Past the edit window, and there’s one more thing I wanted to say:
It depends what you mean by informational sites. I’m not talking about the news. I’m talking about getting plain, objective information for daily use. For example: What time does a store open? (From the store’s website.). What subway lines stop at a certain station? (From a transit system’s site.). Did a certain check clear? (From my bank’s site.). In all these situations I just want to get the info and go; there’s nothing to have a conversation about.
Well of course I don’t leave comments when I get a bus schedule from MARTA. Or when I check out a restaurant menu. Though come to think of it, what’s the harm in feedback being available for sites like that? If the bus schedule doesn’t work for you, you can let them know. If the restaurant menu features items you particularly like or don’t like, you can let them know.
Sorry, just not seeing the harm and a great deal of potential good in the ability to make public comments.
Most of you know that msn works like a readers digest these days… they mostly just repost their news stories well they made the mistake of letting people use Facebook to make comments…it only lasted a year or two…at first they said "were trying o make the comments section more fair and friendly give us Abit …they never came back…
This seems quite timely. I’ve noticed recently that many of the news sites I go to have actually shut off their comments section. At least my local ones did. Earlier in the thread I said I would have no problem with that, and I don’t. But one thing did change, 3 years ago I mentioned that I never even looked at them, now (or more recently) I have started to at least glance at them. Never commenting or even repeating what I read as to use as an argument, but just to see if other people picked up on the same things I did.
In any case, I don’t mind them being gone and I do still think it’s nice because people IRL now have to read the article instead of just the comments.
Our local newspaper’s site only allows you “10” articles per month before you have to pay (although I ALWAYS seems to hit the pay wall, so I only read them in Incognito mode) and their comments are dominated by right wing trolls and russian bots with zero moderation. Their FB posts seem to have at least minimal moderation.
I’m always surprised at the lack of moderation on those comments section. On the one hand, I suppose it keeps all those people coming back, lots of clicks, lots of views. OTOH, I’ve seen some nasty stuff written in some of them. Including, in one case, someone using my dad’s name sling shit at a local politician. Luckily in that case, we all, including the target, knew who was actually responsible, so at least as far as that person was concerned, he knew it wasn’t him.
There are a lot of respectable web sites where a few idiots dominate the comments section and make an absolute joke of it. When that happens, I don’t blame bloggers for shutting comments down.
That works in ALL political directions. If Rachel Maddow gets a million comments from crude, abusive alt-right Jew-baiters, or if Ross Douthat is getting a million commenters calling him a fundie bigot, I’d tell them, “Shut it down. The commenst aren’t adding anything useful to your blog.”
I never went to msn.com again after they got rid of commenting on articles. First they had site specific login, then went to facebook plugin, then got rid of comments altogether.
Hell, half the fun of reading a news article is the comments section.
I didn’t vote because there is no option for “sometimes I still go to sites that don’t but not nearly as much.”
I don’t have facebook anymore so I can’t comment any sites that use it as a log in. (For example, Huffington Post). So I don’t go there nearly as frequently as I once did.
I’ll not be coerced into using FB again. There are other sites with the same old same old.
Considering that the average internet surfer is pretty low intelligence, I don’t get a lot of value from reading commentary to articles, etc. from readers. So, if I’m interested in reading an article, the value I receive is from the author, not from the commentary.
Mostly, comments are disabled on my end, if they even exist. Thanks javascript filter. I can enable them when I want but rarely do. For widely used sites comments seem to skew largely towards people channeling their inner toddlers having tantrums. Occasionally it’s useful to see what kinds of things people are having tantrums about. Twitter is my go-to for that use.
I prefer site specific registrations. It provides one less way to gather a broad profile of data about me. I use disposable email addresses for those registrations and just save the login info. If I lose the password I just make a new account. I may also have a completely fictional Facebook account used to access registered user content on sites that don’t allow site-specific registration but allow linking to a Facebook account.