Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Founder Josh Marshall explains why he’s been dissatisfied with various third-party solutions (their current is Livefyre) and why, unlike Nick Denton, he doesn’t want to invest development resources into Building The Perfect Commenting System.
In addition to spending lots of time and money supporting commenting systems that don’t work well — the worst of both worlds — we also spend a ton of time dealing with trolls, spammers and miscellaneous anti-social behavior in the comments. And since our staff is heavily weighted to reporters and editors, it’s the reporters and editors who in most cases have to do that work. And that doesn’t make sense. I want them breaking news not trying to keep flyboy7456 from screaming obscenities in some comment thread.
He answers the we-need-anonymity argument by asking tipsters to tip elsewhere (i.e., through the ageless talk@talkingpointsmemo.com email address). Ironically enough, there’s no space for comments on Josh’s post, so some TPM commenters are opting to complain over here.
One comment:
TPM FAIL. It’s not difficult to see how FB is slowly creeping into EVERYthing we do online. Places like TPM feel they must take advantage of the presumed traffic. I commented at TPM for many years and the problems Josh mentioned seemed to be rather minor. Plenty of sites like this one have a good system. I’m not buying their claims.
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