Last week’s brouhaha
over WashingtonPost.com shutting down reader comments on one of its
blogs after the discussion turned ugly gives us an opportunity to
ponder the future of discussions online. The Post is hardly the first old-media organization to go through this kind of trauma — and new-media ones have suffered, too.
Amy Gahran suggested some possible solutions for WashingtonPost.com in her blog item last week, and I added a few more in the comments section.
Additional solutions are suggested by Metafilter,
a popular weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to.
First, you have to sign up as a member before you can post something
new to the site, and then there’s a one-week waiting period before you
can post a new item or ask a new question. You can post comments
immediately, though, once signed up.
User registration won’t stop all inappropriate comments, of course. But
how about instituting a 30-minute waiting period for a new registered
user? That could provide a cooling-off period for someone who’s angry
and immediately wants to fire off a hot reply. Give them some (forced)
time to think it through. (Frankly, I don’t think that’s a great idea,
but let’s throw it out to be part of the discussion.)
Metafilter also charges a $5 fee to be able to post to the site. All
Metafilter users have to pay the one-time charge, which is termed as a
donation toward server costs. That’s one way to “keep the riff-raff
out,” I suppose. It reminds me of problems that Craigslist
is having in New York with its free apartment-listings category. It’s
gotten so big and unruly, with unscrupulous people using the service,
that founder Craig Newmark is considering charging a fee to post in that category — as a way to tame things.
I can foresee problems with that approach, too, of course. If
WashingtonPost.com started charging a fee to be able to participate in
its online discussions, charges of elitism surely would fly.
OK, in the spirit of putting out ideas for solving the problem of
out-of-control online debate, here’s another: Charge a registration fee
that permits a user to post, but make it a “deposit” that they can get
back any time they wish to discontinue using the service, but will lose
if they grossly violate the site’s discussion rules and terms of
service.
Anyone else got more ideas?
