is difficult to track how much users are engaging with specific authors/articles. With comments under the article, however, there is a direct and easily understood metric for how a specific author, article or topic gets the readers agitated.
The UK's Daily Telegraph (once one of the finest newspapers in the English-speaking world, now much diminished) is known for being particu
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Amen to that - especially where moderation is allowed on threads where the user is also posting.
I once had a conversation with the editor of a site that used that system. He knew how broken it was as a means of managing discussion, but said that their metrics showed that it produced the highest number of page-views. There's a certain class of user that goes elsewhere when they aren't allowed to downvote at will (and it is downvoting that is the draw, not upvoting).
propaganda doesn't work well when called out (Score:5, Interesting)
I am reasonably certain this is happening because people are starting to wake up to the bullshit. Propaganda is beginning to fail and when you have people pointing out the bullshit propaganda in the comments, you must obviously shut that down. This has nothing to do with negativity and everything to do with controlling the narrative.
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Pretty much. The Verge straight up blames gamergate and the Daily Dot is currently featuring an article about how JK Rowling's upcoming production is just too damn white. This kind of behaviour is typical of the social justice brigade, whenever people start pointing out the many intellectual incoherencies in their hatemongering, they shut the discussion down.
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Re:propaganda doesn't work well when called out (Score:4, Insightful)
These media outlets have enough trouble preventing their own journalists from deviating from the media narrative. An audience that can contradict their media narrative is just too much for them to handle.
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Depends on the nature of the "offensive" comments. /. wouldn't be /. without the GNAA (or I guess now cows and apk and shit) but I can understand the New York Times not wanting that in their comments section.
Is your commentariate nothing but shitposters or psychopaths doxxing and harassing your readership IRL? Then yeah it's not an awful idea to shut that down.
But if they're just worried about "safe spaces" because people actually, gasp, disagree with their slant, then yeah it's bullshit.
Out Source It (Score:2)
Yes, it is a full time job to manage a comment section - but there are huge economies of scale here. The odds of there being a mob on two different comment sections at the same time are minute. One company can manage comments for 10 different online publications almost as easily as it can manage 2 online publications.
Even more so if you use the same login, as Facebook has been pushing.
The real problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem is that these sites define trolling as merely having a contradictory opinion. They don't want anyone to threaten their echo chamber. They don't want people posting sincere, meaningful comments that defy the media narrative they are trying to push.
The Verge in particular suffers from this.
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The real problem is that these sites define trolling as merely having a contradictory opinion.
So say so many people who have contrary opinions. The problem is, however, some opinions (many) are somewhere between dumb-ass and batshit crazy insane.
Let's take here as an example.
On articles about some cool thing about evolution, you get a bunch of anti-evolutionists and YECers. That's not against a "narrative", it's against logic, observation and reason.
On articles about climate change, you get people denying
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You get crackpots in Slashdot comments, sure... and all but the most well-spoken of them get downmodded, and the ones that get upmodded get plenty of rebuttals that also get upmodding. You don't get the crackpots overrunning the site and drowning out everything with their crackpottery.
And that's how healthy discourse should go. It's fine if people who are wrong espouse their wrong opinions, so long as it's not drowning out all other conversation, and someone else speaks up to point out how and why they're w
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Slashdot is frankly MASSIVE compared to the comments sections on the other places. It ahs over 4,000,000 registered users and users active since 1997. Very few sites have large enough communities to make user moderation work properly. On smaller sites, without inordinate staff effort you can just get nutters drowning out everything else.
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Precisely. Popsci.
It was never, ever part of the actual scientific consensus. Yet people glom on to it like it's a damning indictment of the science even though it has nothing to do with that.
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Even if carbon warming turns out to be totally exaggerated, it would be a damning indictment of the politics around it, not the science. Real scientists maintain skepticism as a default mode.
So much for many-to-many communication (Score:5, Insightful)
We're going back to the old ways!
WE SAY, YOU LISTEN!
Thank you,
Old media (and now new media too)
To Facebook We Will Go! (Score:2)
Well, if they want to base their community in a single social medium, so be it.
When that community withers on the vine, hopefully, so will these dinosaurs.
The People's Voice (Score:5, Insightful)
Disallowing or removing contents is to censor the average person's thoughts, ideas and opinions - often in favor of biased information or propaganda.
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That is not censorship. If you want to comment, you host it and link back to the article. You are not being "censored" if somebody else doesn't allow you to write in their notebook.
Milking time (Score:2)
Where is the guy with the cows when you need him?
99% of comments are garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem. It seems like most Internet users act like morons. I'm not saying they ARE morons, but we all know how a degree of anonymity can cause people to lose control of their inhibitions about what they say. I've seen comment threads that were extremely informative, but that's rare, and mostly on the more obscure websites. Any website that attracts a broader spectrum of users is going to get a lot more moronic posts. People misunderstand the content, flame the content, flame each other, post SPAM, and just generally cause havoc. It's hard to find a signal in the noise. Even when people are well-meaning (which a lot of them are not), discussions can completely devolve.
Sites like slashdot and reddit, which are built on comments, have to have elaborate systems of moderation in order to keep the crap in check. Imagine a completely unmoderated system. It would be completely useless. Oh wait. We had usenet, and from the moment the AOLers got access, it went into decline, and now it's basically dead.
99% of everything on the Internet is crap. Statistically, that includes my comment as well.
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"...a degree of anonymity can cause people to lose control of their inhibitions about what they say..."
I presume you're talking about insults, profanity and personal attacks. i.e. Things you would never say to a person's face. Discussions which devolve to that level are indeed useless. Still, the fact that people would feel the slightest bit "inhibited" from expressing themselves is why it's essential that we preserve anonymity on the internet. When people can be persecuted (in ways other than angry ret
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You can say what you want without necessarily being an asshole about it. Ok, I'm sure there are situations where being an asshole is warranted, but the idea is to not be *unnecessarily* rude or insulting when trying to make a point. Generally speaking, if you feel that you have to be rude or insulting, you probably just don't have a good point to make in the first place.
Anonymity is important so that people can make important points without fear or reprisal from one censoring government or another. Howev
I guess some people will get more sleep now (Score:3)
Blame the trolls and other idiots (Score:2)
Re:Blame the trolls and other idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Tolerating trolls to some extent is the price you pay for freedom of speech.
Just as the threat of terrorism doesn't justify a police state, and at some point a society has to just accept the remaining risk instead of growing more draconian or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent; so too trolls and other assholes don't justify censorship, and at some point a community just has to put up with them instead of tightening the screws or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent.
We've seen this before, and we'll see it again. (Score:2)
Free Speech melts Special Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially the argument against free, anonymous speech is that people will show the world exactly how they feel deep down inside. They won't filter, they won't self-censor, they won't be politically correct. And that's A Bad Thing(tm) according to the powers that be, so we have to shut it down. What a cowardly fucking attitude to have.
Grow a fucking set and learn to deal with criticism. Some people don't like me for whatever reason. A few even probably HATE me. And that's absolutely their right to do so. In fact, it's a pillar of free society to be able to have whatever opinions you like, whether or not it hurts someone's feelings, or (gasp!) makes someone uncomfortable or shatters the fragile little ego of some useless millennial* leech who can't attain respect on their own merits so they have to demand respect from society through the control of thought and language to protect themselves from the truth.
I think pure, unadulterated, uncensored, open speech is the most beautiful thing in the world. As hateful or unpopular as much of that speech is, it's how someone really feels and that person deserves to have their say just as much as any special snowflake or "safe space" dweller. In fact those snowflakes are the majority amongst the millennials of my generation due to their narcissistic addiction to social media and their tendency to be "followers". Where are the safe spaces for the minority of us who can still think critically and for ourselves, peer pressure and popular opinion be damned?
And if comment sections are so overrun with said incorrect thoughts, you have to wonder if maybe the people censoring them are the ones that are "incorrect".
Actually, its because... (Score:2)
Actually, I think its because many of the comments disparage the reporters writing the articles. Usually for good cause... the quality of most news articles these days is pretty horrible. But news organizations don't like to be told that they are idiots.
But there are certainly also lots of instances where the commenters start fighting among themselves... usually it devolves down into politics or religion. People with very strong views often come up against the hard, harsh wall of reality and the result i
The truth is in the comments (Score:2)
News outlets that heavily moderate or have removed their comment sections are those i stay away from. It's unfortunate when journalists do such a poor job writing a story that it takes readers to fill in the grand canyon sized gaps.
It's not hard to moderate a comment sections. It is hard to maintain a spin on a story when your commentators are calling your paid writer a troll, shrill, or just an idiot for being plain wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone is going to miss those valuable insights.
Re: (Score:2)
And this is why I come to Slashdot for the comments.
Re: (Score:2)
Or, they're news sites, not in the business of designing a comment system, and don't want to waste resources policing the assholes and idiots.
If their core competencies aren't designing a good comment system, WTF should they bother with it for if it's just a lot of work to keep out the trolls?
I mean, really, how is your news site going? Or are you just assuming just because they have a news website they should give a damn about supporting a comment system?
The internet doesn't need every site to have commen
Re: (Score:2)
I knew someone would say something like this. There's always some yutz who thinks that freedom of speech means that other people are required to provide them with a platform to speak from.