The weather is in the more benign range of news these days. It does have the disadvantage of a lot of ads - particularly windows that pop up and squish out the actual weather news. And it does have that strange scrolling "news ads" section at the bottom. But what makes it in the benign range is that it doesn't have the comments section where people with low levels of grammatical literacy and spelling plow their rows of opinion into mountains of emotion.
What makes news sites have comments sections given these toxic levels of comments? Wikipedia says:
"The comments section is a feature on most online blogs, news websites, and other websites in which the publishers invite the audience to comment on the published content. This is a continuation of the older practice of publishing letters to the editor."
Editors-in-chief say this about commenting: "Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise.”
Take away the comments, and traffic declines on sites without comments. The Pynter.orgwebsite says it might be worse to have no comment section than to have one. They say the New York Times has actually invested in online commenting - moderating comments is a required activity if news sites are going to have comments.
Moderation isn't a simple activity. Take a look at the Guardian's articles with comments HERE. i picked the article "Ten years ago I won a trip to New York. If this happened today I'd delete the email."
I took a screen shot of the two Guardian Pick comments. It is tantalizing, isn't it? What better way to get you to sign in to read more.
And there we have it - the difference between free-for-all and "managed".
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