Thursday, August 20, 2015

Comment isn't free

How to deal with the persistent and unpleasant problem of trolls? Some websites, such as The Daily Dot, appear to regard the solution as simply closing their comments sections.

Perhaps it's easy for me to say, as the proprietor of a site that gets precious few comments (and therefore requires little moderation), but it's a sorry state of affairs when the trolls are allowed to win. Part of the beauty of online media is that readers can generally respond directly to content with greater ease and speed, and comment-box conversations can extend the debate far beyond the confines of a short opinion-piece. Removing the facility for leaving comments is a trend that implies mass communication might be (disappointingly) reverting from being a dialogue back to being a one-way street once again.

Any thoughts? You know what to do.

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