Take your pick of news supplier, and odds are that they allow comments on their articles where readers can write their responses. Whatever value this might have had in theory, in practice it has shown to be pretty much worthless as a source of additional factual information. Nearly 100% of all comments offer nothing in terms of new information; no anecdotes, no statistics, no interpretations of data, nothing on the actual factual information revealed in the article, if indeed there was any.
Instead, readers are opinionated, rash, pig-headed, and abusive. They are politically-motivated, writing extremely slanted opinions that have only the remotest connection to the article.
The net effect of maintaining comments, in many cases, is a dead loss to society. Writing the comments drains the time of the writer. Such comments certainly waste the time of the reader, who is better off ignoring all of the comments because they do not inform. Overall, news organizations would benefit their readers by eliminating their comment sections on articles.
Friday, June 15, 2012
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