The New York Times, WaPo and Mozilla Are Building an Open-Source Community Platform to Fix Comments
Media companies both large and small may differ on many things — the value of print, the efficacy of paywalls, and so on — but one thing they almost all agree on is that reader comments are a wasteland of trolls and flame wars. There have been attempts to fix that problem in a number of ways, but many have simply given up trying and handed their comments over to Facebook. Now, a joint venture between the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project is going to try and come up with an alternative.
The new venture isn’t just about comments either: as Dan Sinker, who runs the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, described in a blog post announcing the collaboration, it is intended to be a platform that allows media companies to connect with their readers on a number of different levels — including by allowing them to upload photos and contribute to the journalism that is being done by those outlets.
