National Journal said Friday that it would ‘join the growing number of sites that are choosing to forgo public comments on most stories.’ Editor-in-chief Tim Grieve wrote that negative user comments on its website have “cheapened” and “debased” the reader experience.
‘For every smart argument, there’s a round of ad hominem attacks — not just fierce partisan feuding, but the worst kind of abusive, racist, and sexist name-calling imaginable,’ he wrote.
(Huffington Post, May 16, 2014)
Actually, I disabled the comments feature on this site years ago. Far too many visitors were using it to either publish comments that had nothing to do with my commentaries or hurl insults at other readers (you know, the ignorant and juvenile snark that seems standard fare on Twitter and Facebook). Not to mention those who commented anonymously or under fake names because they didn’t have the balls to stand by, or the brains to defend, their comments.
Incidentally, anonymity is the lifeblood of internet trolls. Allowing people to post anonymous comments is like allowing a cancer to metastasize.
Let me hasten to clarify that visitors can still share comments, including criticisms, through my Contact feature. Many do, and I do my best to reply to as many of them as possible.
But I’m not surprised that it has taken other sites so long to disable theirs. For the dirty little secret is that sites not only tolerate trolls who publish drivel in their comments section, but even engage them because trolls help generate ad revenues.
This was never an issue for me because I established from the outset that this site would be an ad-free zone. All the same, I empathize with the National Journal and the growing number of sites now lamenting that their comments section, for so many visitors, has become a license to shrill.