No Comment! Why More News Sites Are Dumping Their Comment Sections
Letters to the editor have always been a key part of American newspapers, the main channel for readers to respond to the content they consume and publicly debate major political and social issues.
So in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when media outlets began publishing their content on the internet, many editors and reporters were cautiously optimistic that providing a space for online commenting would solicit more diverse audience engagement and create stronger connections between content creators and consumers.
In 2008, NPR introduced its reader commenting system, an option it embedded through a third-party system at the end of most articles on the site. In the announcement, NPR wrote: "We are providing a forum for infinite conversations on NPR.org. Our hopes are high.
We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative."
And an adventure it has been,
but not so much a positive one. Eight years and millions of toxic exchanges later, NPR announced the abrupt end of the experiment.
"After much experimentation and discussion, we've concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org storie
s are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users," wrote Scott Montgomery, former managing editor for digital news, in his 2016 farewell-to-comments address.
Like countless other news outlets, NPR found itself overwhelmed by trolls, anonymous contributors who had too often hijacked comment threads with offensive and inappropriate submissions.
Simply put, trolls are the loudest voices in the room, the ones who write "crazy, nasty things just to get people all riled up," as this latest Above the Noise episode explains in its exploration of trolling psychology.
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