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Notice also, no byline, and no comments allowed. The Guardian often panders to culture war outrage bait then hides behind taking responsibility or criticism wit
by m00g00 9y ago
Notice also, no byline, and no comments allowed. The Guardian often panders to culture war outrage bait then hides behind taking responsibility or criticism with tricks like this, and the fact that an occasional decent article exists.
Why again does this failing rag deserve support, and why is this obvious propaganda upvoted to the top of HN?
- gsnedders 9y agoComments are only allowed on the blog-like "comment is free" posts, which presumably they don't consider editorials part of despite them now obviously being part of the same platform technically (hence the /commentisfree/ URLs). This isn't something specific to this editorial; it is the general rule the website works by. (As an aside, I'd much rather Comment is Free just died, because so much of what the Guardian gets lambasted over is content posted there—and its explicit point is less editorial control over the contents. If people don't want what gets posted with less direct editorial control over content, just don't give it to them.)
- m00g00 9y agoNo idea what their arbitrary rules are, but I noticed a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album linked at the top of this article did have comments enabled. Both of these are obviously opinions, so I'm not sure what the difference is, besides the fact that one article (GP) was way more likely to receive backlash in the comments than the other.
- gsnedders 9y agoWeird. It certainly used to be the case no "newspaper" article had comments enabled, but that definitely does. So yeah, OK, I don't understand when commenting is enabled any more. I mean, at least the old "newspaper" platform v. "blog" platform distinction made sense—there were many more differences (editorial control being a major one) than just commenting.
- Nursie 9y agoFor a while they had comments on almost everything, then they realised that the majority of comments were opposed to their viewpoint, and even ridiculed them. So they shut most of it down That's not to say the readership wasn't with them - that's a lot harder to quantify - but thencommenters largely weren't.
- jamespo 9y agoironic comment from a throwaway anonymous account
- joosters 9y agoShow me a comments section of an online newspaper that isn't full of bile and hate? It unfortunately seems unavoidable, and so many publications are just removing their comments sections. Much better than leaving the hate in, IMO.
- m00g00 9y agoIt's the selective nature of their disabling of comments. Notice on this very article, at the top, is a link to a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album, and comments are enabled for it. Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.
- peoplewindow 9y agoThey used to have comments enabled on most stories. I remember, from the time they were covering Snowden, all their stories seemed to have comments enabled. I believe they largely shut down comments for a couple of reasons: - Like a lot of newspapers, they feel very strongly that they have to moderate comments very aggressively. They didn't use automated systems to do that, because often the comments they wanted to delete were highly scored, so they ended up paying an army of moderators. That's not affordable for an organisation that loses tens of millions of pounds a year. - As their columnists got crazier the comments got more vitriolic. It became commonplace for me to read a loopy story and go down to the comments to find people pointing out factual errors by the writers, or flaming them for their extreme opinions. I think the staff got tired of commenters trying to bring them back down to earth. Nowadays they only rarely seem to enable comments. Presumably to keep mod costs down.