Unfortunately, with the harsh benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see that this whole idea really didn't work out that well for the media. This type of thinking led down the dead end of blindly following analytics, and getting rid of people like trained photographers, because the public could be begged for photos, or they could just be nicked from social media.
And it led to the awful, awful mire of comment sections.
There is a noble idea behind comments, and in a perfect world, they would be a sharp-as-fuck way of getting new information and perspectives, with readers sharing views, and new connections built between news websites and their audiences.
Unfortunately, they tend to get taken over by shit-lickers whose only goal in life is to prove that they are absolutely right about absolutely everything, and anybody who disagrees is a moron. Somehow, they always seem to devolve into bun-fights about politics or religion. Every fucking time.
Moderating these comments for the big news sites is one of the shittiest jobs in media, and if you think they're a cesspool as they are, you should really see the kind of sexist, racist and generally appalling rubbish that gets denied. There is no chance of building a community in this ocean of bile.
Unsurprisingly, now that we're another 10 years past the promise of Web 2.0, many media organisations are giving up the fight and shutting down the comments altogether. The Spinoff and RNZ both made a fairly big deal about getting rid of them last year, and even the NZ Herald quietly shoveled them off its opinion pieces, without making much of a deal about it.
You can't really blame them - there is too much to lose, for so little gain. The moderisation of comments was essential, because the companies who host the comments become responsible for what is said on them. If Joe Fuckballs from Waicuntiki breaks a suppression order in a court case, it's the business that is liable, not the anonymous dickhead.
RNZ knows this better than most – it was recently found to have breached standards because of a goddamn Facebook post, which cannot be moderated before being published. The fact that the funding-frozen organisation just did not have the resources to have somebody watching what these shitbirds are saying on Facebook 24/7 didn't cut much slack, and it was held responsible for the gross and childish behaviour in comments on its posts.
This might seem like prosecuting the owner of a wall that has had some obscene grafitti sprayed upon it, but that's the standard that has been set, and it's a shit-sight easier to knock the fucking wall down in the first place, or at least put up some big fuck-off barbed wire so nobody can get to it.
Everybody's got arseholes and opinions, and everybody wants to share both of them on the internet, but if you're annoyed that these sites don't give you the chance to say something about their stories, it's tough shit. You might be looking for somewhere to shit out your vital and unique opinion on general news topics, because this is why you can't have nice things.
- Katherine Grant
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