Slashdot Mirror
Popular Science Is Getting Rid of Comments
Daniel_Stuckey writes "From an article announcing the sites' decision to do away with comments: 'It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter. ... even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. ... A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.'"
This comes alongside news that Google is trying to clean up YouTube comments by adding integration with Google+. "You’ll see posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities, engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles."
No, I think you're missing the point (and fixating on a poorly worded sentence). Lively debate about the finer points of evolution or climate science are one thing. They're talking about armies of trolls with no interest in dialog who spread lies. They are politically motivated, where you are probably motivated by a desire to uncover the truth. The signal to noise ratio is too low. Many of 'them' are processes on computers, not people, and those bots can say a whole lot more on the internet than an army of real people.
Saying that this is the mag trying to silence dissent is sadly close to what the trolls are doing to their comments. Do you really think they don't want to have lively debate between educated, thoughtful people with different views?
Slashdot has an excellent comment system. Maybe that's what they need?
on the walled garden. Evolution, as I have understood it, is related to increasing abilities from learning from previous mistakes. Yet our society is dumbing down so fast it is astonishing. And yet another wall to prevent one seeing the wall with the writing on it. Fuck me running.