Earlier this week Alaska Dispatch News announced it is ditching Facebook-based comments in favor of a new comment moderation platform, Civil Comments. It is now the third media outlet to do so, joining alternative newsweekly Willamette Week and Register Guard, both Oregon newspapers.
Alaska Dispatch News made the move after receiving nearly 900 reader comments with the common theme that comments are a problem. With hundreds of comments being posted to the ADN.com site per day, the paper didn’t have enough staff to sufficiently monitor them.
“It’s a fresh approach to story commenting, using reviews by other commenters to help moderate submissions. The goal: interesting and civil debate and conversation, no spam and, we hope, a better experience for all readers,” said executive editor David Hulen in the announcement.
“We’re keeping our comments. At their best, they add information and other points of view, and they can inform our own reporting. We value that and want to keep it,” Hulen added. “We’re not looking to stifle or skew debate. We do want to improve the quality of the comment space, and we think Civil Comments can help us do that.
Based in Portland, Civil Comments is a startup that uses technology to moderate comments using peer review. Here’s how their product works. A reader creates an account using their Facebook or Twitter login or an email address, and creates a user name. When the reader goes to post a comment, they’ll be asked to rate three other people’s comments for quality and civility, and then rate their own comment.
Once the reader’s comment is submitted, it will be rated by other commenters and Civil Comments’ algorithms analyze the comments and decide which to publish. Abusive or harassing posts will not make the cut.
Alaska Dispatch News plans to leave previous comments on older posts in place and begin using Civil Comments on new content starting with articles published March 23. Comments (432 of them!) on the announcement were varied, but they were civil.
Insider Take:
This is a refreshing approach to commenting, and we applaud Civil Comments for developing such a system and the media outlets who’ve chosen to give it a whirl. Comments have become increasingly negative, even downright evil at times, causing media outlets like The Verge, the Chicago Sun-Times and Popular Science to turn them comments altogether.
There must be a happy medium to meet the needs of publishers who can’t afford to manually moderate every comment and the needs of readers who wish to be a part of the conversation. Civil Comments provides an alternative to allow discussions of news stories and editorials to continue without an undue burden on publishers.
Of course, the trolls will still find a way to ruin online discourse for the rest of us, but Civil Comments offers an appealing option. We’ll be watching to see how these three news outlets fare with the new platform and to see if other, larger media outlets will adopt it too.
~ Dana E. Neuts, Subscription Insider
