Chicago Sun-Times will temporarily cease to run comments

I've probably mentioned this before, but my wife freelanced a feature for the local metro about a classic violinist. The discussion on the comments section focused almost entirely on the violinist's breasts in the photo, and whether she would need to get implants to be a successful musician.

The violinist was 13 years old.

That was the day I pretty much stopped reading the local metro.

 

If you have to have reader comments, require a Facebook login. Make the cretins own what they say.

havegunwilltravel won't be nearly as troll-like if he's down there as John R. Wilhelm. (Hoyt's grandson.)

 

Don't forget about spam. I don't understand how, but every time a I read an online story in the large metro in my area, there are usually a couple of spam comments. I don't usually read deep into comments sections, but I notice the spam comments near the end of articles.

My shop went from the free-for-all comments (make a name and email address) to making you use a Facebook profile to comment. The thought was that there would be less trolling if posters had their names (and in many cases, pictures) beside their comments. Didn't have an effect. If anything, trolls were more defiant. We've now eliminated comments, and I don't think anyone at the shop misses them. I can't recall a single event we every got anything worthwhile out of them.

 

That's surprising and illuminating. Thanks.

 

I can make $7,429 a month working from home ....

 

I absolutely agree with this. Facebook commenting is the way to go.

 

We're a fairly small daily. We have hit every level, from totally anonymous to "register with your real name and contact info, but display whatever name you want and we'll ban you for being an ass" finally to "real name, all the time." Much of the random discussion on stories got scaled way back, but we still have a few stories a week that generate 30+ comments, and one every two weeks or so that pushes 100 comments.

It's rarely enlightening discussion, unfortunately. It boils down to a few regulars. We have one drug addict who seems to use the comment section of any random article to talk about whatever is on his mind, from movies to sports to life. We have a know-it-all who writes incredibly long takedowns of basically everything we do, and we have about a dozen intense Tea Partiers who go on and on and on about what you'd expect, health care, Common Core or whatever the tin-foil hat scandal of the week is, then just enough rotating liberals to egg them on, but who never stay around long enough to actually win an argument. (Ha. Win an argument in a comment section. I crack myself up.)

They're not as much of a cesspool as they were, but they're still a far cry from valuable. At this point there's not much left to do to clean them up.

 

Just as easy to fake as a fake log-in.

 

That is true, Bubbler. However, if a trolling commenter really wants to go through setting up a dummy Facebook account with a dummy email address since you can't use the same email address for a separate Facebook account last time I looked, why not make it harder?

 

Saw this linked from Romenesko this morning:

"My theory is people who bemoan lack of comment sections are Web 1.0 folks who remember when comments were discussions, not digital cross-burnings. Those same folks now use Twitter/Facebook for that discussion and haven’t spent time in daily news site comment sections in a while. If you’re going to build a place for a community, you ought to have the right services, processes and tools in place to serve it. But news site comments sections are there more because of inertia than anything else."

http://www.ourmaninchicago.net/2014/04/sun-times-comments-on-news-sites/

 

I would not notice if comments were eliminated. There is no point in reading them; they add nothing.

 

Most people lack your restraint. There are threads here I know I shouldn't open, yet I do.