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Bad comments “became too much to really fight back” against at Popular Science, associate editor Dan Nosowitz said in a radio appearance Wednesday. “We’re not in favor of discouraging discussion or discourse,” he told KPCC. “It’s just that we think that the current form we have for comments wasn’t doing our readers much of a service.”
Popular Science is “totally in favor of substantive disagreements,” Nosowitz said. “What we are not in favor of is having those published on our site. I don’t think that diminishes public discussion, to just decline to publish anything on our site that anyone wants to write.”
Popular Science’s decision to shut off comments prompted both negative and positive reactions this week:
“I’ve seen a number of examples of significant errors in research being discovered through comments on scientific articles and blogs, something that is arguably similar to the peer-review process,” Mathew Ingram wrote in Paid Content.
The post in which Popular Science online content director Suzanne LaBarre announced the change casts “an image of science as an ancient and immovable stone fortress, from which the anointed few (Popular Science staff writers, say) may cast pearls in the direction of the masses below, but which might crumble to dust if the teeming throngs aren’t kept at bay,” Will Oremus wrote in Slate. “This conception is antithetical to the spirit of free inquiry that has always driven scientific discovery.”
But in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson considered comments sections’ similarities to sewers: “Most of them are logistically required, but consistently disgusting, subterranean conduits for what is, technically speaking, waste,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he wrote, The Atlantic elected to keep a comment system that “felt democratic, encouraged voting, prized smarts, and included fail-safes for deleting racism, sexism, and the worst kinds of deliberate idiocy.”
Good comments sections tend to cluster around sites where readers “share an interest in certain policy areas” and return frequently, Alexandria Petri wrote in The Washington Post. “You can be much ruder to the waiter in a place where you are not a regular.”
Previously: Popular Science eliminates comments
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