Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com

That actually makes me sad: good automoderation tools are decades (plural, yes) old and yet most website haven't caught on the fact that you need some sort of ranking to filter out spam or bots.

Thing is, newspapers as their business model currently is, have zero incentives in having quality comments. Negative incentives actually. Journalism is 20% facts reporting, 80% comments and that's generous: comments are the cheapest to write, some news website/papers are closer to 99% comments. If you have quality comments by your readers, what are you selling then?

We need to move to a business model where facts reporting and facts checking (careful: talking about facts checking, not analysis checking) are the primary services that journalists would get paid for. Comments, even quality comments can be done through a good enough moderation system and a big enough community.

I agree. I remember years ago a friend of mine was found dead (took his own life) and a local news site reported it and had a comment section.

It was beyond horrible. People were commenting about how glad they were that this person they *didn’t even know* was gone. “One fewer idiot” type of comments. It was one of those things where it was so bad you didn’t want to look away.

The moderation was non-existent.

I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.

If you build a public scribbling board, people will indeed come and scribble on it. (-:

It's a lesson that definitely pre-dates computer-mediated communication. I've seen freely accessibly physical noticeboards quickly fill up with advertisements and suchlike, posted over the notices for which the noticeboards were actually for, for one.

That seems completely reasonable, as local newspapers were never two-direction mass-communication before, but it's somehow harder to justify removing a comments section once you've decided to have it.

> I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.

That's an excellent idea, too bad management said no. a friend of mine works on an outlet where only paid subscribers can comment. Not only it reduces spam by 100% but it actually allows for a more thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

That's where making commenting a perk (among others) of being a __paying subscriber__ would be a change in business model that might be beneficial. Though that alone wouldn't get me to pay. Weight towards focus of research I find valuable might.

>I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.

Urbit ID solves this problem, too.

If trolls, or any one user, can make dozens of accounts per day, that's on you. You can very easily stop account creation from VPN and TOR IPs, and of course limit it from real IPs. Or make it so new accounts can't post for 2 weeks or need a certain "karma" to post, etc etc.

From memory, published arguments have only been against right from the start, because it was so popular that the pro side needed no support.

Comments and social sections were the big in-thing in the latter part of the noughties, if you were trying to make your site modern and hip, it was assumed you'd have comments and share links on everything. I recall a degree of belief that social media was the future and if you didn't integrate with it you'd get left behind, but I think as much it was just a design fad.

I'd guess the rationale for comments would be implicit before then. e.g. it's not strange to see that there's a chat alongside livestreams on Twitch, or a comment section beneath YouTube videos. There's a natural community of people interested in the content enough to comment. - I'd guess the difference here is that newspapers get significantly more traffic from social media.

I'd also think it comes from a positive vision of technology. The internet as a means of "making the world more connected". Empower people to communicate in ways which weren't possible before. - Turns out this wasn't as positive as expected.

Get your readers arguing with each other - makes pageviews go up, which makes ad revenue go up, all without spending more money on those pesky journalists.

I don't know if that's the best method though. If some PAC decided it was going to pay for the subscriptions of its members as a campaign, then that subscription model isn't really a big barrier.