Trolled to death
Here's a perfect example of how comment systems don't "scale" (in the social sense) - any site that covers controversial topics (especially political ones) will end up getting overwhelmed by commenters picking fights. Here's what the Washington Post had to do:
At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The Washington Post Company and other related issues.
...
But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.
This happens on any highly trafficked system - popular usenet groups became useless piles of dreck years ago, and blogs and forum sites are merely following that trend. Look at slashdot or digg, for instance - for every useful comment in a thread, there are dozens (sometimes hundreds) of comments that - boiled down - say "you're a moron" (only in less polite terms).
Any site that gets popular is going to end up going where a lot of the popular political blogs went a long while back - comments off. The only trouble with that is that tracking referers is hard, due to the absolutely enormous volume of referral spam.
Comments
Slashdot full of trolls, but rating works OK
[David Mitchell] January 20, 2006 13:33:24.602
Some would say that it's to silence legit criticism
[sean] January 20, 2006 15:41:37.770
Daily KOS
This doesn't mean that it's right to become incivil in the commants section of blogs, but c'mon... It's easy to become irrational when the MSM starts spewing far-right talking points as fact.
Damn MSM, so republican... :)
Here's the thing
[ James Robertson] January 20, 2006 16:30:00.810
Comment by James Robertson
The topic pretty much doesn't matter. As soon as you start yelling (in text, all caps), or swearing - a huge number of people just tune you out. At that point, all you're accomplishing is "preaching to the choir". All your pals will chime in with "atta boys", and everyone you might have managed to convince with reasonable language use will discount everything else you say. Possibly on a permanent basis.
I agree
[sean] January 20, 2006 17:15:37.249
..with everything you've said.
But it's also a natural response from people who feel that they're being ignored/disenfranchised to shout (or riot, etc.) There's nothing like politics to bring out this sort of response from people.
TWP deals in politics, hence.
I don't think a call for order is the solution here. I can't think of any solution actually.
Simply blog your responses
[Brandon Corfman] January 21, 2006 12:38:53.180
If you have a beef, blog it. Sites like memorandum keep track of the discourse pretty well and keep the illogical or profanity-ridden threads confined to their own sites. I don't really see the problem with keeping the comments off.