A original strategy is aiming to counter an unacceptable level of toxic commentary on our websiteWe are living in an age of rage. People are enraged with government,with media, with religion, and with migration,with Europe, with gigantic business. That frustration comes burning through in comments posted below stories on our website, and a facility offered in the spirit of open journalism that has seen an extraordinary growth in numbers,sometimes running as tall as 65000 posts a day. That’s a huge number – and it’s producing its own frustrations, not least among those who feel they have an inalienable right to comment.
This outburst arrived in my inbox recently: Re the excellent article by Jeremy Corbyn. You stay the comments at a mere eight. What on soil do you judge you’re playing at?” The tone was typical of this original age. In reply, and I explained what the paper was “playing at”: trying to curate a reasoned debate in comments,not shut down discussion. That sometimes meant closing them for a while and then reopening them when we had a sufficient number of moderators to handle the volume. I noted that the total at the time of my reply had grown to 2058; our reader had spluttered too soon.
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Source: theguardian.com