For years now, when I’ve been asked to suggest a comment “strategy” for someone’s site, it’s always been the same: allow it if you want, but moderate every comment. At the very least, moderate the first comment from every user.
I still give the same advice to this day, and feel more strongly than ever that a wide-open commenting policy is a bad idea for the vast majority of sites. YouTube moving to a more moderated commenting platform (the merit of using Google+ notwithstanding) compelled me to give a quick rundown of why I suggest this.
Anonymity can serve you, but it probably won’t.
Allowing unmoderated, anonymous comments on your site provides an opportunity for trolls to highjack any worthwhile discussion that may actually take place.
For instance, when I wrote an article about GoDaddy on Super Bowl Sunday, I had a decent spike in traffic—and with it came an influx of rude, sexist, unhelpful comments.
You know how many of those rude comments came accompanied by a real name and email address? Zero. But, since I had “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” checked in WordPress, none of them were published. Yes, I have less comments on that post than I could have had, and so the interaction level isn’t indicative of its traffic. But, I’d rather serve people reading the article than my own ego (or advertisers, if I had them).
That’s just one example. I’ve seen my employers and clients be saved by the same policy countless times. Anonymity without moderation leaves you vulnerable to people who have motives other than fostering a healthy discussion.
At least one study backs this up.
An article in the New York Times earlier this year cited a study on online civility and its effect on reader perceptions. You can get the gist of it pretty quickly:
Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
Popular Science even cited that write-up when they shut down comments entirely. As they concluded:
It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.
Take control of commenting; help the Internet.
Here’s my plea: if you don’t have the bandwidth to moderate comments on a given post (or embrace some newfangled technology), don’t allow them. You’ve got plenty of channels to engage your readership on these days that are not directly embedded below your own content—use those instead.
You won’t only be helping yourself, you’ll also be doing an positive thing for the whole Internet. However infinitesimal it may be, it’s movement in the right direction that can snowball into making content relatively enjoyable again.