Over at Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg lambasts editors who leave their comment threads unattended before complaining about how uncivil they are:
It is one of the great tragedies of the past decade that so many media institutions have failed to learn from the now considerable historical record of success and failure in the creation of online conversation spaces. This stuff isn’t new anymore. (Hell, this conversation itself isn’t new either — see this Kevin Marks post for a previous iteration.) There are people who have been hosting and running this sort of operation for decades now. They know a thing or two about how to do it right. (To name just a few off the top of my head — there are many more: Gail Williams of the Well. Derek Powazek of Fray.com. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon’s Table Talk. Caterina Fake and her (ex-)Flickr gang.)
The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.
If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?
Tour the Web with me, and I’ll show you a number of spots where the conversation can turn to abortion or race without descending into abject savagery. But it takes work and dedication. And if it gets to the point where it takes too much work for our Argo-blogger, we’ll tighten the technical filters until the load becomes manageable.