I completely understand why the Washington Post closed comments on one of their blogs. Not only do I understand, I agree with it.
I came to the Internet via Compuserve, in the days when Compuserve was a pretty decent online service (at least, compared to AOL…). Over time I found myself moderating a CNN forum on Compuserve and when CNN migrated their interactive services to the Web I migrated too.
Working for CNN Interactive was “Internet by Fire”. On March 31, 1996 we launched the CNN.com Community with 4 staff members. On April 2, 1996 we were already swamped and overwhelmed by the amazing number of posts that were downright hateful, racist, and transcended the term “flame” by a factor of ten. Because of CNN’s visibility and international reach, we had the Palestinians fighting Israelis on our Middle East forum, the gay-haters trashing the gays on our Gay Rights forum, and as time went on, it got worse.
When I left CNN in 2000, we had an international staff of around 20 people and were moderating the site 24/7. Thanks to Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Princess Diana, Pakistan, India, Israel, Kosovo and the 2000 election, we were moderating in excess of 30,000 posts per day. Those were just the legit posters. We also had an interesting group of folks who liked to flame themselves via multiple personas and browsers. Despite the ugliness, CNN.com Community was really a wonderful place to be — thriving, interesting and the provider of my daily adrenaline rush for over four years.
Moderating a site like that is incredibly time-intensive. You can automate post removals, spam removal, add email verification for a very thin layer of identification, but the bottom line is that it took someone’s eyes to be on the posts and removing those that went beyond the limits. Not only was it time-intensive, it was exhausting to read sometimes. I can remember times where a partner and I would have to sit and watch the Clinton impeachment board for hours, one locking out the newest troll while the other was cleaning up the mess. We’d be on IM shooting names and links back and forth in an effort to stop things from reeling out of control.
Some might argue that this was over-moderation, but having seen it from the inside out, I differ with that. It wasn’t just a question of getting rid of gratuitous flames; it was also the strain on the system itself. When the Pakistanis were spamming the boards with ‘nuke India’ messages and vice versa (one of the ugliest conversations I ever saw on the Web), or when the Republicans and Democrats were spamming each other with anti/pro Clinton sentiments, it could amount to a denial of service for all of the other areas of the community. Maintaining the balance was hard.
Looking at the Washington Post blog, there’s an entry from January 17th referencing comment issues and remarking that there seemed to be problems with some comments publishing. On the 19th they announced that they were shutting them off.
Reasons for comment deletions aside (and I’m sure there were very legit reasons for that), I don’t believe blog software is developed enough to handle high traffic volumes, a language filter, and a moderating queue that could ease the man-hours needed to moderate high volume commenting. My experience from the inside out also is that it was a painful decision for the Washington Post to make. I don’t believe they wanted to do it or that they would have chosen to do it if they’d had a better option. A few screamers can squelch any productive discussion and that would appear to be the case here.
The thing is, the conversation isn’t over simply because the Post turned off their comments. People with legitimate concerns over the article itself will write about it on their own blog. Perhaps their comments will be more thoughtful, because they are not the Washington Post.
There are some who have a need to try to use a media site like the Post (or CNN) as their personal megaphone, believing that they somehow have a more legitimate voice by commenting than they do by blogging. In fact, the voices I am more likely to consider would be those who think about the article and write on their own blogs about it, because they own it. Anonymous comments don’t lend themselves to the same credibility.
Technorati Tags: blogs, conversation, conversational media, washington post
Update: Edited to clarify that Washington Post closed only one of their blogs’ comment areas – Thanks, Amy!
Update: Dave Winer asks: Do you care if the Washington Post has comments?
