Commenters: Are You the Problem With Journalism?

2008, it is starting to seem, is the Year of the Commenter. New York Magazine did an entire cover story about The What, an aggressive pseudonymous commenter on Brooklyn real-estate blog Brownstoner. Gawker--basically the Olympics of snarky commenters--did a piece on the backlash against snarky commenters. Nerd World's Lev Grossman wrote a column asking what drives someone to respond "kill yourself" to an 11-second YouTube video of a cute gerbil. And NPR's On the Media program did a segment about whether news sites should allow comments at all. (OTM host Bob Garfield has his doubts, some of them shared by This American Life's Ira Glass).

And now on Lewis Black's Root of All Evil tonight, Patton Oswalt declares commenters (well, bloggers in general, but he's especially harsh on the commenters) to be worse than ultimate fighting:

Let me be old-media for a minute and tell you what I think before I turn it over to you.

I don't buy the argument that it somehow degrades The New York Times to have obnoxious comments by cornholio264 (or whoever) appearing in a comments section under one of its articles. I think most people who read online recognize that just because someone can use the CAPS LOCK key and hit return does not confer the Grey Lady's imprimatur on their words.

That said, that doesn't mean that more discussion automatically = more enlightenment. When time.com instituted registration on our blogs, I resisted it at first, because I worried that it would stifle discussion. But what it mainly did was keep discussions from degenerating. If I wrote a post on a hot-button subject—say, Don Imus—especially if it was linked widely elsewhere, I'd get slammed with hundreds of comments, mainly from people who hadn't read what I wrote at all and simply wanted to respond to the headline or unload a screed. Once a post hit 100 comments or so, I wouldn't bother to read them, save to delete whatever obscene/bigoted comments I could manage to. Beyond-the-pale comments aside, a post like that would just become so much noise and crap-flinging after a point.

Since registration, though, Tuned In has become pretty much self-regulating. There are still arguments and disagreements—occasionally someone even disagrees with me!—but it's almost always civil. I don't moderate comments, yet I honestly can't remember the last time I had to delete a comment that wasn't spam. Now, it helps that the subject matter here doesn't (always) get people pissed-off the way it does over at Swampland. But it seems clear that having some barrier to posting—thus limiting posts to people willing to take the time to sign up—helps reduce the incidences of drive-by 'Net rage.

That's right, folks: My controversial conclusion is that you Tuned In commenters are the best commenters in the world.

Now that I've sucked up to you—seriously, I'm curious what you think about the pros and cons of reader comments at other places you read online. What kinds of restrictions work, or do you prefer a free-for-all? Make me proud, people!