PopSci has turned off its comments, citing research demonstrating that rude comments beneath an article polarise a reader’s opinion of its content, and tend to make people doubt the science involved.
Given their stated aims, it seems like a reasonable move – if they’re not going to be able to give the conversation the attention it needs, and especially if they’re facing coordinated astroturfing to undermine their science. They don’t owe anyone a platform.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Has anyone yet tried a pre-mod commenting policy requiring scientific accuracy and cited sources in comments? That could be an interesting community – labour-intensive for the moderators and maintainers, but a fascinating place for expert discussion.
Entirely possible. Since 1998 at the BMJ – the first fully digital medical journal – we’ve posted more than 92,000 premoderated Rapid Responses (eletters) to our website http://www.bmj.com/comment/rapid-responses Here’s how it works http://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-readers/responding-articles Trish Groves, deputy editor, BMJ
That’s fantastic, Trish – thanks for the response. Do you field a lot of responses that way? And what sort of proportion of the responses you get do you tend to publish?
Yes; virtually all responses to BMJ articles come in this way, and from them we choose formal, indexed Letters to the Editor (there’s no other way to submit Letters). I reckon we post >90% of submitted responses: over the 16 years our community’s got the hang of submitting comments that are substantive and clear enough