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.
By Invisible Inkling » Blog Archive » Comment trouble at the Arizona Daily Star December 13, 2006 - 10:17 pm
[…] Danny Sanchez points out an explainer from the Executive Editor of the Arizona Daily Star on why comments were deleted from some stories: “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.” […]
By howardowens.com: media blog » Blog Archive » Daily Star struggles with comments December 16, 2006 - 8:09 am
[…] The Arizona Daily Star is struggling with comments on stories. Recently, the trolls have come out in mass. That is exactly what will happen without monitoring and policing. A newspaper site simply can’t post comment links and then let things run on their own. It takes time and effort to have quality user participation. The only answer/solution is to create a new FTE position and hire somebody to manage things. Removing comments, not having them, is not an option. Of course, I’ve been through this before. (via Danny Sanchez) Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
By Journalistopia » Yahoo! strikes down message boards December 21, 2006 - 12:48 pm
[…] Is there a possible trend brewing here? Yahoo! News announced it has nuked its message boards because they have been causing “a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion.” The Arizona Daily Star recently recently zapped ts boards as well. […]
By Anon E Mouse December 22, 2006 - 10:21 pm
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