One of Sluggers’ strengths is the comments. On average, we can have around 15k comments on the site each month – which is a lot.
Comments can be a pain to manage, which is why many sites have taken the easy way out and just turned them off. Don’t panic. We would never do anything so radical, but we need to take steps to improve the quality of the comments.
Personally, I find the volume of comments overwhelming. Many posts can have hundreds of comments, and it is impossible to wade through them all.
My relationship to the comments is like that scene in old Western movies where the guy opens the doors to the saloon, and a full barroom brawl is in progress. The camera zooms in on the guy’s face and he decides the best thing to do is close the doors again and walk away.
The problem arises with the poor aul mods who have to wade through the comments. Despite our attempts at union busting by reminding them all that unions are not only Marxist but frankly ungodly, they have bandied together in open revolt and insisted we do something to improve working conditions. At this rate it’s only a matter of time before they are demanding payment for their work (shudder).
So here are the main issues with comments:
Social media behaviour is bleeding into the comments. There is too much snipping, personal attacks, whataboutery, going off topic, constant negativity, shoehorning what you want to talk about into every post, etc. The constant negativity and the same old arguments are really burning out the mods. We are not expecting sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, but we just ask that you try to make comments that are at least constructive.
There is a quote that is variously attributed to Socrates, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder or Basil Brush:
“if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”
We would like to have fewer comments but better ones. It’s better to have 50 good comments on a post rather than 500.
We are introducing a minimum comment length of 160 characters to encourage more constructive comments. This limit may go up or down depending on how it works out. Padding out comments to hit the limit will be frowned upon. We are also turning off downvoting. The mods want to remove upvoting as they think it can be abused to push out minority voices, but I want to keep it for now as I know readers use it to filter the most upvoted comments.
Also, there will be a new criterion of ‘are you adding anything useful to the conversation?’ and some of our regular offenders will soon be banished for good if they don’t change their ways.
I am acutely aware that Slugger is a social hangout for many of you, and I don’t want to make it a craic-free zone. We will still have the open Sunday posts, and I am open to more open posts during the week to let you talk about whatever you want. Without getting too hippy, I would like us all to be kinder to ourselves and each other. The internet does tend to bring out the inner dick in all of us (me included). Remember that no one at Slugger gets paid. The writers, mods, etc, all do it for free because they enjoy being part of the community. But we need to make sure that we keep it light, as soon as it becomes a burden or an emotional black hole of despair, we will start to lose people and the site will wither and die like the promises in a programme for government. I met many of you at our live events; you are all nice people in the real world. Which reminds me to organise some new live events…
We also have a big issue where many comments should be posts. I keep asking for more writers, but this appeal falls on deaf ears. I want to encourage more of our regulars to write posts and send them in. Some of you are talented writers, and comments can be a bit ephemeral. Maybe it is better to think of it as sending in a letter like people do with newspapers. If you have a good response to a post, consider sending it in for publication instead of writing a huge comment. Remember we relaxed the real name policy so you can use a pen name.
Lastly, I fully admit that we are making this up as we go along. We have no idea how things will pan out, but we are open to experimentation. We are more than willing to consider your views, so do let me know your take in the comments.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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