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Moderation, Such an Aggravation
Friends, readers, commenters, lend us your ears. Torontoist has, for the past few years, moderated comments (that is, unpublished comments or banned commenters) rarely—only when those comments are in clear, unambiguous, and over-the-top violation of Gothamist’s comment policy or when commenters repeatedly break those rules. At this point, we unpublish fewer than five comments a month, and ban commenters far more rarely than that. Often, that hands-off approach works well, but some times, for some topics (like, oh, say, graffiti), the conversation inevitably devolves into a bunch of ad hominem attacks and recapitulations of firmly entrenched (and tired) ideologies that stifle, rather than encourage, further conversation. It sucks, and we can’t imagine you enjoy it any more than we do.
So, what works for you? Gawker publisher Nick Denton told Portfolio that he sees comments on his set of sites “as a party. We don’t take responsibility or credit for individual comments, but we have the right to invite or disinvite guests and throw the best party we can.” Is more moderation the answer? And if we do choose more moderation, how should it work: should it be the responsibility of someone on staff, or an independent comment moderator whose sole job on the site is that? Or, should we keep the comments as they are now, almost entirely unmoderated and free-for-all? What encourages you to or prevents you from commenting on Torontoist, and would moderation help or hinder that?
We’d love to hear not only from regular commenters, but from people who comment on Torontoist less frequently, and from those who haven’t commented at all. Rather than discussing it internally, Torontoist staff have also been invited to participate in this comments of this entry; we want to hear from anyone and everyone who has an interest in making Torontoist’s comments as good as they can be.