Brady: "Shutting this function down is a bad idea."

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady's thoughts (from the paper's internal critique board) on whether to shut down comments (earlier): Just wanted to weigh in on what we're doing to try to deal with the issues with comments on the site. I'd agree that, in the past few weeks, we've seen a marked increase in the number of reprehensible comments on the site. Not sure why that is, but whatever the reason, we need to address it. But before getting to that, I want to reiterate why we think comments are crucial to keep on the site going forward. Libby pretty much hit it on the head: One of the reasons the site has seen continued increases in page views and unique visitors is because we've gained a rep among consumers of Web journalism as a site that's willing to engage in a discussion with its readers. In this new world, readers expect to be allowed into the conversation, and if they're not allowed to do that on our site, then they'll find a site that will. Shutting down comments allows the bad actors to win at the expense of the people who are trying to do the right thing. The Walter Reed story was an example of where we were able to use comments to produce additional journalism. Comments sometimes provide story ideas, tips and corrections. Comments allow some of our bloggers, like Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher, to develop communities that come to the site every day to read them and interact with them. On top of that, shutting down comments merely opens the door to our competitors, who either already use this functionality (BBC, the Guardian), just launched it (USA Today) or are working on getting it launched (won't name all of them here, but as we speak, most news sites are working on implementing comment functionality). Shutting this function down is a bad idea. The interactive world is a new one, and the expectations of our readers are different. To not attempt to adapt to hose expectations is a much riskier proposition in a medium in which news consumers have access to the content of every major news organization in the world. Having said all that, we DO need to figure out ways to improve the quality of whats out there. So here's what we're going to do in the short term: Read the rest when you click below... 1) We are going to bring in additional bodies, on a temporary basis, and throw them at comments control. This will allow us to get bad posts out faster. (This is helped, obviously, if newsroom folks use the "Request Removal" link to flag bad comments they see, since we tend to focus our efforts on that queue, and also articles in topic areas that are consistently problematic). 2) We will be launching a new article comments system in April that will give us more tools to manage the flow of comments to the site and their presentation. This new comment system includes a "bozo filter" feature that displays a blocked user's comments to that user only, so the commenter will not know that he/she has been blocked. We expect that this will increase the effectiveness of blocking offensive commenters. 3) We're looking at biulding rating functionality into comments. This is similar to what you see on Amazon in the reviews area, i.e. 77 of 88 people foun this comment useful. This way, we'd have the ability to elevate the best comments and either block or demote comments that either offensive or just useless. This will take a few months, and may require experimentation to get it right, but it should help as well. Also, want to clarify a few things that were mentioned earlier: 1) You DO have to be a registered user to post any comments on articles. That's also the case with some of the more problematic blogs (which use a separate comments system), but not all blogs. Over the next few months, we're going to try to add that registration barrier to all the blogs. 2) We DO have a profanity filter that prevents a long list of words from being published at all. Bad actors get around this by substituting characters and transposing letters. There are also certain words (like the vice president's first name) that are acceptible in some contexts but not in others. So this will never be more than a partial solution. 3) We have a zero tolerance policy for accounts that post hate speech. These accounts are blocked from posting further comments, but nothing stops users from re-registering under another name. We also expect to reduce this churn with the "bozo filter" outlined above. These steps are part of an ongoing process to improve the reader experience and enhance our ability to manage coments on the site. As the medium and reader expectations change, we will continue to prioritize finding the best ways to make reader feedback work on our site. Thanks, Jim

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Brady: "Shutting this function down is a bad idea."

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