Every online publication should have this warning label modeled after the one on alcohol bottles, even in "dry counties" in the U.S. and in countries where alcohol is banned.
On this blog, we provide room for comments, and we did use "unmoderated" comments to see how we would fare. As expected, some comments had nothing to do with the contents of a post, and some did but failed to address the post's arguments.
Of course, a few wacky comments to this blog won't make any difference to the the internet, but we wanted to be nice to our readers - and show that we read and understand comments. So, the setting was changed to "always moderated".
Now and then, we are reminded of this choice when we encounter some heavily commented article in a major online publication. When interest is huge and emotions run high, their moderators are not to be envied.
Do people at the big online sites keep score of the workload of crappy, non-sensical reader comments? Do the moderators get teased, as in "hey, hit a big one today", "how are you hanging in there"?
A perfect example of the big emotions this week was an article in the German Zeit online about pig heads at the site of a planned mosque in the east German city of Leipzig.
The number of comment postings where the text had been replaced by a note to please stay on topic or a stronger "this comment was removed because it violates our community standards" was way greater than average. This is not surprising to anybody familiar (or unfamiliar for that matter) with the web but there is one question prompted by the large number of removed comments.
What influence do these reader reactions have on the moderators or authors at the publication? Our guess would be that, while at times considered a drag on resources, the totality of comments is another tool in the tool set of the publication to better gage "what's out there".
So, make yourselves heard but please comment in moderation.
No comments:
Post a Comment