Comments don’t scale?

From Editor and Publisher: a cautionary tale about what happens when comments facilities are stuck on the end of articles without any moderation…

So much for participatory journalism. The Ventura County Star in Ventura, Calif., announced today that it has shut off comments on its Web site because the tone of those comments had grown too vicious and incendiary.

[...] The site’s managers discovered that race became a common thread. "Whether it was a school award or a crime, it seemed that the comments quickly devolved into a discussion of race and immigration," Moore wrote. "We know that much of that is triggered by talk radio and its incessant blaming of societal problems on race. But it also showed what these readers were interested in talking about. So we let it run, deleting the comments that were profane or defamatory."

Recently, that changed.

"The viciousness of the comments began to escalate," according to Moore. "We found more and more of our time was being spent moderating the comments. With comments posted on dozens of stories, it ate up much of our day." That’s when the Star’s staff decided to eliminate the comments.

The intro to the piece is bound to infuriate people - allowing comments isn’t "participatory journalism" as I’d understand it - but it is a warning that you can’t simply stick a commenting facility up on all your stories, and hope people will play nice. As, of course, many leading bloggers will tell you.

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COMMENTS / 4 COMMENTS

As tempting as it is to write a silly comment here, I’ll just say that although I dislike sites/blog without comment facilities, I don’t purposefully avoid sites that don’t have them- the prime example for me being engadget/gizmodo; only one lets you post reactions, and I still read both. The negative implications of commenting could be well observed with the fandom idiocy about the announcement of the next generation consoles last week.

Mull thought this on May 25 05 at 11:28 pm

My “How to catch mice” page ended up being the top hit for that phrase on Google (still is, I think). The comments went crazy. A whole community of mouse-hunters was revealed, engaging in really open and personable conversations … two people even formed a romantic attachment as a direct result of meeting eachother in the page’s comments (honest, I’m not making this up).

Eventually the spam started to creep in and I couldn’t keep on top of it, so after many thousands of comments I switched it all off, and the comments are no more. Pity though, it was fun reading about everyone’s mouse-chasing adventures.

Giles thought this on May 26 05 at 12:02 am

I’ve been developing blogs at Musselburgh Grammar School for 18 months now and have always had open comments. We’ve just had to trust the pupils not to abuse the facility. After nearly 100,000 hits on the blogs in this time and thousands of comments I have only had to remove around a dozen for being a bit off the mark. It’s rare that they’re racist or offensive to an individual.

What really gets on my goat are other educational ‘bloggers’ taking off the comment facility for their students. They then clamour to talk about how wonderful their blogs are when, in fact, they are just doing what they have done all along as classroom teachers - YOU’LL listen while I TELL you what I have to say. What’s the point? Pupils often have more interesting things to say than the teachers!

Rant over. The French school trip live blog that we have just run (with Podcast, too) went very well and had 300 comments from the whole community for our 40 kids. Not one has had to be removed. Maybe Musselburgh really is the ‘honest toon’.

Ewan McIntosh thought this on May 29 05 at 4:24 pm

This is a shame. I visited the Ventura County Star offices in April and at that time, Alicia Hoffman (the online editor) and Howard Owens (head of new media) were hopeful that they wouldn’t have to eliminate comments. I think the problem could be easily dealt with by taking it out of the realm of the online editor’s responsibilities and having someone - an intern, even - moderate the comments and deal with IP banning and such.

Jackie Danicki thought this on May 30 05 at 5:29 pm

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