![]() ![]() Before the change, commenters were only able to make comments on news stories by clicking on a “comments” link, which opened the comment section on a new webpage. In November 2011, The New York Times redesigned its comment section. The Study The Effects of Comment Section Redesign Understanding how real-life commenting works can help journalists as they grapple with the best ways to design and interact with comments on their own sites. Moderators reject comments with profanity, while site visitors recommend comments that include partisanship and incivility. When moderators select comments to post prominently on a site, those commenters who receive the honor appear to comment more after the engagement. Opinionated news may prompt more uncivil comments that are likely to be rejected. Thoughtful redesigns can promote more commenting without significantly threatening the discourse within the comment section. The New York Times comment section provides a treasure trove of information about the commenting behaviors of individuals and newsroom staff. Using partisan and uncivil terms in a comment corresponds with a greater number of user recommendations.Comments containing profanity and using fewer words are less likely to be selected as NYT Picks.Comments containing profanity and using fewer words are more likely to be rejected.Rejection rates and the use of uncivil terms in the comments are higher on weekends than on weekdays.The New York Times receives more comments on weekdays than on weekends.Receiving a recommendation or being selected as a “NYT Pick” relates to a boost in how many times a commenter posts.The use of uncivil terms declined slightly after the redesign.The redesign had little effect on the number of recommendations per comment. ![]() Use of abuse flags declined following the redesign.The number of comments increased after The New York Times redesign in November 2011.The following results emerged from our analysis: How important is the technical design of a comment section to the way news users engage with comments? What prompts commenters to post more comments? How does the comment content affect how journalists and news users respond? We answered each of these questions by examining comments posted to one of the largest, most active news organization commenting spaces: The New York Times comment section. Here, we return to a few of these topics and raise new questions by turning to observational, rather than experimental, data. Yet there is much researchers and journalists do not yet understand about the commenting process and the tensions between participation and ideal content. The Center for Media Engagement has investigated comment sections before, asking whether journalist engagement in comment sections, 3 changing the structure of the comment section, 4 or including summary information about an issue prior to a comment section 5 influences commenting activity. In this report, we consider Hoyt’s question by examining both the participation in the comment section on The New York Times site and the content of the comments on the site. How does the august Times, which has long stood for dignified authority, come to terms with the fractious, democratic culture of the Internet, where readers expect to participate but sometimes do so in coarse, bullying and misinformed ways? 2 Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times when the paper launched comments on news stories, summed up this concern well: The ProblemĮver since The New York Times and other news organizations began allowing comments on their sites, journalists have been concerned about the level of discourse that appears in comment sections. This allowed us to see how the moderating team interacted with comments. The dataset also included comments that were rejected from the site by the moderators. The team engages both in pre-moderation, meaning that comments are screened by moderators before they are posted online, as well as in selecting representative comments to feature as NYT Picks. Finally, unlike many comment sections, The New York Times has an active community editing team, led by Bassey Etim, that moderates the comment section. Second, because the dataset includes comments posted over the course of multiple years, we can see how a technical redesign of the comment section affected behaviors within the commenting section. Most commenting analyses examine only a subset of comments. First, The New York Times gave us access to every comment posted to its site. The New York Times comment section dataset is unique in both its scope and its content. This report describes what we learned from analyzing 9,616,211 comments people posted to The New York Times website between Octo– the date on which The New York Times began allowing users to post comments to news stories – and August 13, 2013. ![]()
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