NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
I see comment moderation as one of the &#x27;unsolved problems&#x27; left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise.<p>Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there&#x27;s just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.<p>Maybe moving comments to people&#x27;s own social groups on FB&#x2F;Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re really seeing any discussion value for the most part.