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4 6 September 2016
MEDIA
N
ot too quietly, but without a great
deal of fuss, NPR (National Public
Radio), the American public radio
network, killed commenting on its
website in mid-August.
In a statement announcing the change, the
network explained that an analysis had
revealed that only a fraction of one percent of
their monthly 25 to 35 million audience was
making use of the comment facility on their
website. Over a three-month period, only 2,600
people had left a comment – 0.003% of the 79.8
million NPR.org users who visited the site
during that period.
On 23 August, after eight years, the boards
went silent, joining may other North American
news sites which have decided that reader com-
ments just aren’t worth the bother.
That isn't to say that NPR no longer talks to
– and listens to – its audience. The network
runs a daunting range of social media accounts,
including more than 30 Facebook pages and 50
Twitter accounts, as well as accounts on Snap-
chat, Instagram, and Tumblr. Its primary
Facebook account reaches over five million
readers. Individual journalists also run their
own social-media accounts.
In Ireland, media outlets have taken a variety
of approaches to commenting, from free-for-all
to no comment capability at all. Differing defa-
mation regimes also affect how commenting is
managed. The courts are still working out the
niceties of when a reader comment is published
by a website, and when the website becomes
liable for defamatory content, so different pub-
lishers have taken different approaches to
ensure their comment sections stay within the
bounds of the law as they see it. The need to
police harassment and trolling by site users
also influences those editorial decisions. Troll-
ing has little to do with Scandinavian ice giants,
rather, trolling was the act of fishing for com-
ments, baiting users with inflammatory
statements, analogous to how one might fish
by trolling bait along a riverbank.
So for example, the Independent website
requires commenters to register, either using
Facebook or Google Plus (both of which have
real-name policies), or by registering, using an
email and password combination. In theory,
such measures can reduce harassment and
aggressive posting, but the ease with which
throwaway email addresses can be created
reduces its effectiveness.
Sister publication the Herald doesn’t host
commenting on its stories at all, while the Irish
Daily Star (through its online vehicle Buzz.ie)
simply requires users to provide a name and
email address before posting comments on tits
stories. Both the Star and the Independent
require - labour-intensive - pre-moderation, so
commenters have to wait and see if their
insights and observations are deemed worthy
before they are shared with the world. Pre-mod-
eration has the advantage of reducing
harassment and improving the tone of the com-
ments sections, but it does mean that the
publication becomes liable for any defamatory
statement that slips through.
The Examiner requires registered users to log
in (using any of their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twit-
ter, or Google Plus identities, or by registering
an email and password combination), but in
most cases doesn’t offer an option for readers
to comment on stories. Registering does, how-
ever, allow the Examiner to collect data on what
stories readers are interested in, and to tailor
news alerts on phone and tablet apps. Like the
Examiner, the RTÉ website offers users the
opportunity to register, but this is in order to
access and keep track of programmes on the
RTÉ Player across different devices. No com-
menting facility on its news or entertainment
offerings is available. RTÉ does ask for a lot
more data than most sites during registration
(full name, gender, date of birth, and
location).
The Irish Times, meanwhile, limits comment-
ing to paid subscribers. The Sunday Times,
through its Times of Ireland daily product, is
behind a hard paywall, which also has the
effect of restricting access to comments.
This raises the intriguing question of what
might happen when trolls - who have paid their
subscription fees - cross the bounds of accept-
able speech. Is moderation made more difficult
when it could lead to a potential loss of reve-
nue? Are those with disposable income to cast
at social media more reticent online than those
with nothing to lose?
In summary, although most Irish traditional
news outlets offer some form of reader
Controlling
the s****
The internet, like newspaper letters
pages, is about community
by Gerard Cunningham
Site-users are listening
and reading – not in
the comments section
but on Usenet, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Tumblr, or
Snapchat
September 2016 4 7
participation, there are heterogeneous require-
ments before comments can be left on sites. The
particular software solutions managing com-
ment sections can also act as an impediment to
commenting (the Examiner site in particular was
extremely slow in loading comments) and pre-
moderation can lead to delays which reduce the
likelihood of participation.
With news outlets that were actually born on
the web, commenting seems much more vigor-
ous. While The Journal, for example, requires a
sign-in with Facebook or Twitter, comments are
not as a rule pre-moderated (although on some
controversial stories, commenting is disabled).
Joe.ie/Her.ie do not offer a comment facility.
Broadsheet, arguably the site most dependent
on comment, is mostly unmoderated, although
software may occasionally stop a comment until
it is vetted by a staff member, if for example it
is from a previously unknown account, and pre-
sumably if it contains any of a list of blacklisted
phrases. Broadsheet articles are often little
more than a handful of sentences, linking to a
tweet or facebook entry, and the real reason
readers stay is to read and join in commenting.
That audience, in turn, can expect an occasional
longer article, including some longform journal-
ism running to several thousand words.
The free-for-all spirit in the Broadsheet com-
ment section is strongly reminiscent of the
culture of early bulletin boards, dating back to
the earliest days of the internet, before Tim
Berners-Lee came up with the idea of the web.
In the early days of the internet, there was no
world wide web, and there were no newspapers
online. But there were discussion groups, first
with emails carbon copied to multiple recipi-
ents, then with mailing lists managed through
central subscription-software listservs, and
eventually, through user networks anyone
could subscribe to. The Users Network (Usenet)
was built on earlier electronic bulletin boards,
and became the first widely-distributed, cha-
otic, user—regulated social network. Godwin's
Law was born there, and spam, and much of the
received wisdom about how to deal with online
nuisances (filters, blocks, mutes, and Do Not
Feed The Trolls) were first formulated on usenet,
back when the number of users onlinenum-
bered in the hundreds and thousands, not
millions and billions.
Usenet was divided into a hierarchy of sub-
groups (science, arts, recreation etc) and using
subgroups within subgroups, any topic could be
catered to (eg rec.arts.movies.star-wars). Users
could even crosspost between the newsgroups
if a topic was relevant to more than one commu-
nity. 'Who Would Win A Fight Between the Borg
and Death Star' would cross post to rec.arts.
movies.star-wars and rec.arts.movies.star-trek,
for example. Of course, the person who asked
such a cross-posted question was often a troll,
more interested in starting a flame war between
the rival fandoms than getting a straight
answer. More seriously, discussions in the sci-
ence groups were often disrupted by crossposts
from religious groups, in particular from crea-
tionists who took the presence of biologists
online as a personal affront to their religious
beliefs. Paradoxically, one of the most consist-
ently readable groups on Usenet, talk.origins,
exists because of this trolling tendency, having
been designed specifically to attract and debate
creationists, thus allowing the scientists to get
on with their work in (relative) peace.
A regular feature of newsgroups was a debate
initiated by a news article. In the earliest days,
users would type out newspaper reports manu-
ally, which they would then post, igniting a
discussion. Later, when the world wide web
came along and newspapers decided they
needed an online presence, and began upload-
ing their content for free (a move many in the
industry now lament) this was no longer neces-
sary. Posters could simply cut and paste the
article, or post a link to the relevant web page,
perhaps accompanied by a relevant quote.
Again, the point of the exercise was to initiate
debate among the online community in the
newsgroup.
As the world wide web grew in popularity (and
people increasing called it simply "the web"),
websites sprang up seeking to mimic the fea-
tures of usenet, and capture its audience.
Boards.ie, to pick one example, began as essen-
tially a duplicate of the usenet experience. It
even carried usenet groups, which were free to
Most Irish traditional
news outlets offer
some form of reader
participation but there
are heterogeneous
requirements before
comments can be left
on sites
4 8 September 2016
all since usenet, built in the original collegiate
spirit of the internet, wasn't privately owned.
(In fact, it isn't owned by anyone at all, having
no central server or administrator, leading to
one of the first internet cat memes: Fluffy owns
Usenet). Politics.ie was an even more special-
ised example, limiting itself to Irish political
debates. Reddit to this day has the look and feel
of a clunky usenet client transported
to a web page, as did such
notable sites as Slugger
O’Toole for a long time,
before blogs and
WordPress tem
-
plates became the
new paradigm for
discussion sites
on the web.
What made
websites like
Boards.ie and
Politics.ie work
was the communi
-
ties they built,
regular readers who
initiated and contributed
to discussions every day. And
with every refresh as a contributor
checked for new responses, a fresh page hit
was recorded, which translated into advertising
revenue.
Facebook is only the most successful of sev-
eral social websites which were set up to
capture those audiences. Like Bebo, Friendster
and others before it, Facebook (and other social
media sites from Twitter to Snapchat) work on
the premise that there was no need to create
subgroups for users. Ultimately, it doesn't
really matter what people post and talk about,
so long as they do what comes naturally to
human beings - building communities. The
most successful social networks are those
which enable frictionless community forma
-
tion. Those communities, once they become
large enough, generate network effects. You're
on Facebook because everyone you know is
there, and not on MySpace. People don't need
to follow news groups, they just have to follow
each other. Communities are an emergent prop-
erty of the network.
News stories are sometimes the connective
tissue holding these communities together. But
so, for that matter, are radio broadcasts, TV
shows, movies, comic books, podcasts, the
latest Netflix download, and of course, cat
memes. Anything that people can share, appre-
ciate, and critique.
And so, it should come as no surprise that
once NPR looked at the sums, they discovered
far fewer than one percent f their readers and
listeners are commenting on their website any
more. Audiences are still listening and reading,
but they're talking about it on Usenet, or Twit-
ter, or LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or even Snapchat.
There's a media myth that comment sections
attract readers online, because people want to
talk. It dates back to the days when independ-
ent blogging was at its peak, and newspapers
were borrowing whatever emerged organically.
Specialist bloggers linked to each other, and
created a new kind of news community, who
both created, commented on, and read
each others posts. But while
many blogs still survive, they
are no longer primarily
where debates take
place. That happens
on social websites.
Blogs are the trig
-
gers to start a
discussion some
-
where else. Their
comment sections
mostly lie empty.
So, noticeably, do
the comment sec
-
tions for a great many
newspaper stories.
The network effect means
its easier to join one or two
sites like Facebook, and discuss
what you read everywhere else on the web by
posting links your friends and colleagues can
see there, rather than registering to post com-
ments on dozens of different sites, each
requiring a different combination of login veri-
fications and passwords, each with different
audiences of strangers.
The process has come full
circle. Now, instead of post-
ing a story link and then
discussing it on usenet,
audiences do the same on
Facebook, or Twitter, or the
network of your choice. Even
Google Plus, unloved even
by its creators, has its fans.
Newspapers aren't losing
audiences to social net-
works, because they never
really owned those audi
-
ences in the first place. Commenting has a
chequered history on the internet, but of course
commenting predates the internet: it just
wasn't always called commenting. Letters to
the Editor are as old as newspapers them
-
selves. Proprietors realised very early in the
history of periodical publication that people
would buy a copy of the paper simply because
their name appeared there. And what better
way to encourage that impulse - and exploit
that vanity - than to offer readers a forum where
they could comment on the news events of the
day.
To use the modern parlance, Letters to the
Editor were heavily pre-moderated and curated,
in addition to being sub-edited for length, read
-
ability, and typos. Despite that, over time,
legends grew among those subeditors charged
with maintaining the Letters to the Editor pages
about their correspondents. There were the old
familiars, who ran off at least one letter a day,
often stereotyped as a retired colonel in the
Home counties fulminating on the pages of the
Times about young people these days, or the
intrusion of modern conveniences - always
referred to as contraptions - into their enviable
idyll.
There were the hardy annuals ("Sir, I just
heard the first cuckoo of the Spring. Is this a
record?"). And there was the Green Ink Brigade
- the clearly deluded, ranging from conspiracy
theorists fulminating about alien lizard over-
lords and illuminati to often garbled religious
fundamentalists who expected the apocalypse
to begin by the weekend. For some unexplained
reason, these seemed to correlate heavily with
the use of green ink biros.
And of course there were the undeclared
interests, the member of a local lobby group
who neglected to mention that fact, or the
brother-in-law of a county councillor, or the TD's
cousin, who regularly wrote to defend their rela-
tive, but always neglected to mention the
familial connection.
Despite these shortcomings, however, the
Letters to the Editor pages provided an often
lively and usually interesting feedback on sto-
ries and how they affected communities, and
indeed helped foster a sense of community
among the readership. It
was understandable that
newspapers wanted to
capture the same dynamic
online.
For too long newspapers
assumed that readers were
interested in their specific
stories and titles, when
readers were usually more
interested in community,
and newspapers have for
the most part been very
poor at managing commu-
nities. There's still a place for Letters to the
Editor, curated and considered comments and
input from readers. Huffington Post is based on
the principle of turning Letters to the Editor into
articles. Other publications disguise it better,
but many of their online hot takes and opinion
pieces work on the same principle of (often
unpaid) user-generated content, commenting
on what has already been reported
elsewhere.
For original news outlets however, the task of
editors and journalists remains the same as it
ever was. Produce compelling content people
will talk about, point to, and read. We can only
wish good luck.
MEDIA
With news outlets that
were actually born on
the web, commenting
seems much more
vigorous
September 2016 4 9
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