MILESTONE: Tipping Point for Tower of Babel II

On August 23, NPR will stop the comment section of its story articles!

The NPR article notes that NPR is not alone doing this, also listing “This American Life, Reuters, Recode, Mic, The Chicago Sun-Times, Popular Science, CNN, The Toronto Star and The Week.”

So, the reason I’m writing this post, is to PROCLAIM:

As of AUGUST 25, 2016, society has reached the tipping point for the demise of READER COMMENTS, and the ability to capture the voices of the people to promote direct democracy.

Why is this significant? Because “reader comments” are a tool that was presented as one of the internet’s greatest achievements: a method for average people in society to share their voices. With this tool collapsing, the great promise of the internet has been greatly diminished. The INTERNET, society’s modern Tower of Babel, has been dealt a mortal blow! And with the loss of society’s ability to gather the “voices of the people”, the promise of democracy has also been greatly diminished.

What was the basis for NPR’s decision? Wanting to provide content valuable to it’s members, NPR observed that,

“far less than 1% of that audience is commenting, and the number of regular comment participants is even smaller. Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months — 0.003% of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period.”

But the problem is far greater than having only a few readers providing comments. In a post from former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard, she explained,

“The trolls who rule the comment seas may actually have won because they often scare away people with their vicious attacks.”

Did this collapse have to happen? Isn’t there a way to make it work?

The NPR story does discuss their attempts to moderate the discussions,

“caretaking NPR’s commenting system becomes more expensive as the number of comments increases — sometimes costing twice what was budgeted. So basically, NPR decided it’s not worth the money to engage only a sliver of its audience.”

What if moderating the discussions wasn’t a money problem? Would the problem be solved? Unfortunately no. Anyone who has participated in discussions with tightly moderated academic groups will observe further problems. Specifically, the comment format itself is not conducive to managing anything but the most trivial of issues.

So, in short, the problem is that NO internet service, including the likes of Google, the NYT or Columbia University, has successfully figured out how to economically deal with moderation or subject complexity.

Does that mean it can’t be done? No. I know this because I have developed and demonstrated such a system that does make comments work. For example, I jumped in on a comment effort, in a pretty well moderated academic group, that had been going on for 4 years. In two months, with only a few hours of my effort, the discussion came to a resolution!

So, the real problem is not can it be done. It’s, ironically, a fundamental problem in journalism itself: ego! The people in the lime light don’t want to give up their control. They don’t want to bring in voices or ideas that challenge their ideas or reduce their prominence. The same applies to companies and efforts that profess to be developing solutions. They have somehow obtained the funds to research the problem. They don’t want input from outside that would solve the problem, thereby putting an end to their effort. And when it comes to democracy, public opinion is not something sought. It is something to manipulate and control.

That is what happened with the group I helped. What all of its members, in public, would repeatedly claim, was that the society was a completely “democratic” organization. It wasn’t. It was dominated by a very authoritarian leader. He didn’t like the conclusions that resolved the 4 year discussion. They went back to the old approach.

The RESULT! Humanity goes over the cliff of hubris — the cliff of false pride. You can read about it in the series Collapse of the First Global Civilization Part 5 — Language, Government Gridlock and the Breakdown of Communication.