Why Newspapers Shouldn’t Allow Comments: a newspaper is not a blog—not even its online version. Conversely, a blog is not a newspaper. Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper’s site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.
The mythical supersmart LISNews readers almost always carry on interesting discussions!
interesting discussions?!
First Post!
(oh, c’mon — *someone* had to do it)
:-)’
Nothing beats YouTube
But for dumb comments nothing beats YouTube.
This comic points that out.
can’t agree with that article more
The paper in my town has “comments” for each article AND for the letters to the editor. I’m convinced that this paper is hijacked by a small group of whackadoodles who use the comment portion of the website to nitpick and attack each other viciously, but without being outright offensive. You see the same names over and over again. It’s clear that I live in a community of jackasses.
comments?
Sure, 90 percent of science fiction is crap.
That’s because 90 percent of everything is crap.
— Theodore Sturgeon
Surprisingly, comments are no exception.
I support ratings for comments, and overall ratings for users. People will strive to garner recognition. That helps, a very little bit – true, to increase quality.
Especially if you ruthlessly promote the highest ratings. Highest ratings go to the top, period.
Surprisingly, even with structural impediments, I’ve found actual useful things in newspaper comments. But, having to dig thru 100s of micro-pages with 10 comments apiece to ry and find that stuff is an exercise in tedium. Usually, I just skip ’em.
The first page or two of comments on poorly designed sites are first-post fluff. If I were in charge, I’d enact a penalty on FP stupidity. I think I’d smack down, ie: you lose points, any comment that comes in within the first 10-30minutes of the story posting. Or the first 30 comments. Maybe just on principle smack down the user who first comments. There’s always some idiot…. Maybe for a smaller site, smack down the first user – unless they get a 5 or a 10 (whatever is the highest rating) on reviews of their comment.
Often in comment-threads, many people have individually interesting snippets, but each comment is pretty poor. If they were commenting in a wiki, then the interesting idea in each post could be rolled into a real meaty list of interesting stuff. But that’s getting really complex for a ‘comment’ section.
Sometimes comments are great for pointing out factual errors in the story.
W-H-O-R-E-! (couldn’t resist)
— Ender, Duke_of_URL