Slashdot Mirror
Another Wave of Publications Shut Down Online Comments
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."
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.