Please comment on this story about comments

Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been reliving the dysphoria of the 1960s lately? What with students agitating on college campuses and grotesquely violent images coming in from overseas? (The latter perhaps giving some context to the former.) Of course 50 years ago, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Cronkite et al told us what was happening, while now we get our news from Twitter, Facebook and the like.

If the Vietnam War was the first conflict brought into our living rooms, as the critic Michael Arlen noted, then today’s struggles are the first to play out on our smartphones. We can watch protests and terror anywhere, anytime, which has huge and yet-to-be-determined implications. There’s something else too, and that is that we’re all in the media business now. We comment, post, vent and Twitter-war. Some of us troll, spam and hate. It’s created an unsettled, variegated netherworld of media, a blend of vendor and vendee that’s still playing out. This form of participatory media can be amazingly informative and mind-blowing. It can also be butt-ugly.

I remember my indoctrination to this world a number of years ago when I was doing TV regularly on CNN. Someone posted on the show's page that “You can’t tell where Sewer’s [intentional sic alert] chin ends and his neck begins.” There were other less flattering, and equally accurate, comments as well. When I mentioned this to a female on-air colleague, she said something to the effect of, "That’s nothing compared to what I get." And then she said, “Didn’t anyone tell you? Never read the bottom half of the Internet.

I've always loved that line.

Yes, comments are tricky for those of us in the content business. Some say you either let the commenters have unrestricted reign or you lose their traffic and the sense of community. But is that really the case? To me it’s more of a spectrum of options. At its most laissez-faire, a media site can offer anonymous, un-curated commenting without any oversight or registering. Or in its most controlled form, it can implement a high-touch, moderated-by-editors, fully logged-in model. Or it can sit in the middle with some combination of registration, identity and moderation. Or, at its other extreme, it can kill comments altogether.

There’s little consensus, except that what’s right for Re/code might not be right for the New York Times (more on both in a minute), and that the trend now seems toward purging comments, particularly the no-holds-barred variety. Wired recently ran a timeline piece, “A Brief History of the End of Comments,” which noted that Bloomberg, The Verge, The Daily Beast and others have all dropped comment sections.

Here at Yahoo Finance we have chosen to stick with the freewheeling, uncensored model for now. I say for now because allowing users to say pretty much what they want, even within the confines of our guidelines (https://help.yahoo.com/kb/news/SLN2292.html) can be fraught. While we get all manner of great insight from our readers, and we love giving them a place to engage, we sometimes get comments that are boorish, off-point, offensive or racist. When we see comments that fail to meet our guidelines we remove them, but we recieve thousands of comments every day, and it’s tough to monitor them all. (With some stories we turn off comments completely.)

Perched on the other end of the spectrum is the New York Times, where community editor Bassey Etim heads a team that moderates comments and has created an intricate system for participatory journalism. The Times truly has the high-touch model. “We treat comments as content,” Etim says. “We want the comments to be a cultural fit with the New York Times and its readers.” Here’s how it works: The Times only allows comments on some stories, those picked by Etim and the editors. In the days after the Paris attacks, for instance, the story on France bombing ISIS targets was opened up for comments (it had over 1,100 in 24 hours), while other stories, on the manhunt for instance, did not. Etim and his team of 14 editors (eight full-time spots) sift through all the comments of the selected story and then pick and edit just a handful, in this case 31 of them, which are placed onto a default tab, "NYT picks." There are two other tabs, one for "All Comments" that runs chronologically and another for "Readers’ Picks," which in this case had some 650, which are listed by most recommendations, in this case #1 had 889 recos. (Note: these numbers are from a moment in time.)

Whew! So doesn’t this take a huge amount of time and money without any return, I ask Etim? “This is not a money-losing venture,” he countered, and went on to explain that while there is debate over measurement, this deep commitment to commenting increases the user base and engagement, aka time spent on site. Plus Etim says there are a modest amount of ads in the comments section. Even more than that though, Etim says commenting leads to subscriber growth, since a reader has to log in to comment, which is one step away from subscribing. Bottom line: the jury’s probably still out on this model.
You could say that Kevin Delaney, editor in chief of Quartz, sits uneasily in the middle of the comment continuum. He tells me that his site’s experimentation with an annotation model—where readers can add comments in the middle of stories, like at Medium—has been only moderately successful. “It may be too complicated,” he tells me. In any event, he said, “We’re finding that the most ardent commentators and comments about our stories are done on social media,” he says. So maybe, I infer, the comment section for QZ will essentially be Twitter at some point.

That’s pretty much where Kara Swisher of Re/code has come out. Re/code ended comments, which at first seems strange for a site that, well, likes to get into it with its subjects. “We felt that comments did not reflect the real dialogue we were having with our readers on social media,” Swisher told me by email from Abu Dhabi. “It felt outmoded and not interactive. Also, we eliminated trolls.” Didn't you lose audience engagement and monetization potential, I ask? “No,” she responded. “Comments were not a vibrant place. Perhaps our own fault. The monetization was minimal, [and] we are active on social media. Content lives everywhere now.” True that.

A corollary point related to what Swisher says is that if you try to block the dialogue, you won’t succeed. Take the so-called shrieking Yale student. You may recall last week when a student at said Ivy (Conservatives’ pejorative term for activists like this student, btw, is ‘SJW’, or ‘social justice warrior’) publicly dressed down a professor over what the student perceived to be the prof’s insensitive actions related to alleged racism at the school. A YouTube video of this went viral—more than one million views—and plenty of people have plenty they want to say. But they can’t, because YouTube informed us that, “Comments are disabled for this video.” But no matter. Someone simply reposted it (at YouTube, of course), where that version had 600K views and 1,476 comments. Many of the comments are ad hominen and harsh. Some are vile. And they are essentially anonymous.

The latter point came up recently in a conversation I had with Randi Zuckerberg, the operatic sister of Facebook founder and CEO Mark and herself an early employee of the social media juggernaut. “The fact that Facebook wasn’t and isn’t anonymous was and is a big reason for its success,” she said. “There’s really no hiding, and I think ultimately that’s what people really want and why Facebook has worked so well.”

Of course there is a place for anonymous comments on the web (and yes that place may be Reddit with its more than 200 million unique users per month). But the question editors and marketers have to ask is whether that place is also on their particular media property. Need you operate a platform for raging incognitos to spew hate? (ISIS on Twitter anyone?) Since there will always be digital venues where anything goes, and as web content matures, I think you can argue that the limited demand for unlimited, unfettered, anonymous commenting is not worth the headache it creates. At some point media may need to either make some sort of commitment a la the New York Times, if that works—or bag it like Re/code.

And that’s the way it is …