And so into this embattled comment arena, steps Civil: a startup co-founded by former online comment moderator, Aja Bogdanoff, who got tired of trying to firefight the endless stream of comments spewing out of an unregulated pipe.
What would you say is the ratio, in a given day, of times you say to yourself, "Wow, the readers of The New York Times sure are a thoughtful bunch," to the times you say to yourself, "Commenters are a bunch of [insert expletive that wouldn't get through our comment moderators]"?
Comment moderators are standing by.
A new breed of journalist – comment moderators – was born in order to handle the avalanche of opinion.
As the community manager at The Times, Etim oversees 13 comment moderators and thinks way more about Web comments than most people would ever want to.
The company built an algorithm trained on comments flagged as abusive by Yahoo comment moderators — and was ultimately able to detect abuse with a 90percentt success rate.
In an effort to "maintain a civil environment" and prevent the "trolls from taking over," says Huffington, in addition to the site's own paid comment moderators, readers are encouraged to flag inappropriate comments.
Wanting to "protect the platform from the worst aspects of the Internet," they focused on developing comment moderators who played a critical role in nurturing and building the community of bloggers and readers.
Borrowing from Foursquare, today it will start giving out badges to loyal readers who comment like crazy and share HuffPost stories via Facebook and Twitter (the Superuser), collect a lot of fans and followers (the Networker), or flag inappropriate comments (the Moderator).
At the Guardian, readers and journalists can report abusive or off-topic comments, and moderators will quickly block them if they break the community standards.
