Well, newspapers have given in to regulating comments
instead of supporting free speech. Rather than embrace
the opportunity to bond with readership they have tried
to control their reader's comments.
Okay! What can they do? Sure people take things to
the lowest common denominator. That's human nature and
so many tests have been done that demonstrate how forums
left to their own will generate into useless debauchery.
Essentially what newspapers have done, while watching
market share disappear, is work to regulate readership in
their comment sections.
There is a better way. What newspapers need to do is
to endorse community amongst its readers. The best way
to do this is to have a rating system where readers rate
the comments from 1 to 5. Each week the highest score is
posted along with the best comment. It might seem silly,
I know, but it works.
A common method media tries is to let readers report
abuse. It's not very effective. I would like to take
this a step further and involve community where the
reported comment could be flagged and the original author
given an opportunity to retract or make further comment.
I would do this by changing the background color of a
flagged comment and then automatically deleting the
comment after a set period of time if no rebuttal is
filed by the original submitter. For economic reasons
try letting this self manage for a while with limited
editorial involvement.
A third suggestion is a word filter. I like writing
this kind of code in Perl where it simply replaces
offensive words with dashes or asterisks. Granted the
word list is limiting, and there are always clever ways
to get around offensive words ('be atch' for example),
but if someone uses the 'f' word they get a clue that
they are inhibiting everybody elses free speech with such
limited vocabulary and maybe after a time a word list
could be developed that proves partially effective.
I work cheap, I'm available and I want a job doing
this.
