Why Stephen Fry has turned off comments

[major_clanger]

Stephen Fry, in a coda to a blog post about his relationship with Apple, nails it on the head regarding comment sections to web sites:

I don’t know about you, but my eyes are already trained only to read the top half of a web page these days. Rather as a Victorian would not look below the waist, I do not let my eyes have even a second’s contact with the revolting Have Your Say or Comments section of a BBC site, a YouTube page or any blog or tech forum. The lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison. I suppose it has to be expelled somewhere, but you will forgive me for not wanting to be close by when it happens. It is a pity, a real pity, that the furious few pollute the atmosphere and obstruct the pipelines that might otherwise allow the reciprocal possibilities of the world of User Generated Content that Web 2.0 promised all those years ago.

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Very sad, and very true.

Contrariwise, it's not (for the most part) a problem on LJ. It appears to be a scale thing - on LJ, I would expect to be know to a good proportion of the people reading a comment I make.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Largely true, and I think the 'friends' system on LJ helps with this.

However, it isn't always true, as a run in with a certain individual I had quite a few years ago proved.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Yes - the friends system makes LJ a much more "safe place" than most. I moderate all my comments from non-friends. But I also agree it doesn't work all the time.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten that - anyone we know? Or would you prefer to let the incident fade into well-deserved obscurity?

Another site that does suprisingly well is MetaFilter, but then it is ruthlessly moderated (and to an extent, self-moderated: assholery is not tolerated.) Making Light is also good, thanks to the Iron Rod of Disemvowelling wielded by Patrick and Teresa. BoingBoing is tolerable, although the moderation there is a bit weaker and there are too many wannabee-Corys making prats of themselves.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Someone who lives in California.

If that is insufficient I'll remind you tonight.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Written a book or two, by any chance?

Yes, I remember that. Oh well, it takes years to build a reputation but only days, hours or minutes to lose it - something that people who have a high opinion of themselves would do well to remember.

[andrewducker]

I agree. Once you have a very large number of people commenting it's impossible to have a community feeling any more, making it a lot more likely that people on the fringes will get away with more.

I've read a fair number of pieces on scaling internet communities, and every one of them seems to have started out with a small number of people with a friendly atmosphere, hit a certain point and run into exactly the same issues.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Mumsnet's at an interesting point on that curve I think - to my mind it's just big enough that there's always a range of interesting conversations happening 24 hours a day, but just barely small enough that it's held in place by shared cultural norms. But I wouldn't bet much money on it staying at that point for too long.

Yes

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I think I came round to this way of thinking some 15 years ago when I stopped reading usenet. The amount of positive friendly comment was far outweighed by the negative. And this is before I noticed any big flamewars which seemed to pass me by.

Nowadays I try to only comment on very technical things or where the community is based around my real live friends.

I really can't see the readers of a newspaper website as a community - there are just too many of them. There is nothing to limit their excesses. (Yes there are systems for user based moderation or rating of comments but I'm not happy that they are working successfully).

-----------

In blog terms what *should* be happening is something like:
Person A posts something that is seen as inflamatory or needs commenting
Person B makes a comment along the lines of "I disagree strongly with this and here is what I think - an article on my own blog".

IM(not so)HO

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Sad, but true. I find the comments on many newspaper articles to be appalling.

And I find it actually discourages me from posting things that I really want to talk about. I hope my friends would not react in that kind of manner, but the fear still lurks.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

On newspaper sites, you tend to get clear communities of trolls. The Guardian's comments are filled with nutjob right-wing Americans, for instance - they seem to have arrived in force during the coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, and stayed on the basis of having found a ready source of (by their standards) ultra-liberal news coverage to rant about.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

The commentisfree website is interesting; among all the trolling is often one comment that completely skewers the main article, sometimes by pointing out that the author works for the Institude of Biased Studies, or has been involved in promoting something ludicrous and damaging like the "satanic ritual abuse" phoney scandal.

There are two features I'd like to see on that site:
- ability to view comments that the mods have deleted
- a small killfile facility

[davidwake.livejournal.com]

If you agreed, then how come you scrolled to the bottom of the comments to add your own?

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I think it is primarily a function of how well-known one is. I've only had a couple of comments on the academic blog that could count as 'flames' (on Arthur and Atlantis, so obvious nutter-beacons). Some sections of newspaper sites are also oases of propriety - Charlotte Higgins' blog on the Grauniad, or Mary Beard's on the Thunderer, though the latter has attracted the occasional troll. But yes, many of the more prominent and/or political blogs have comments sections that are indeed cesspits. If I was Stephen Fry, I'd have turned comments off as well.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I think there needs to be karma points for commenters, and so every now and then there's a public post that allows anyone to comment, and if you start getting enough karma points (from people who have already been acknowledged as sensible commenters on that blog/site) then you get to have access to commenting on other articles ... but similarly you can have karma points taken away and stopped from posting to those articles if you drop below the karma level.

But with a limit for how many negative points you can get for a single ill judged response, so you can't get kicked off for saying the wrong thing *once*, but it has to be a pattern.