Ever since I made the switch to online journalism nearly 20 years ago (how time flies!), I’ve constantly wrestled with how to handle reader comments.

The immediacy and engagement can be beneficial components to building a thriving audience for community news.

And yet the instant availability of digital technology to cause mayhem and spread toxic messages often overwhelms those more noble aspirations.

Even before the age of blogs, social media and smartphones, online communication was an open sewer for mischief, threats, insults and worse.

If you remember the “alt” message boards of the late 1980s-early 1990s, you know what I’m talking about. Compared to today’s performative Twitter mobs, they truly resembled the Wild Wild West.

There were no moderators, almost everyone was anonymous and good luck getting anything taken down that was truly distasteful or even slanderous.

Perhaps I’ve become a bit numb, and even jaded, by what I read online to understand how this atmosphere can strike a nerve with readers today.

Our post last week on a proposed change to how Cobb County regulates trash services—to the point of designating a single hauler for a specific area—got record traffic.

At more than 27K pageviews and counting, it’s the most visited post on East Cobb News in our 5+ years of publication.

Stories like that tend to generate plenty of reader comments, and this one certainly did.

For the most part, readers were civil, if irate.

Then somebody hit the CAPS LOCK BUTTON and didn’t turn it off for a good while.

That was a response to another reader complaining about having fled a “police state” in Cobb County that’s led by “Commie Democrats.”

And so on it went like this for a brief sequence, running a bit afoul of our Comments Policy.

Another reader noticed all this, and e-mailed me. He said he appreciates reading about local news and issues at East Cobb News, but “I’m not sure what benefit your comment section brings to your news organization. It’s kind of a dumpster fire and I’ve never seen a productive conversation happen on it. Literally just people calling each other ‘commie’ and other names.”

He makes good points, and I replied that for the most part, readers here don’t get that far off the chains. We’ve had a fairly respectful environment for community conversation in spite of the limitations on online platforms, not just on the site but our social media channels as well.

Shortly after our exchange, I shut off reader comments for that post, linked to our policy and revised it to include the following:

• Before posting a comment, ask yourself this: Would I say this to someone in person or over the phone? Also, read through your comments for spelling, grammar, etc.;

• In other words, behave like an adult on this platform.

When I was an online editor at the AJC, I had to moderate comments during the sordid saga of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, as he faced charges of being involved in a dogfighting ring.

For weeks before and then after he was hauled off to federal prison, his football career destroyed, I waded through some nauseating comments, chucking more into the “unapproved” bin than I ever imagined.

What Vick copped to was indeed reprehensible, but after my moderating shift was over, I felt like I needed to take a shower.

We all need a place to vent and rant, but online forums unfortunately have become havens for increasingly vile, putrid expressions.

Frankly, I expected East Cobb News coverage of the Tokyo Valentino adult store and the controversy at Mt. Bethel Church to generate some red-flag comments (sex and religion!).

While they certainly prompted some racy reactions to the former and some biblically-inspired pronouncements to the latter, it was nothing that couldn’t be managed.

It is possible to express strong views without boiling over.

In our increasingly overheated times, many media outlets have decided to dispense with allowing comments at all, and not just major corporations.

Another local independent online news publisher here in Cobb County just switched the off button, for many of the same reasons others have.

For the time being, I’m going to leave them on and keep them going. I still think there’s an opportunity to have civil exchanges on important topics.

Most of you do that; it’s always a small handful that ruins it for everyone else.

I may come to regret this, and there likely are trolls out there waiting to lick their chops.

Please, before you comment on this site, or Facebook, or our other channels, read through and abide by our very reasonable Reader Comments Policy.

East Cobb News is meant to be a community forum, so treat it like that. Don’t call people Commies. Don’t tell them to move to Somalia.

Most of all, DON’T TYPE IN ALL CAPS!

Stick to the topic and communicate with people as you would in real life.

Is that really so hard?

As my Cobb compatriot noted, “editing is hard enough without taking on the job of referee.”

Trust me, you don’t want me to blow the whistle on your misbehavior.

Related:

• Editor’s Note: East Cobb News is Alive at Five and primed for more
• Editor’s Note: Community and the East Cobb Cityhood saga

 

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