Pareto?
Popular Science is closing comments on its articles. Citing "trolls and spambots", the 141-year-old American magazine has decided that an open forum at the bottom of articles "can be bad for science".
The decision was "not made lightly" said online content director Suzanne LaBarre - nor, appropriately, without some supporting scientific evidence. Citing research from a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, the magazine argues that exposure to bad comments can skew a reader's opinion of the post itself.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought," Brossard wrote in the New York Times.
"If you carry out those results to their logical end," says LaBarre, "commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded - you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch."
If Popular Science's commenters were in proportion to that on most other large sites, they made up about 1% of those who read the piece. (The Guardian's commenters are about 0.7% of readers on average, according to a statistic calculated by Martin Belam from public figures, with a very small number of commenters generating a large proportion - 20% in Belam's calculation - of input.)
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The decision was "not made lightly" said online content director Suzanne LaBarre - nor, appropriately, without some supporting scientific evidence. Citing research from a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, the magazine argues that exposure to bad comments can skew a reader's opinion of the post itself.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought," Brossard wrote in the New York Times.
"If you carry out those results to their logical end," says LaBarre, "commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded - you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch."
If Popular Science's commenters were in proportion to that on most other large sites, they made up about 1% of those who read the piece. (The Guardian's commenters are about 0.7% of readers on average, according to a statistic calculated by Martin Belam from public figures, with a very small number of commenters generating a large proportion - 20% in Belam's calculation - of input.)
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Comments |Comment on this)