Rieder: Pulling the plug on online comments

Autumn Phillips had had enough.

Last Friday, the executive editor of the Quad-City Times visited her website, qctimes.com, and checked out a story about a man who had been fatally stabbed the night before in a local park.

When she got to the reader comments section at the end of the story, she was appalled by what she found.

"Below the LeClaire Park story was a growing string of comments — a veiled racist remark about Democratic voters, a derogatory comment about police, then something about Hillary Clinton taking our guns away," the top editor at the Davenport, Iowa-based news outlet wrote.

"There were mixed-race jokes posted on a story about a burglary, and on a story about a police standoff in Davenport there was a string of comments about what an idiot President Obama is with questions about his citizenship."

And so Phillips, with the support of publisher Deb Anselm, decided to do something she had been thinking about for a long time: She shut down the comments section, which she described as "a sea of ridiculousness, hate speech and online bullying,"

Phillips was not alone in making such a move. Last week, NPR announced it, too, was shuttering its online comments section, effective Tuesday.

"After much experimentation and discussion, we've concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users," wrote Scott Montgomery, NPR's managing editor for digital news.

NPR had found that a tiny slice of its audience was taking advantage of the forum. "Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months  — 0.003% of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period," Montgomery wrote.

The decisions hardly meant that the news outlets no longer were interested in what their audiences were thinking. Both stressed their eagerness to hear from readers and listeners on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter  and in a wide variety of other ways.

But both agreed that comments had run their course.

And so they have.

In the early days of digital journalism, comments were seen as an integral part of the process, a terrific opportunity for enhancing dialogue between news outlets and the people. That would be welcome, for over the years many news organizations were far too walled off from their audiences. Heightened engagement, much more back and forth, seemed like a healthy and welcome development.

Sadly, that's not the way things played out. Comments sections too often were taken over by a small, nasty slice of the audience. Rather than a place for exchanging ideas, they became havens for ugly name-calling, for intimidation, for racism and misogyny.

The digital world has brought with it many wonderful innovations. But comments sections became vivid sections of the extremely dark side of the Web.

Many news outlets made efforts to police the joint, monitoring comments in an effort to weed out a plethora of offensive material. Since anonymity was part of the problem, allowing as it did pugnacious posters to promulgate their abusive material protected by the cloak of anonymity, some tried requiring including a name a la a letter to the editor, sometimes using Facebook as the intermediary. But too often comments sections remained cesspools best avoided.

Miami Herald ends anonymous comments

An early thumbs-down on comments came in 2013 from PopularScience.com, which decreed that "comments can be bad for science."  Wrote online content director Suzanne LaBarre, "As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter."

Others following suit included CNN, Reuters (except for opinion pieces) and the Chicago Sun-Times.

(Says USA TODAY standards editor Brent Jones: "USA TODAY currently offers comment sections on stories and encourages reader conversations that deliver added value. We are also committed to evaluating the best platform experiences for audience engagement with our content and journalists.")

Besides their noxious quality, comments seem anachronistic today, overtaken by events, a throwback to desktop in a world dominated by mobile, a world in which social media offers far better venues for conversation.

As Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg wrote in 2014 when the tech magazine Recode that they run dropped its comments, "We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years.”

As for the Quad-City Times'  Phillips, she's very glad she pulled the plug.

"Since we made the announcement, I’ve received an outpouring of gratitude from our readers," she says. "I’ve heard from parents whose children were bullied in our online comments. I’ve heard from people who said they wouldn’t send in letters to the editor because they were attacked so harshly by commenters, and it wasn’t worth it."

Little by little, comments continue to recede. Their disappearance is welcome.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder