No comment necessary

Well, boo: NPR has announced that they’re discontinuing comments on stories published on their website as of 23 August. Instead, if you have a burning need to add your insight to stories, you’ll have to go to Facebook or Twitter, or Snapchat, Instagram or Tumblr.

Partly, it seems, the move is due to the increasingly lowered civility we’ve seen pretty much everywhere, no doubt exacerbated by the current election campaigns. It’s certainly been my observation that even the most seemingly innocuous stories (about, say, ice cream, or gravitational waves, or The Sopranos) get splattered with “Benghazi!”, “TrumpU” or variants on “only a moron with tertiary syphilis would espouse that opinion” within the first three hours of posting.

Then there’s the cost of moderating the comments, which even though out-sourced, has been running much higher than budgeted.

NPR extrapolated some insights from running their comments data: Last month their site logged nearly 33 million unique visitors and almost 500,000 comments. But those comments came from fewer than 20,000 users. In May, June and July, more than half of all comments came from just 2,600 users.

As a regular reader, I could probably name at least 100 of them, because you come to recognize not only the names but also the content and style of the comments. Some people get blocked for repeated abuse, then return under new user names. Other regulars suss them out pretty quickly.

Another interesting statistic is that this small number of commenters preponderantly arrives at the site via the desktop, which skews older (younger users favor mobile), and they appear to be more than 80 percent male, while overall NPR.org users are 52 percent male. (This may account for the number of attempted thread hijackings by men’s rights advocates trolls.)

Moving to social media will no doubt engage those younger users. It will probably also mean that the language will be more colorful, at least on the platforms that favor anonymity in registration. And when I say “more colorful”, I mean more profane, vicious and badly-spelt. That’s the nature of the beast.

One more interesting thing about the announcement: in response to both the announcement of the changing of the guard, and the NPR Ombudsman explanation of the rationale, long-time commenters who have engaged in extended “no, you’re a poopy-head” exchanges over the years, have been bidding each other farewell and Godspeed.

It’s like the last day of school after graduation.