Gawker Moves Vs Commenter Mob

Nick Denton, Gawker’s chief, thinks about Internet comments quite a bit. He’s concerned because it often seems the promise of the Web as a forum for open discussion has pretty much become a joke. Anyone who has attempted to wade through comments on a YouTube video or Huffington Post article can pretty much attest that there’s a lot of truth in that. That’s why Denton is making a move against the aggressive commenters he feels, in some ways, have taken over Gawker sites. Gawker rolled out its new commenting system, which allows the starters of discussion threads to censor responses. That left a bad taste in some people’s mouths in the comment string to the post announcing the new system. Denton responded, in the comments of course, that the new system is really about giving rights to voices with minority viewpoints.

We want to provide commenting minorities with some protections. They should at least be able to say their piece without feeling like they’re plunging into a mob. Even though active commenters are a tiny minority of the total, they compensate with volume. And their collective harangue can sound like the baying of the mob to the uninitiated.

Read the full discussion of Gawker’s commenting system on its post. Follow Denton on Twitter at @nicknotned.

https://staging.digiday.com/?p=11611

More in Media

NewFronts Briefing: Samsung, Condé Nast, Roku focus presentations on new ad formats and category-specific inventory

Day two of IAB’s NewFronts featured presentations from Samsung, Condé Nast and Roku, highlighting new partnerships, ad formats and inventory, as well as new AI capabilities.

The Athletic to raise ad prices as it paces to hit 3 million newsletter subscribers

The New York Times’ sports site The Athletic is about to hit 3 million total newsletter subscribers. It plans to raise ad prices as as a result of this nearly 20% year over year increase.

NewFronts Briefing: Google, Vizio and news publishers pitch marketers with new ad offerings and range of content categories

Day one of the 2024 IAB NewFronts featured presentations from Google and Vizio, as well as a spotlight on news publishers.
https://staging.digiday.com/media/gawker-moves-vs-commenter-mob/
staging.digiday.com
CC-MAIN-2024-30
82093
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CJ2I5QPQRXZ6Y67LHA7P6CXXE4NWBDYY
<urn:uuid:4320985d-449e-4e5b-8c9f-6cff58bc4447>
2024-07-17T22:35:32Z
192.0.66.198
text/html
sha1:KFECQAPP7TYAEWBXT7CRKBSAA2AY75V7
<urn:uuid:72a20788-810d-45d2-907d-f936be7641b9>
https://staging.digiday.com/media/gawker-moves-vs-commenter-mob/
response
<urn:uuid:09514982-f010-4466-b489-e7295b004a36>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-30
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-128
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/