Who is closing comment sections?

[Back posting on the blog after a summer hiatus.]

There has been news coverage lately of news outlets ending their online comments, most notably NPR. The Quad-City (Ill.) Times also ended its online comments in August. Some of the best commentary on these changes was from readers themselves (of the Guardian). Salon also write a useful article.

Both the Times and NPR note that their organizations and individual journalists are on Twitter and Facebook, and the paper still publishes letters to the editor.

The editor of the Quad-City Times, Autumn Phillips, wrote:

I’m not breaking any ground here. By shutting off online comments, the Quad-City Times joins a long line of media companies doing the same. This past October, Wired magazine published an article, “A Brief History of the End of the Comments.” The first domino, they wrote, was probably Popular Science magazine in 2014, followed by CNN and the Chicago Sun-Times that same year, citing concerns over “quality.” National Public Radio is ending comments later this month. 

This is all true, but I am skeptical that these changes are "the first domino."

Comment complexity and usage on Reddit

From the Huffington Post: "The More You Comment Online, The Dumber Your Comments Become: Science explains why trolls are the worst."

The headline doesn't help matters. Computer scientists looked at 40 million Reddit comments and found that as users posted more often, their comments became less complex and sophisticated. Basically, they became shorter, which makes sense in protracted discussions or flame wars, although the study did not examine whether the comments became nastier. Remember, too, that this is Reddit, which has its own community and culture.

New software for more civil comments online

I am closely following the effectiveness of this and other similar software. It is called Civil Comments and it uses user-generated feedback to try to temper comments sections. The Alaska Dispatch News, the largest newspaper in Alaska, is the third publication to announce it will use the system.

Basically, if you post a comment you are asked to rate a few other comments along with yours. It may seem odd to rate your own comment, but I think this chance to reconsider your comment is important. Some portion of angry comments might be deleted when the commenter is given a chance to reconsider, even just a few minutes after they wrote it. According to the Civil Comments website, "Our algorithms analyze the reviews and decide which comments to publish.  Abusive comments are held back."

The Dispatch News already uses a Facebook commenting system, which some research suggests may prompt fewer angry comments because it is less anonymous (Rowe, 2015).

Rowe, I. (2015). Civility 2.0: a comparative analysis of incivility in online political discussion. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 121-138.

Times introduces Top 10 comments feature

The New York Times has begun a feature called "Our Top 10 Comments of the Week," a collection of what the paper considers its best comments "as selected by our readers and the journalists who moderate nearly every comment," according to the Times.

As you would expect, the comments they chose are generally thoughtful, well-considered and offered a point of view one might not have considered. Nothing provocative was featured (although provocative is not necessarily a bad thing).

This article seems in line with this article by the Times in November 2014 about its most influential commenters. It is an effort to take comments seriously at the Times, and recognizes (I think) the value readers place on the paper's comments section. The Times is treating this like valued content - it's content the paper sells. I suspect we might see more Times stories about trends in the comments section or profiles of commenters.

The Troll Hunters

This is a very interesting and disturbing story in the MIT Technology Review called "The Troll Hunters," about Internet hate speech and journalists who cover/expose it in Sweden. It is sort of like Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" only instead of child molesters it's people who post hate speech online. Journalists track down Internet trolls who slander or harass others and confront them with the evidence, live on camera.