Commenting on the commenters
Commenters offer an unfiltered look at what people think about a story or a website, but they are sometimes more of a headache for a site, than a benefit. While insightful discussion does happen in the forums, as this piece in Politico notes, the anonymity of commenters allows for racist and prejudicial inflammatory remarks that wouldn’t ever fly in another setting.
“Nobody would tolerate if, at the end of ‘Meet the Press,’ if a bunch of weirdos stormed the studio and started screaming weird racist stuff,” says Wonkette editor, Ken Layne. “They’d call the police.”
The overwhelming crudeness of some comments has led some sites to take cautionary monitoring measures. One statistic jumped out at me.
At the left-leaning HuffingtonPost.com, which got 600,000 comments last month, the site has a paid staff of 30 full-time and part-time moderators who work in shifts around-the-clock to filter each blog comment. They also “post-moderate” the comments attached to news stories appearing on the site.
So, to sum it up: Journalists are being fired left and right; papers are closing; and Huffington Post, which doesn’t pay its bloggers, is paying 30 people to moderate the junk that people write in the comments for free. Feel free to comment.
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Wow, thats weird that the bloggers are not paid but the moderators are. Maybe thats fair though because the moderators have a tedious job and maybe the bloggers are writing because they want to.
I think it’s also because the bloggers are getting the exposure of being published on a site that gets something like 16 million unique visitors a month while commenters have the unenviable job of sifting through the rants and raves of the entire left-leaning internet populace.
I agree Chris. After reading all that abusive hate someone might need therapy! It would probably be a strain on the eyes too.
I bet you see this start to change, though. As the culture begins to accept the fact that comments are the responsibility of the poster and not the Web site, attacks in the vein of “OMG, this comment I read on Huffington Post proves without a doubt that it’s full of racists/leftists/communists” will start to lose traction.
We don’t ask the police to go around telling crazy people on the street corners to shut up, and I wouldn’t form an opinion of a city based on what some nutcase had to say about it.
Kinda funny that Wonkette is comparing itself to Meet the Press, too. C’mon, it’s Wonkette.
Interestingly, there are also legal ramifications to moderating vs. not moderating. Sites that moderate are held liable for commenters in certain defamation lawsuits, whereas those that have free-posting are not. I’m just playing devil’s advocate, but maybe another reason commenters make some cheese at HuffPo - they could decide the sites fate in a lawsuit.
Justified or not, the situation isn’t likely to endure, or dominoes will start falling. A professor of mine once left me with this open-ended question: In the future, where’s the money to pay journalists going to come from? A lot of content is simply re-posted material or comments on someone else’s original reporting. With a source of free content, commercial blogs suddenly think they don’t have to pay their writers, and when mainstream media follow suit, there won’t be anyone getting paid to report. And when everything’s free, there are no professionals.