Ventura Star comments update
Howard Owens of the Ventura County Star says comments are expected to reopen on that site in the morning (Monday, 5/23) after they were pulled previously because of an increasing number of racial or other hateful or insensitive replies to stories (earlier post). (Comments reopened. Link to Star's note about it.)
Owens says that previously comments were not tied into the registration system, so anonymous comments were possible "and frequent, even the good ones." The new system will tie to the registration system so that no comments are anonymous. Owens also says most users have been truthful about their information when registering.
So the trade-off: Some of those good anonymous comments may be lost, as some people, for employment or other reasons, simply don't feel they can use their names. To be gained is the availability again of a paper to connect with its community and community members to connect with each other.
Remains to be seen if this stifles things much. But where the Star sits in California, I'm betting not.
posted by Doug @ 12:34 AM
2 comments|
2 Comments:
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Jon:
The sense I got from Howard's e-mail was that many, if not most, were anonymous.
Phillip:
Don't claim to have pursued that; was just relaying Howard's assessment "assuming registered users are truthful about their information, and most
are." I do not know how they are assessing that, but it's certainly a worthy question. However, I seem to recall reading recently (sorry, can't tfind the reference) that some testing has been done and that most registrations were found to be truthful. Don't know if that's been done specifically at the VC Star.
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