WaPo snafu: The Washington Post today turned off the comments function of its Weblog at www.washingtonpost.com because people just wouldn’t follow the rules:
… there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a shame that it’s come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it’s a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.
So a few bad apples spoiled it for everybody. Now, if you have a comment on a washingtonpost.com post, you’ll have to keep it to yourself because someone used profanity in a comment.
Come on, give me a break, Posties. What level of discourse did you expect? The Harvard Debate Club?
We here at Pensito Review understand the WaPo editors’ frustration because we get a lot of comments on our posts, too. Well, not a lot, really, but some high-quality ones. Well, not that high-quality. Actually, some of them are nasty and hurtful and sprinkled with surprising examples of profanity that we have added to our personal arsenals.
You may not know this, but there are wingnut nutjobs out there with nothing better to do than go around to thoughtful, intelligent, well-designed and left-leaning Web sites like this one and squeeze the boils they have for brains into comments on multiple stories. They are rightly called trolls. But do we take off their comments? Nope. We let other readers respond with their own comments, often creating lively and pyrotechnic strings of comments.
We do, however, remove comments with death threats and refer them immediately to the FBI.
At Pensito Review, we would never turn off comments, mainly because the comments our readers leave often are funny, clever, thoughtful, insightful and make us feel like superior spellers and grammarians. We believe in freedom and free speech, and if you want to show your ass by leaving a ranting, rambling, obscenity-laced blurt of brain pus, why, that’s OK with us. Heck, we do it ourselves sometimes. Well, there was that one time on washingtonpost.com, anyway.
