Leaving a Comment? That'll Be 99 Cents, and Your Name

netbuzz writes "Anxious to lift a ban on comments brought about by incessant trolling and anonymous slander, a Massachusetts newspaper has begun requiring two things of online readers who want to leave their thoughts on stories: a one-time fee of 99 cents and a willingness to use their real names. Says the publisher: 'This is a necessary step, in my opinion, if The Attleboro (MA) Sun Chronicle is going to continue to provide a forum for comments on our websites.'"

Comments

Irony

[GruntboyX]

I guess speech is no longer free.

Re:Irony

[godrik]

but it is still free as in speech! :)

Re:Irony

[Lunix Nutcase]

Except that you never had free speech rights on someone else's website?

Re:Irony

[Mashhaster]

The first amendment to the constitution doesn't obligate a newspaper to print any anonymous inane bullshit one may send in. I don't see how this is much different, paywall aside.

Re:Irony

[Maximum Prophet]

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one

-- AJ Leibling

Re:Irony

[HycoWhit]

At .99 cents--its considered to be Value Speech! For a few bucks more they will throw in fries and a drink.

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

.99 cents

This reminds me of an incident some person had with Verizon concerning data rate costs...

Re:Irony

[eugene ts wong]

If they are willing to pay to troll, then they are welcome on my blog. I'd kick them off, and then they can pay to spew again. It's easy money, and if it is consistent, then it would be better than ad revenue.

Re:Irony

[dkleinsc]

Believe me, that was the least bogus part of my argument.

Re:Irony

[bigredradio]

they should moderate their comments

And that won't cost the paper money?

not allow them at all

Nice solution there genius.

I was really confused for a second until I realized you were calling the newspapers assholes instead of the assholes that they are trying to prevent cluttering up their comment boards.

I hate reading comments in most papers (and slashdot) where anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people. (BTW, good job here, it worked on me) If your bitching about a one-time .99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.

I hope their plan works and others follow suit.

Re:Irony

[mysidia]

Or... we have too few employees willing to hire, because they have a (low) salary expectation that cannot be met by the available candidates to do their job.

Now hiring C# Developers, minimum 5 years of experience in C# development and project management, with deep understanding of C# sockets, multi-threaded programming, remoting, COM object interoperability, Firefox and Internet Explorer extension development, must have college degree, MCSD certification, and MCSE certification. $8/hour. Paid vacation and increase in pay available after 3 years of employment.

hello!

[knappe duivel]

posting here is still free

Dept of Troll Prevention....

[LostCluster]

Slashdot has for a long time had a way of filtering the trolls out, why can't a newspaper have their own scheme to do so?

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[Sarten-X]

Slashdot's system relies on its huge popularity.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[cyber0ne]

Slashdot doesn't filter them out very effectively, it's forever plagued by them. What it does have is ways for knowledgeable users (it's entire userbase) to reduce the noise and bring out the signal, all the while knowing full well what trolls are and how to ignore them. A local newspaper has a much smaller and much less savvy audience and needs to actually filter it out somehow, which can be exceedingly difficult if even possible at all.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[iluvcapra]

Slashdot has for a long time had a way of filtering the trolls out,

What system would that be, homeslice? The moderation only works on posts that are of the generic-troll or meme-troll variety -- like "HOT GRITS" or "OBAMA is a N1&&3r" or somesuch. When trolls troll from a point of view, then it becomes much more subjective. Meta-moderation is very much a crapshoot and not evenly applied.

Obviously slashdot has its own cultural norms and when you come here you simply have to be aware that there's going to be some verbal abuse. A newspaper, on the other hand, doesn't really want that and doesn't want to dedicate its services and infrastructure to hosting shouting matches. The draw for a newspaper is the story, not the argument itself; this is where a newspaper and a forum are different. Any conversation on the article should facilitate understanding, perspectives, and critique of the article, and not be a sort of vanity contest.

Boston.com did a very interesting article recently on the average anonymous poster. And to be honest, I don't see why these people spout off about half the crap they do. They just want attention, and it isn't a newspapers job to host vanity projects.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[hedwards]

People often times end up being modded -1 I disagree. Some of the most insightful comments around here end up categorized as funny, flamebait or troll. Mostly because a lot of the people with mod points are mindless morons that seem more interested in suppressing speech than encouraging it. Not sure whether I'll get modded Troll, Flamebait, Insightful or Interesting, the suspense is almost palpable.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[Brett Buck]

Of course, "troll" is in the eye of the beholder. Slashdot's system enforces a monoculture of thought as restrictive as any I have seen on the internet. Now maybe that what people want and it's moderately democratic in the way it is done, but to claim it's a bastion of free speech and acceptance of varying opinions and perspective is a huge misrepresentation.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[badboy_tw2002]

Sorry, could you repeat that at a higher moderation level?

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[SleazyRidr]

Slashdot's moderation system is terrible! The only thing worse is every other system out there.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[natehoy]

Slashdot's moderation system is basically a meritocracy, or if you prefer to think of it this way, a syncophantocracy. Anyone who says a lot of things that the existing mods want to hear gets karma points and is then allowed to mod, eventually. If your viewpoints don't line up with the herd and you can't express them with a certain level of politeness, you're screwed.

But, overall, the system only sucks in that it's only marginally better than anything else out there. It's imperfect, but it relies on collective intelligence or ignorance as opposed to being the viewpoint of a small band of people. Still highly imperfect, but less imperfect than any other system I've heard of.

Sure, there are abusive mods, and there are bad moderations, but the bad moderations tend to be fixed over time, and the bad moderators tend to fail metamoderation and remove themselves from the moderation gene pool.

It still means that if you post an anti-(insert viewpoint here) and get a bunch of pro-(insert viewpoint here) moderators on your case, your post will be machine-gunned into oblivion soon. But, by and large, so will their moderator points.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[honkycat]

It's not filtering of different opinions, it's filtering of the trolls who post off-topic graffiti and goatse links rather than actually taking part in the discussion. OP was spot on. Slashdot's moderation system works because it has a huge army of visitors that can be tapped for mod duties. Most newspaper websites have nowhere near enough visitors to do this. Just look at the number of posts on a typical slashdot post and compare it to the most popular articles on a local newspaper: slashdot probably wins by an order of magnitude.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[seebs]

Ironically, part of the monoculture is that you have to think Slashdot sucks.

Ah, well. At least we're consistent.

Re:Dept of Troll Prevention....

[shutdown -p now]

Getting downmodded (or upmodded) due to disagreement with the groupthink is typical when your comment is itself purely emotional, or, if factual, does not provide any proof for that. Basically, if you say "Linux sucks", you will be downmodded, and a large number of those downmods will be the "disagree" mods, but is it really a big issue?

But if your claims are factual, the overall tone of the post polite, and you back your points with references, you are much more likely to be upmodded even when advocating opinions that are unpopular here.

The real problem with the moderation system isn't with unreasonable downmods, IMO. It's with unreasonable "+1000" upmods. For example, in any RIAA story, you can post something along the lines of "RIAA can go suck my dick!" in response to some post detailing the abuses, and get heaps of Insightful mods. More generally, for any topic on which /. has a strong group opinion (Linux & OSS, SCO, MS, religion & creationism etc), purely emotional or unsubstantiated FUDish posts that go along with that opinion are upmodded just as fast as those that go against that opinion are downmodded.

I suspect the reason for this is the existence of "Insightful" mod, because it is really bordering on "+1 agree" by definition, and many people seem to use it pretty much that way.

Re:Good Idea

[sqlrob]

Call it a hunch but I don't think your last name is squid or quid.

if its a small town paper

[circletimessquare]

you aren't dealing with sophisticated tor and proxy users and ip spoofing, you're dealing with the local technically barely literate cranks. so just enforce ip bans. or even cookies. these guys are sitting at home on one computer, not even in a coffee shop. and you're probably only dealing with 12-24 committed griefers only, so its not an endless problem

finally, i was always a fan of the rubber room (there may be a better term for this technique):

once you've flagged the committed griefer, make it so his comments only appear to him. oftentimes these hacks will comment freely and continually for months on end, completely oblivious to the fact that no one is reading their comments except themselves

Re:if its a small town paper

[SocialEngineer]

(I'm the Systems Manager for a local newspaper, and also had to deal with administration of local forums) Even in my smallish town, the trolls are quite able to get around IP bans and more (many are still on dialup, but we have had some utilize proxy services, or SOCKS proxies - I knew I shouldn't have written that guide a few years back :P). Beyond that, we also get trolls who aren't even living in the area anymore.

As far as the rubber room, while it's a good idea, many papers don't have staff capable of developing systems like that, and are using CMSes not developed in-house. Hell, many small papers don't even HAVE a "web guy/gal" to manage the site. Still, it is feasible that it would function well once implemented.

That's too bad...

[Pollux]

and a willingness to use their real names.

Somewhere in this country, there's a Hugh Jass who feels silenced.

Re:Good Idea

[PopeRatzo]

Requiring real names is a great idea.

Whether or not it's a "great idea" it's the newspaper's right as a private business to require whatever they want for someone to post comments on the site. It might not be the best way to encourage comments, but if you look at the comment section of the Washington Post or other newspaper, there is so much spam and garbage that there ought to be a requirement of real name.

Also, a one-time membership fee of 99 cents does not seem unreasonable for a city's daily newspaper. Or maybe just allow subscribers to comment.

Re:Good Idea

[LostCluster]

The 99 cent fee sounds like 1. An excuse to charge the credit card presented as ID, 2. A way to make back the credit card fees and cost of having a person review the transaction.

Re:Good Idea

[cpghost]

The 99 cent one-time fee is a great way to verify user identity by using the banking / credit-card system.

ALL CAPS?

[HycoWhit]

Can I a pay a little extra to make my post all caps?

I'm partially in favor

[dustin_0099]

I don't want future employers googling me for my political views, so I want to use a pseudonym, but I'd be happy to give them my full name to activate the account.

Re:Good Idea

[selven]

Correct, it's "squid0". Now shut up and be glad it's not "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--".

Re:Good Idea

[mrsquid0]

No, but if slashdot ever initiates such a rule I will legally change it.

Re:Good Idea

[bill_kress]

In the case of newspaper article comments I'm not sure a real name is a bad idea.

I've seen (and left) a few in a local paper that were terribly insensitive--not always wrong, exactly, but when your grandma drives into a car and everyone is killed--the local paper, read by the family, might not be the best place to debate the merits of/problems associated with DWO.

I've seen articles about parental negligence, a 20 year old drowning because he didn't wear his life jacket, etc. with some very insensitive finger pointing.

I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).

So having a real name associated won't (and shouldn't) stop people from posting their opinions, but it might help them remember that they are communicating with real human beings with feelings and not throwing a comment into some abstract internet debate.

Re:Good Idea

[Macrat]

Actually spammers don't mind paying small fees to spam forums as their credit card info is stolen anyway.

But the banks DON'T verify that...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The 99 cent one-time fee is a great way to verify user identity by using the banking / credit-card system.

Yeah, umm... The thing about that is that they don't verify your identity. At all.

No, seriously you can get a credit card in ANYONE'S name so long as you're paying the bill. They verify the transaction, not the person's identity.

I was gonna flame you, but...

[Radical Moderate]

...you have a point. I mean, our paper has always been very strict about verifying the identity of writers of letters to the editor. So what's the difference? Google. No employer is going to sift through thousands of newspapers to see if you wrote any LTE's they don't approve of. But googling? Oh heck yes, in a heartbeat.

I still agree with the newspapers on this, but it sucks that some people will be--justifiably--afraid to speak up.