It was beyond horrible. People were commenting about how glad they were that this person they *didn’t even know* was gone. “One fewer idiot” type of comments. It was one of those things where it was so bad you didn’t want to look away.
The moderation was non-existent.
I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/coronavirus...
Who wants to scroll through 1k comments in a narrow, awkwardly-paginated column? They also allow posts from anyone with an email account (mitigated somewhat by the paywall on most articles) which results in a lot of high-emotion, low-information spam. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal limits comments only to people with a subscription. Perhaps as a result, the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I wonder if this is driven by the different susbscription prices, or just the different audience.
How many WSJ comments sections have you actually read?
I don't dare look at the WP now.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/13/tim-dow...
* https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/25/inquirer-daily-new...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/Our_Comments_Are_Changi...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20100707_Le...
In my mind, the answer is quite easy: increasing the amount of page loads increases the amount of ads people see. If you deliver emails along the lines of "someone replied to your comment", people are gonna click on them and you're going to serve another set of ads.
Moderation requires effort and reduces the amount of page loads, therefore most websites that use comments don't want to do that.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
I don't think removing comments will affect page views by much.
I think I saw one system where you couldn't comment directly, but you could post a reaction. It would need to be approved before being visible to others first. I think such a system, while pretty labor intensive, would be preferable.
Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.