The Arizona Daily Star, apparently fed up with the army of trolls on its message boards, has delivered the online equivalent of capital punishment: it has shut down several of its boards.
The reason, from executive editor Bobbie Jo Buel:
“In the past month, though, more and more comments are violating our standards. Instead of offering constructive criticism, too many posts are just plain coarse.While we created the reader comments feature to give readers a place to talk, StarNet is still our house. And our editors and staff simply do not want guests who make vulgar, abusive, obscene, defamatory and hateful comments. If you want to live in that kind of neighborhood, go create your own online forum.
In the old days of BBS’ing, message boards had “moderators” who volunteered their time to help the “sysop” keep things from degenerating into flame wars. That’s what was missing.
Trolls just make it bad for everyone. I repeatedly said as much on the message boards. A few agreed but testosterone toxic sophomoric trolls thought recess would never end.
Surgery should be done with a scalpel not a meat axe.
My guess is that Yahoo now has far fewer “eyeballs”; far less ad “hits”. That would threaten revenue. Time will tell if users will read their news directly from news feeds like Reuters instead of a middleman portal. That was Yahoo’s initial offering since other news servers like AP do not seem to have a public feed. Public commentary on the news was one of the ways Yahoo distinguished itself from Google News.
AEM