Summary American magazine has decided an open forum at the bottom of articles can be bad for science.
LONDON (Web Desk) - Website says comments harm debate, while YouTube begins integration with Google+ to bring friends and popular personalities to greater visibility - and hide random remarks.
Are comments on articles a form of argument, or discourse, or do they damage scientific understanding?
Popular Science is closing comments on its articles. Citing "trolls and spambots", the 141-year-old American magazine has decided that an open forum at the bottom of articles "can be bad for science".
The decision was "not made lightly" said online content director Suzanne LaBarre - nor, appropriately, without some supporting scientific evidence.
Citing research from a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, the magazine argues that exposure to bad comments can skew a reader s opinion of the post itself.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they d previously thought," Brossard wrote in the New York Times.
"If you carry out those results to their logical end," says LaBarre, "commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded – you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch."
If Popular Science s commenters were in proportion to that on most other large sites, they made up about 1% of those who read the piece.
(The Guardian s commenters are about 0.7% of readers on average, according to a statistic calculated by Martin Belam from public figures, with a very small number of commenters generating a large proportion - 20% in Belam s calculation - of input.) There s no data on how many people read comments on news sites, though
The reaction to Popular Science s announcement was mixed (though on their site, there was silence: comments weren t enabled on the post announcing comments were to be disabled).
The Washington Post s Alexandra Petri argued that "it can t come soon enough", but Matthew Ingram of paidContent echoed the sentiment of many, asking "why not try to fix comments instead of killing them?" That s what Google s trying to do. The company has announced a major change to the way comments on YouTube, widely seen as the worst of the worst, are displayed.
Now, comments will be tied to a commenter s Google+ profile - which they will have to have to be able to comment. When viewing comments, you ll will be able to see posts from those who your Google+ circles show as friends and acquaintances, or who are "popular personalities" near the top of the thread; by contrast those from random passersby are relegated further down the list.
As already occurs, the video s creator will have a privileged place in the thread. But so too will "popular personalities" on YouTube.
But hiding bad comments only solves part of the problem. For one thing, the person who moderates the comments still has to read all the abuse. It s preferable, surely, to focus on encouraging good comments?
That s the approach the Huffington Post is taking, as it attempts to increase the accountability of its commenters.
Starting this month, the site is asking new users to verify their identity when creating an account, in the hope that it will "reduce the number of drive-by or automated trolls."
"Rather than participating in threads and promoting the best comments, our moderators are stuck policing the trolls with diminishing success," said Jimmy Soni, the group s Managing Editor.
It s a weaker requirement than "real name" policies of the past, since the site is keen to point out that "many people are not in a professional or personal situation where attaching their name to a comment is feasible". But, argues Soni,
"We are capable of doing far worse things to one another when we do not have to own up to the things we do." By requiring, if not real names, then at least stable pseudonyms, HuffPo hopes to inject some humanity back into comments.
