Another Reason to Give to Reason: We Let You Comment, You Mangy Sons of Bitches!

As noted earlier (and trust me,
every few hours for the next week), this is Reason’s annual
Webathon, where we ask readers of Reason.com to support our
award-winning (and, full disclosure, award-losing) journalism in
print, online, and via video.

This year, we’re hoping to raise $200,000 to help promote “Free
Minds and Free Markets” in 2015. Go here for swag and
giving levels and rest assured, you can give in Bitcoin
and any payment method this side of Camel Bucks.

I outlined some reasons
to give here. Here’s another: Unlike an increasing number of
sites, we let you—the hoi polloi, the rabble, the masses—comment
freely at Reason.com.

That’s not simply because we’re lazy or because we don’t read
the comments anyway (we do, and we cry, just like real humanoids!).
When we started Reason.com and, later, our staff blog Hit and Run,
it was central to our conception that we would allow immediate and
unfiltered feedback from our readers as much as possible.
Commenters can be brutal—I’ve been called everything from a “gay
Elvis impersonator” to an “apologist for stupefaction” and worse
(and will almost certainly be in the comments section of this
post).

But one of the great things about classical liberalism,
capitalism, the internet—indeed, one of the things we celebrate
generally in all of our work—is the way that new technologies have
in general leveled long-standing hierarchies. Hell, that picture
above of me is an example of the ease with which all of us can
speak more freely. Thank you,
poopdogcomedy of The Daily Kos, for helping to prove my point
(I know I’m living in a glass house on this, poop, but investment
in a spell-check app, why don’t ya?). You may be a mangy left-wing
cur, but this much we can agree on: Speaking up and speaking out
and speaking back has never been easier.

Keeping the conversation open like we do at
Reason.com is an increasingly endangered sensibility, especially
among folks who don’t like having to mix with the, er, wrong sorts
of people. Consider this recent column by The Washington
Post‘s Chris Cillizza, which was forwarded to me by Reason
columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy. “The
elites,” she notes, “are being annoyed that the common man can call
them out on their brain farts.”

RESOLVED: Comments Sections Need to Go

…Reuters recently got rid of comments on
articles….Vox, the site run by former WaPo-er Ezra
Klein, doesn’t have comments at all. The New York Times
heavily curates its comments sections….

In the early days of [Cillizza’s blog at the Post] the
Fix, a group of regular commenters — some who liked my work, some
who didn’t — banded together to keep the guy typing IN ALL CAPS
ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL POST from
overrunning the site. It worked — for a while. But, as we
added more writers and the traffic numbers grew, the ability of a
small-ish number of commenters to police an increasingly large
number of “loudest guys on the block” was reduced
significantly….

The best solution? Not to get rid of comments entirely. Instead,
deploy an army of comment curators who harvest the best of the best
for each article so that scrolling to the bottom of the page is
rewarded. Unfortunately, given the amount of content that any news
site produces in a given day, you would need hundreds of people to
curate the comments….

Rather than use resources on people who try to make comments
sections smarter…[h]ire more content creators who can widen our
community in ways that make more and more people want to be a part
of it. That seems to me to be the way to be the best steward of our
growing online city. And the bigger the city grows, the
harder it is to hear the loud guy screaming nonsensically down the
block. Win-win.