How does a site promote lively discussion while weeding out abusive ‘trolls’?
Managing the comment threads on Internet sites, especially political ones, is a tough, complex task. How does a site promote lively discussion while weeding out the abusive, nasty online ‘trolls’? Some sites (like the New York Times) use crowdsourcing—a strategy that lets readers score or vote on comments and then filter them. Perhaps the trickiest workaround is a piece of software that takes comments with especially high negative ratings, and makes them invisible to all but the authors, who are left to think they’re being ignored.