Slashdot Mirror
Reuters Ends Anonymous Comments
eldavojohn writes "In an effort to retain civility, it appears that Thompson Reuters has ended anonymous web comments. You may recall the defense of the anonymous commenter, but you need look no further than Reuters' own Dean Wright (Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards of Reuters) for two lengthy editorials arguing against anonymity online. After reading his complaints against anonymous readers, it almost seems like they need a moderation system to decide what's worth reading and what's trash."
Like comment moderation would ever work
Fuck you.
- John Smith.
Without having read TFA (hey, it's a venerable Slashdot tradition!), I'm not sure what they actually hope to gain by eliminating anonymous comments. Surely as long as people are free to create throwaway accounts that are not actually tied to their real identities, trolling etc. will persist?
Signed, an AC of many years (by choice)
you knew it was coming....
Frankly, Reuters as a news organization has, like all of them, gotten a lot sloppier as competition for online eyeballs has squeezed all the value out of anything other than eye-popping headlines.
There's really not much you can do to keep commenters from hiding their identities, and it's somewhat hypocritical to do so when you omit bylines from many of your stories, and when your reporters, columnists, editors, and editorial writers are just fronts for the attitudes of the corporation.
Allowing people to remain anonymous to readers, but insisting that they give you identification you can use to trace them if they violate the TOS, seems a reasonable compromise.
Why is this under "yro"? You and I have no inherent right to make comments on their website. If they choose to invite comments, they have every right to attach conditions to that invitation. Anyone is free to setup their own site to comment on Reuters news coverage, if they don't like the conditions attached to commenting on Reuters sites.
"Why allow them?"
Seriously, why allow them? Just get a damn account. It takes seconds and you can use a pretend name if you're worried that people are going to sue you for leaking secrets or whatever.
I believe the rationale is that registration requires verification with an email address, and email addresses are not quite as disposable, and leave a subpoena-able trail that can be used to pierce the veil.
At the very least, there is an audit trail by IP address that leads to an audit trail that eventually leads to you.
If you're posting from a repressive regime, such as China, Iraq, North Korea, or (some would claim) the United States, this might concern you.
-- Terry
The correct name is Thomson Reuters
having just read a local paper's comment section to an opinion piece and seeing the first comment intentionally rude, you'd think i'd agree that with Reuters. but i don't. the anonymity of blog and news site commenters probably is not the engine of incivility in politics. there are people who are just outright angry about certain things, justifiably so or not, and they don't care how they express themselves. especially when so many of those people seem to lack an education or even knowledge of etiquette.
"To stop the terrorists."
As a semi-regular AC, all I can tell you, is that I first of all don't need yet another account to keep track of with a user name that might be rubbish anyway, since most names are taken anyway it seems, and an associated password, and furthermore, I'd hate to leave a track of what I've posted so people could use that to eventually track me down or use my previous posts to somehow "infer" the value of the _current_ post, which is another important part of anonymity; Nobody gets a free pass because they are Sir That or professor This, and good posts from people without a reputation still might get read rather than discarded because of the senders ID. Every posting is judged on its own merits, which is exactly how it should be.
In practice, I don't think it works that way. We've got a local paper, we've got some toxic anonymous commenters. It's local enough that the anonymous asshole knows who other commenters (using real names), makes personal remarks (accuses woman whose child has CP of being a "mooch" on the system, tasteful stuff like that). Newspaper editor is the corporate golden boy for all the controversy and fuss this causes, because hey, hits. Most people aren't smart enough to follow through on this, and don't boycott (I do).
And if you look, I've got a consistent pseudonym wherever I go, a relatively consistent political position, fine karma here at slashdot, and I try hard as heck to stick to facts, and avoid (well, minimize) use of dirty words -- that is, if you want to check my judgement on whether this guy is toxic or not.
And as a practical matter, we know that there are people out there who think like this, just as we know that pigs like mud. Doesn't mean we like muddy-pig-wrestling.
I've studied anonymous commenting for a while... And while I wrote passionated blog entries in its defence in my younger days (=a few years ago), I can't say I'm for it anymore. In blogs, etc... sure. In newspapers or any other "high quality" media? No.
The flaw in your reasoning is this: The problem isn't intentional trolling. The problem is "too many idiots with too much time". The people who have jobs, relationships, hobbies, etc. don't waste much of their time arguing online. What this means? People who don't have jobs, education, hobbies, relationships, etc. form a large part of the people who browse news stories and choose to comment on them. The vocal minority that is more prone to extremism (be it left, right, whatever...), doesn't really have anything intelligent to say and post in pretty much every news story. Then a sane person appears and he goes "I might have something to contribute to this story about astronomy... Whoa. 76 comments and they are just all flaming each other about immigration? I'll just leave". It is a positive feedback loop of idiocy.
Now, there are three common answers to that. One is "strict editorial policy, such as an employee approving all comments before they show up" but this is really quite unoptimal solution. It takes a lot of manhours, works well only during office hours and generally isn't good for a live conversation where people react to each other, etc. etc.. The second one is "disable all commenting" but some people actually have something important to add. The third one is "Force users to register first".
The last one reduces the amount of comments but this is a good thing: There is a lot less crap to go through when you want to see if there is anything worthwhile. Even more importantly, you can see "Oh, that idiotic comment is written by P4triot86... And that one... And that one..." so the comments section will imply "There are a few idiots regularly posting here" instead of the false "People really think this way".
I disagree. The problem is that comments in such places are not at all a realistic representation of what most people who read the articles think.
There is a vicious circle involved, where only the most hateful tend to be likely to comment, because so many of the other commenters are posting vile stuff. This is not the same thing that happens in "real world" environments, where social pressures that have evolved over centuries tend to keep things in check -- rewarding those who are diplomatic and follow decorum, and punishing those who aren't/don't. This is a GOOD THING....imagine if the discussion in a university class always degenerated into the sort of things you find in unmoderated, anonymous comments threads.
Even people who are nice in other environments may end up posting hateful comments. The Stanford Prison Experiment can give insight into why.
Add comments to a web page without the permission of the website operators.
http://reframeit.com/
I heartily second this. Slashdot does have the best moderation system I've ever experienced online. Yes, there is still noise in the signal, but it often happens here that when there's an article on, say, rockets, that actual rocket scientists who know what they're talking about provide a lot of incredibly well-informed insight. Or, when the file-sharing debate crops up, we have actual lawyers who are or have defended accused file-sharers comment on the legal distinctions under consideration. Compare that with any other site with comments (eg. Digg), where every discussion resembles the holy wars between vi and emacs back in the day.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Blizzard already doesn't allow anonymous postings, and never did. Their proposal was to involuntarily switch from handles to real names pulled from original account information that could not be changed and up until then was kept confidential. If all these people were paying a monthly fee to access the news site they might also feel more invested in how it was run. You're not seeing the same reaction because the situations have nothing in common except the word "anonymous," which never actually applied to Blizzard's forum anyway; Blizzard has always known exactly who every poster was. That entire debate was a smokescreen to keep the entire conversation revolving around whether Blizzard should use the information to plug their players' accounts into Facebook, which was the real reason for the proposed change.
I predict that eliminating anonymous commenting will bring an end to commenting in general. Sure, there will be a handful of people who will still be compelled to comment, but most wont venture. It's no different than most people, when in public, avoiding sensitive subjects. The people who will comment will more likely be those who already are compelled to post political commentary on Facebook.
Then there's the whole other issue of having your name plastered on every site you post comments.
The big problem is that the vast majority of people are nowhere near as well informed as they'd like to believe they are. There's an interesting problem society faces today: people know a little about a lot of things. We're probably exposed to more information than we've ever faced before. But it's all disseminated in bite-sized chunks that offer little to no substance. So we're aware of many things without really understand the complexities behind them. And I haven't even gotten into the issue cherry picking and bias. Compound these problems with the fact that humans tend to polarize everything. It's all or nothing.
So we have millions of misinformed, occasionally ignorant but very passionate people commenting on everything. And far too often, because they're incapable of cogent arguments the proceedings devolve into irrational name-calling. Of course, this is all facilitated by the fact that generally these interactions are anonymous.
Slashdot offers the best solution I've seen so far on any site. That said, it's dependent on three few factors:
1) The maturity and knowledge level of those posting.
2) That the site isn't heavily dominated by a particular mindset. All the moderation in the world wont help if group think takes over.
3) There's some level of responsible oversight by those running the site.
It may just be that news sites don't make for the best discussion forums anyway. Discussion forums might be better left to sites like Slashdot where there's a more specific draw.