The Voice of OC announced a change in their comment policy today, switching to Facebook comments. What this means is that readers who comment at the Voice of OC won’t be able to hide behind anonymous names – and they will be forced to set up Facebook accounts so they can comment at the Voice of OC.
The downside to this new policy is that many readers may be afraid to voice their opinion as now folks will be able to stalk them via Facebook. Liberal Orange Juice blogger Greg Diamond, an attorney, once threatened to sue us because we wouldn’t reveal the IP address of a commenter he didn’t agree with. Imagine what he might do if he could track you down via your Facebook page?
The post announcing this comment change quickly attracted almost 100 comments, then they were all gone as the Voice of OC turned on their new comments. Many of the Voice of OC commenters who commented today said they were finished reading the Voice of OC.
Here is how the Voice of OC summed up their decision:
Nearly all major news organizations have had similar troubles with commenters and decided to either dedicate full-time staffers to monitor comments, require some level of registration, or both.
As a small non-profit, we want our resources focused on producing high-quality journalism – not monitoring comments – so we’ve decided to switch to a comment section that requires registration through Facebook starting Tuesday.
The Orange County Register made the same decision awhile ago and now they have hardly any comments and they are in financial trouble. We tried to go with Facebook comments but our readers didn’t like the feature. Today our readers can still comment anonymously on our blogs.
How will members of the OCEA, the public employees union that bankrolled the Voice of OC, feel about not being able to comment anonymously any more?
And was this move really done to squelch comments from folks the Voice of OC editors disagree with?
Some dance—some sit on their hands ! The OC crowd chose to plug their ears .
How will they feel? Nobody will ever know – the 60 + comments (mostly negative) to the announcement article disappeared in the transition. I presume many commenters made multiple site visits to continue dialogs, and are now down, daily, to “one and done” (if that) as I am. I hope the drop in their traffic will cause a reconsideration of their decision.
I agree that this move is going to hurt their traffic but I don’t think they care about that.
Frankly, I think it’s a good policy and that the snarking trolls hiding behind anonymity won’t be missed at all.
Like you, I don’t hide but I hope no one gets stalked now that everyone is in the open.
Yeah Rick. Wait till you start getting calls to your boss, anonymous packages sent to your house, your friends and family harrassed. That might redifine “snarky”.
One of the final comments at VOC talked about this and the damger of unstable vindictive political junkies taking matters into their own hands. So in an effort to make things “pleasant”. The VOC has divorced itself from the public.
Sounds like another victim of the Northwood Nightstalker, aka Mr. Business of Baseball, aka Dan Chmnimowski.
CB, your anonymity aside, I’ve seen “snarky” comments here (and elsewhere) that were little more than an invitation to engage in violent behavior. There was no substance or truth in what was posted. Once the door is open and the light turned on, like cockroaches, this sort of miscreant will scary off into the darkness and we’ll never see them again.
If this is what it takes to keep “unstable vindictive political junkies” from participating in discussions here… so be it.
My guess is this was due to their new affiliation with the Register who wants to be all fuzzy and corporate and friendly with the pols. The funny thing is that 95% of the trouble at VOC was caused by Fiala and people confusing him with a sane man – sort of like getting into an argument with the babbling dude outside the 7-Eleven.
They could have banned him. Or alternatively, added mongoloid and Jew to their list of swear words. Problem solved.
Very astute observations.