The Freedom Bulletin

There seems to be a growing trend on the web to allow more and more visitor interaction. Although this may seem like a good thing, and in many cases it is, there are a few drawbacks to increased reader interaction with blogs and news sites.

 First of all, a great website does not need to include any opportunities for interaction at all. The purpose of a website is to share ideas or information with the world. Socializing with other people and allowing others to create content on your website can be cool but is not an integral part of what having a website is about. In various places around the web I have heard the argument that the whole point of a blog, the thing that makes it different from simply a website, is the ability for visitors to leave comments. That is false: a blog is a website that mainly consists of entries organized by date. This format, not interaction, is what makes a blog a blog. It’s not comments, but originality, writing ability, humor, and interesting topics that make a blog great.

 In addition to being generally no better than sites without interaction, sites with reader comments have a few disadvantages. For one, they are more complicated and harder to read than sites without comments. When I want to read a news article, I want to read a news article, not the myriad comments readers have left on it. Having a link before or after the article letting you know how many comments there are, or even worse, showing a sampling of reader comments at the end of the article, makes me feel almost like I still have more to read if I’ve only read the article, and that my knowledge is somehow incomplete. Of course, just because the comments are there doesn’t mean anyone has to read them, but often I would just prefer there to be an article, and that’s it. Knowing that there are comments that I haven’t read makes me feel like I’m missing something.

 Second, depending on how popular the site is, comments can get out of control. If each of your blog entries has over 100 comments, it gets to the point where hardly anyone is going to read the comments. Some blog entries and articles even have over 1000 comments on them! Web pages are meant to be read quickly, and no way is the average person going to take the time to read 1000 comments. In these cases, the webmaster has to either cut off commenting ability after a certain number of comments or a certain amount of time, put obstacles in commenters’ way such as forcing them to register, or just live with the fact that there are so many comments hardly anyone will want to read them.

 Additionally, comments detract from a website’s professional feel. For personal blogs like this one, this isn’t much of an issue, since such blogs aren’t written by professionals anyway, but for news sites, it is important to maintain a professional image. Web content written by professional reporters is inherently more trustworthy than that written by anonymous visitors, especially when the visitors are unable or unwilling to use proper punctuation and grammar, as most of them are. Sometimes I don’t know whether or not to believe things that are said in comments, since I have no idea who the person is or what evidence they have. I would much rather read the media’s version of events, which is credible for the most part, than random people’s opinions, which I have to endlessly sift through and guess about. Allowing readers to create their own content on news websites blurs the line between journalists and regular people on the street, which I don’t think is desirable. When I read something, I want to know who wrote it and how trustworthy it is.

 The worst thing about comments on the Internet is the cruelty and meanness that almost inevitably occurs. It’s well-known that people feel comfortable saying things online that they would never say face to face. This can be good. For example, I am a shy person in real life. I often end up pretending I agree with everyone else when inside I actually don’t. The Internet allows me to share my real opinions much more than I would be able to in real life.

 However, some people are not shy at all. In fact, they are mean bullies. They feel perfectly free to say their opinions in real life, and the only thing, if anything at all, that they are held back from doing is being utterly abusive. Online, however, they aren’t even held back from doing that. I’m not going to quote anyone, but suffice it to say that the heartlessness, brutality, sadism, and utter evil of some online commenters can be impossible to fully convey in words.

 It doesn’t help that most (not all) comments left by visitors on websites contain terrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Additionally, very few of them contain original ideas. It is amazing how many “discussions” consist of nothing but a bunch of people bashing the same victim, all using the exact same insults but in different words. What is the point of voicing your opinions if they are exactly the same as everyone else’s opinions? Furthermore, many people contradict themselves, showing that their opinions aren’t based on any kind of logic. It seems like their goal is just to be as mean as possible. If you have the audacity to verbally assault innocent people, the least you could do is to have half a brain. The cruelty of comments seems to be strongly inversely correlated to the intelligence of their authors.

 One last note: some defenders of visitor comments claim that they have a right to post whatever they want on websites because they have “free speech.” Well, that’s not true. The right to free speech means that people can express their views, not that every website in the world has to provide them a forum. People have a right to decide what they want to do with their own websites. If you want to voice your opinions online, you should make your own website. 

For the most part, the ability to leave comments does not make a website better for readers, and it often makes it worse. The only time that I have felt any desire to leave a comment is when I am outraged by a comment that someone else left!  Most of the time, readers’ comments make the web chaotic, disorganized, confusing, uncivilized, and unprofessional. Most news sites and many blogs would be better off without them.