Popular Science magazine shuts off comment section
I remember how much time it took to evolve a notion of the range of ‘appropriate’ comments and how difficult it was, excluding the easy ones to eliminate that were simply rude and crude. There were lots of considerations for Angry Bear that are different than the magazine faced I am sure, but the struggle to maintain an open comment section was intense and took a lot of time. I can feel a post is coming on the issue, but for now will take my cue from comments:
Signs of the time…lifted from the website of Popular Science.
Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments
Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
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.
That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters.Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close to all, of our commenters are shrill, boorish specimens of the lower internet phyla. We have many delightful, thought-provoking commenters.
But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments (“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:
Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.
Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.
Another, similarly designed study found that even just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers’ perception of science.
If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch.
Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more. We also plan to open the comments section on select articles that lend themselves to vigorous and intelligent discussion. We hope you’ll chime in with your brightest thoughts. Don’t do it for us. Do it for science.
Suzanne LaBarre is the online content director of Popular Science. Email suzanne.labarre at popsci dot com.
Dan:
While growing up and after getting a subscription, I always like reading the comments in Popular Science when all that existed was the magazine.
Maybe it is time for PS to just go back to mailed in comments to its magazine? It is far to easy for trolls to post directly. When they have to write a letter to the editor which includes address and proper name, the task becomes too revealing and burdensome. Maybe becoming old-fashioned in the face of scientific advancement in communication will improve the dialogue and clean up the act of many an easy-to-become troll hidden in the anonymity of the internet.
Digby at her Hullabaloo site has had comments off for months now. Early on she was noting they would be back, but obviously she has found little need for such now.
Maybe it’s time to give up on the “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” business, and require commenters to provide names and email addresses, to verify the latter, and to publish BOTH name and email address with the comment.
Or also, or in addition, maybe logging in ought to be required before people post comments. It’s annoying, it takes time, but … having to do some work before leaving a comment would probably eliminate most trolls.
Alas, the tenditious, the looney, and the overly loquatious ye will always have.