A little comment moderation does go a long way, though. Reading the comments on articles on New York Times' web site, the only real moderation is that readers can "like" certain comments. You can then open the "Readers' Recommendations" tag to read comments rated by order of the number liked. This tends to make the comments much faster to read, putting the more useful ones near the top. It's not as robust a system as you get on Slashdot, but it's far and away better than comments systems that just sort
Without having read TFA (hey, it's a venerable Slashdot tradition!), I'm not sure what they actually hope to gain by eliminating anonymous comments. Surely as long as people are free to create throwaway accounts that are not actually tied to their real identities, trolling etc. will persist?
Frankly, Reuters as a news organization has, like all of them, gotten a lot sloppier as competition for online eyeballs has squeezed all the value out of anything other than eye-popping headlines.
There's really not much you can do to keep commenters from hiding their identities, and it's somewhat hypocritical to do so when you omit bylines from many of your stories, and when your reporters, columnists, editors, and editorial writers are just fronts for the attitudes of the corporation.
Like comment moderation would ever work
you knew it was coming....
Without having read TFA (hey, it's a venerable Slashdot tradition!), I'm not sure what they actually hope to gain by eliminating anonymous comments. Surely as long as people are free to create throwaway accounts that are not actually tied to their real identities, trolling etc. will persist?
Signed, an AC of many years (by choice)
Frankly, Reuters as a news organization has, like all of them, gotten a lot sloppier as competition for online eyeballs has squeezed all the value out of anything other than eye-popping headlines.
There's really not much you can do to keep commenters from hiding their identities, and it's somewhat hypocritical to do so when you omit bylines from many of your stories, and when your reporters, columnists, editors, and editorial writers are just fronts for the attitudes of the corporation.
Allowing people to rem