WaPo + Anonymous Comments = Lockdown
One of the largest newspapers in the mid-Atlantic, Washington Post (WaPo), will be making an important decision with regard to their commenting infrastructure and essentially their online community.
From the lede of CNET’s coverage, If Jim Brady had his way, there would be no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.
The Washington Post has dipped their feet into allowing anonymous comments on various news articles, but as expected, they’ve experienced an on-going frustration with Trolls. Their most critical of users usually suggest the usual censorship or a handful of the variety of political conspiracy theories involving WaPo, Republicans and Democrats.
I understand their plight. They want comments, but just not those ones. The honest truth is, it’s their audience and they need to embrace it and find some way to earn participation from the readers who actually have some semblance of online candor to their name.
The executive editor of the Washington Post, Jim Brady, shares his thoughts and struggles in promoting a positive community — but the gem of his proposal is strategically buried at the bottom of the CNET article:
“I don’t know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver’s
license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise
the level of discourse.”
That is, a traditional news agency asking for your address, payment method or a copy of your traveling documents? Yikes! The idea that an oft-criticized news agency would solicit personal identification is just stoking the fire for your critics. Be careful, Brady.
I don’t sense any malice in his suggestion — I do sense fear and I see his concern for the dying breed (traditional news and the “write to the editor”-style feedback.)
Of course, there are other ways to provide verified identities of users without soliciting government-issued, or financially-backed documents. For example, cell phones and text messaging, e-mail verification, Heuristics, IP addresses. In addition, they could employ disemvoweling to remove a troll’s contributions (almost literally), as well as the usual “profanity list” and its variants to avert some of the offensive discussion.
Jim, you walk a fine line here between a passionate community and no community. One of the grey areas in providing positive communities is to moderate commentary and set clear guidelines. Here’s a hint: It’s very costly, I know cause it eventually cost my former job, but it would offer a balanced, critical and engaged community that you and your advertisers would want.
Question: Would you be content in providing a photo copy of your government-issued ID in order to participate in discussion on the Internet?
Share your perspective in the comments below. (And yes, anonymous responses are OK.)
Actually, I’m not opposed to sites requiring verification for those who want to make comments. There is room on the Web for totally open to walled communities.
I think Jim was saying that he wasn’t sure how to do it, but that some method for assuring people who “choose to participate in a community” (after all, washingtonpost.com doesn’t lasso people and drag them into the community)are held accountable for abiding by the guidelines they agreed to when they joined the community.
You have a short memory if you don’t remember your frustration with not being able to track folks who disrupted communities you managed.
As long as The Post or any other site are clear about the purpose of the community interaction, the behavior expected, and what will happen if guidelines aren’t followed, then a user can make an informed decision about whether or not to participate there.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I once managed community for washingtonpost.com and it’s earlier version Digital Ink. In the Digital Ink days users had to post under real names and those names were verifiable by credit card (it was a paid service). Later, when we became a free service as washingtonpost.com, we still expected people to post under real names and there was a verification process.
I think a business has every right to design and define community any way they want. Users have the right to decide whether they want to participate or not. That’s what makes things interesting.
NYM
I agree there is plenty of room for private communities on the Web, as well as public, anonymous communities.
I don’t think the solution of online community disruption is necessarily in verifying the users in a community (though, it would help); the solution is to manage the content the users product and the ability to manage those accounts effectively.
Many of my pains in managing destructive communities, was not solely directed at the frequency of illegitimate accounts; rather the inability to manage content in a method that would scale. (For instance, someone who posts 300 unacceptable messages, I need tools to manage those messages accordingly.)
Though I haven’t followed WaPo’s history in online community, I would imagine that every large journalism source receives the same vitriolic response from critics. I want to say this because even for the Arizona Republic (AZ’s dominant newspaper), about 15-25% of comments just criticize the coverage of a story rather than the story itself… not including the usual array of hate speech and off-topic targeted attacks.
Shifting gears a bit, another thing the Post can do, is not to silence their disruptive users [entirely], just provide users who can maintain positive community discourse more voice. (I mean that’s what we all kind of hope for in posting comments, is to get attention, right?) That is, if one’s comments are rated highly they are “bumped” upward in view instead of being buried on the last page. As a byproduct of this, it enables moderation of disruptive comments to become less labor-intensive when it is done from the bottom of the queue upward.
Paid-communities are great when managed effectively — but usually (as Brady eludes to) people will behave better when they have something to lose or can be identified easier. Something Awful Forums are a great example of this, and from what I hear, they have fun with it where members can pay more money to sanction another member — maybe not the best discourse in community, but discourse nonetheless.
Anyhow, thank you for your insight on this topic. Hopefully whatever WaPo does, they do it with reasonableness and consider their audience in the decision and perhaps other news syndicates.
~Joe