> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them.
So it’s a tiny fraction writing the comments, which is disproportionately represented by racist trolls. Removing the comments manually is a lot of work, an automated system is problematic, but The Inquirer very understandably doesn’t want to leave up hundreds of hateful comments.
Besides, have you read the comments on local news websites? Even the very best are almost always useless. It is not like Hacker News or Reddit or another news aggregator, where the value is in the discussion. I don’t think any meaningful discourse is being lost.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them.
So it’s a tiny fraction writing the comments, which is disproportionately represented by racist trolls. Removing the comments manually is a lot of work, an automated system is problematic, but The Inquirer very understandably doesn’t want to leave up hundreds of hateful comments.
Besides, have you read the comments on local news websites? Even the very best are almost always useless. It is not like Hacker News or Reddit or another news aggregator, where the value is in the discussion. I don’t think any meaningful discourse is being lost.