Just Kill All of the Comments Already
There are ways to better moderate comments, but Nicholas has a point here - unless it’s a well moderated community site most comments do not add much value.
Gawker Media is scrambling to figure out a solution to stop violent pornography and rape images from being added to its Kinja commenting platform after the staff of Jezebel publicly called attention to a problem they’ve been dealing with for months. “If this were happening at another website … we’d report the hell out of it here and cite it as another example of employers failing to take the safety of its female employees seriously,” the Jezebel staff wrote in a post, which was finally published in an attempt “to light a fire under management’s collective ass,” outgoing editor-in-chief Jessica Coen told Poynter in an email.
The fire has been lit, to some extent. Until Gawker Media management can settle on a more permanent solution, it’s implementing a series of temporary fixes. Earlier today, comments were shut down on a post because, according to an editor’s note, “some asshole keeps posting gore and porn GIFs and we don’t have an adequate way to stop him. Sorry.” Just a little over an hour after the post was published, support manager Ernie Deeb emailed all Gawker staff to let them know that image uploads were being disabled across the entire network. (BuzzFeed has the full text of Deeb’s message.) I don’t know what solution Gawker will ultimately come up with, but I can offer a suggestion: Shut down Kinja completely.
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