I think, for the most part, general news sites shouldn't have comment sections.
Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#12I really hope that we can figure out this whole "people being absolutely terrible on the internet" thing. A lot of people say that it's just because this is how people really are, but I'm not convinced. I know for a fact that I'm a lot ruder on the internet than I'd ever want to be in real life, regardless of consequences. I've found that "real name" policies help (not necessarily forcing a real name, but at least tr…
It's not the anonymity, it's the lack of consequences. In big cities, people are casually rude in traffic even though they can see each others' faces; but they'll probably never meet again. The clerk at the DMV treats you as shitty as they can get away with. By contrast, an anonymous seller on eBay may go to great lengths to make you happy beyond the terms of service, just because your review will stay with them.
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#13I'm sure that this change will mean that HuffPo's comment section will live up to the high quality established by articles such as "Lady Gaga nude video" and "Amanda Bynes tweets something crazy."
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#14Their site, and therefore they can do anything they want with it, but real name policies are like a bur under my saddle. I would never comment on a site that required me to give my identity beyond the ones I expose by choice (and all the ones I expose without, IP etc).
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#15I really hope that we can figure out this whole "people being absolutely terrible on the internet" thing. A lot of people say that it's just because this is how people really are, but I'm not convinced. I know for a fact that I'm a lot ruder on the internet than I'd ever want to be in real life, regardless of consequences. I've found that "real name" policies help (not necessarily forcing a real name, but at least tr…
It's not just the internet. What's going to happen on HuffPo when the nasty comments don't go away? Use the State to bludgeon the offensive speakers? Where will that end?
Historically you lose your right to free speech when you start making death threats.
If you've read the news recently you'd see a lot of very violent stuff being thrown at people. Internet or not, people are not allowed to say they are going to rape your corpse and harass you over and over. So "using the State to bludgeon the offensive speakers" seems like a reasonable reaction to these people.
Some of the stuff (that bomb threat twitter thing) is a bit much, but there's a limit to freedom of speech.
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#16I think, for the most part, general news sites shouldn't have comment sections.
I feel the opposite. Nowadays, I can't stand reading general news without a comments section. I think it's one of the areas where "crowd intelligence" actually works amazingly well: in uncovering fallacies, subtle agendas, propaganda, misrepresentation of facts, etc. I feel I might be polluting my mind when I read a piece of general news that is not being subject to commenting.
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#17I think, for the most part, general news sites shouldn't have comment sections.
I feel the opposite. Nowadays, I can't stand reading general news without a comments section. I think it's one of the areas where "crowd intelligence" actually works amazingly well: in uncovering fallacies, subtle agendas, propaganda, misrepresentation of facts, etc. I feel I might be polluting my mind when I read a piece of general news that is not being subject to commenting.
It all depends on how things are run. On some sites the comments are written by people who are borderline illiterate. On others the comments are insightful.
I am somewhat hesitant to say it, but a good policy might be to charge people a small fee (like $5/yr) to post comments. Much of the trolling and illiterate nonsense would be would be filtered by such a system, at least from what I have seen in places like Metafilter or the WELL.
Edit: or we could do things mailing list / Usenet style and just have people run spam filters on their own. Of course, some NGs are overrun with noise that makes them almost unreadable. Also, most computer users are not sophisticated enough to actually set up a killfile or spam filter on their own.
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#18Well, this happened in the biggest media company in Sweden (Aftonbladet) back in 2011 when they required everyone to login and authorize Facebook access to comment.
The editor made the choice after the attack in Norway[1] and brought up that the norwegians handled the situation very good with more openness, more conversion and more democracy. He goes on saying that the hate is too much for normal people and if you want to say what you think, you should stand for what you think.
Blogpost in swedish from the editor: http://bloggar.aftonbladet.se/janhelin/2011/08/sta-for-vad-d...
Same blogpost translated to english: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#19>"I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity." Only a privileged person can think like this. So what happens to all the people who live in places where sharing a conflicting opinion can get them in trouble? I say that as if USA is not of those places, but lately....
Even a privileged person should not think like that. When you are looking for a job, do you want a controversial political opinion from 10 years ago to get in the way? Ward Churchill learned this lesson the hard way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_September_11_at...
Re: Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity
#20The trolls are winning.