InfoWorld.com no longer taking comments

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Posting comments on InfoWorld.com has always been difficult. Now, it’s no longer possible. Instead of commenting after each blog, you’re redirected to
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Seems the way the web has been going. But not me. No Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin for me!

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Woody, I’d always wondered why there never seemed to be any comments over there to your always interesting InfoWorld posts. Now I know the reason, thanks.

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Why doesn’t InfoWorld take comments anymore? Any particular reason?

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I’m not completely sure, but all of the major publications are having problems with spam, intolerance, ignorance. Commenting is largely seen as an expense without much benefit.

I take advantage of commenting for research – my readers are great! – and since I approve everything before it’s posted, we don’t see much fisticuffs.

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Yeah, teh requirement to log in to a social site in order to post comments turned many people off.

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They care about readers as much as Ms cares about their users.

Ikeep trying to disabuse people of the illusion that the media is in the business of providing content to users, but selling audience to advertisers, but to little effect.

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I meant to readers.

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Re: “Commenting is largely seen as an expense without much benefit.”

I agree,

although two weeks ago, I found it interesting that the UK “broadsheet”, mainstream (right-leaning) newspaper the _Telegraph_
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
(which has declined in quality lately)

has decided to re-establish reader comments,
which they used to have, then eliminated in February of this year.

They require reader registration to leave comments, but registering is free (you don’t have to be a paid subscriber to register).

Also, if you register you are allowed to read one paywalled article a week for free (ooh boy, one whole article!)

They said they brought comments back in order to increase reader engagement, etc.

=====
Coincidentally, the person who for five years was the editor of the “Telegraph Blogs” area of the Telegraph’s website wrote an article in a different publication 2 months ago saying he was glad that many online comments sections are closing down:

“Comment threads are closing, thankfully – but the underpants brigade have won

…‘below-the-line’ comment threads are being killed off by the media outlets that set them up. With a sigh of relief.
Malicious creeps have had their microphones turned off, mid-rant.
So have countless monomaniacs who aren’t malicious but who have been sucking the life (and profits) out of the publications that host them.
Clever, polite people have lost their platform, too, but I’ve yet to meet an editor who feels their pain.
…now the commenters have really got something to be cross about. Their online adventure playground is being padlocked.
The Telegraph has closed its comments threads. The Guardian is itching to do the same.
…in America as well as Britain, major outlets are closing their comment forums….”

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/comment-threads-closing-thankfully-underpants-brigade-won/

[He obviously didn’t realize that the Telegraph was going to start their comment sections back up again.]

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Not me, either!

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Actually I tried few times with my LinkedIn account and it has never worked. It is not about turning people off because of the requirement to log in, it is more likely about a faulty implementation.

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+1

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Interesting!

I sympathize with InfoWorld (and the other IDG sites). Sifting through comments is a time-consuming pain. I’m very fortunate to have the good folks you see around here!

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At a news article page on infoworld.com, eg
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3142128/open-source-tools/4-no-bull-takeaways-from-microsoft-joining-the-linux-foundation.html
, after clicking the link to Infoworld’s Facebook acct, I could not find the news article there. So, I could not make any comments n will likely stop visiting IDG’s websites.
.
I think IDG has too many tech websites that r similar. They need to be consolidated = save costs = no need to do away with the Comment section.

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Woody
As long as you continue to take comments and questions here then I’m happy. I don’t bother with the other stuff and stay off of Facebook and all the rest of the social network websites. I for one believe in face to face communication.

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No question that big web sites (such as CBS’s ZDNet, Neowin which is 40% owned by Stardock, AOL’s engadget, Vox Media’s Recode and The Verge, Conde Nast’s Ars Technica and Reddit, and many more) are selling eyeballs to advertisers. Others (such as IT Unity’s Thurrott.com and Penton’s WindowsSecrets.com) take a fremium approach, with full access given to those who pay by the month, in addition to advertising.

I’m an independent, and this site depends on eyeballs (those who allow it through their ad blockers) and donations.

It’s not so much a question about caring. It’s mostly a question of making a living (or turning a buck) without getting caught in a swamp.

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+1

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I do Facebook, but I don’t post comments to other sites via my Facebook account.

Not only do I want to keep my Facebook account separate from all of the other accounts I post on (I don’t want these sites joined together into one big profile), but also I don’t want to take the chance that InfoWorld (or whoever) will somehow gain access to my Facebook account.

After reading the above comments, I can see why a site might want to go the social media route for their comments; but I’m still not going to do it.

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+1

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For me, it is a huge turnoff to have to log in to post comments, especially with social media accounts as I don’t use them. I don’t want my posts to follow me as I mature and change every year and for some stupid posts I might do sometimes, some others might contain some interesting ideas and I don’t want all of that aggregated somewhere.

Woody, I understand that it might be a pain and not very helpful to manage posts on a big publication where any idiot can post useless comments, but I can assure you that the job you are doing here is great. The comments are regularly more enlightening that the already interesting original post.

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I wasn’t including u and indeps.

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I did get talked into a Linkedin account but I’ve hardly ever looked at it, never seen the point really.

FB and Twitter you can keep.

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Understood. But I’m quite dependent on eyeballs!

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I agree!

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I was on the school debating team for several years and really enjoyed the strategy associated with presenting a logical argument.

In a debate you have to listen to what the opposing side is presenting and formulate a response that exposes its weaknesses. You acknowledge strengths especially if your own position exhibits the same strengths. This illuminates the differences. Facts matter and you do not have the liberty of creating your own. Argumentum ad hominem is a sure way to go down in flames.

Unfortunately social media is a denizen of flame throwers and sociopaths. It is not a place to discus anything of substance. Commenting there is like participating in a melee.

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By Jove, you’ve got it!

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I always wonder when people do away with a convention that’s been around for a while whether they understand why it was there in the first place. The number one reason for doing away with comments seems to be, understandably, that trolls pop up and dominate anywhere that gives them room to speak. They’re like the graffiti “artists” of the internet world. The current approach seems to be a strategy of tearing down the factories and storefronts to prevent the vandalism (you can’t vandalize what doesn’t exist). This is most unfortunate. I think we have a common human need to give feedback, even if we just know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that we’re only making fools of ourselves. It’s harder to listen when we cannot speak.

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I am on my website too and I use a few pertinent ads but no comparison to what corporations are doing. Our business is content for eyeballs theirs is eyeballs to adverters and the behavior is different.

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Goodbye Infoworld – you are no longer of interest to me if I have to use Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to see readers comments. I thought the internet was a platform to share
information not pass the buck to other sites that I have never, and never will register to use. Thank goodness for “askwoody.com”.

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I agree : the Telegraph used to be a great information & opinion site, they have degraded it to an incredibly low level with the last redesign. It’s a case study in dumbing down. Even the journalists’ blogs, which were a delight, have been savaged in quality and number.

The new visual interface itself is stupid. I suppose they wanted to make it more readable on a smartphone. I wonder whether the paper version is any better. On top of that, I used to be able to circumvent their ridiculous free reading limit, now it’s gotten more difficult.

On a more general note, having to register and login in order to comment on a site is massively dissuasive. Commenting is an urge of the moment. I may have tried to comment once or twice after Woody’s articles at InfoWorld, but I don’t have any account on social media and don’t want any.

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Perhaps but it does not negate the fact that media cares about advertisers first.

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I stopped using LinkedIn a while ago its an ad generating machine and produces no benefit except to itself. Nobody who does not have something to sell participates at least in my technical area. Statistics show its an utter waste of time

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I resent LinkedIn very much, because they force you to be rude to friends, or at least they make you feel so.

Each time someone I know registers to LinkedIn and tries to add me to his list of contacts, I receive an automated mail saying : so and so wants to add you to his list of contacts, please confirm that you know him.

Upon trying to confirm, I am informed that I must open a LinkedIn account for that, which I won’t do, for privacy reasons. But there’s no way to politely decline. The only option is to register, or ignore.

So I ignore, thus triggering a series of increasingly insisting and irate canned mails, saying hey, you do know so and so and he tried to befriend you on LinkedIn, so why are you a butthead and don’t you answer him ?

The only option at that point being to fire a personal mail to the culprit, saying thanks but no thanks, all the while feeling bad for declining.

Or to do nothing, and feel bad for it.

So we have this extraordinary situation of commercial companies using machines to try and redefine the rules of civility for their own profit while being themselves rude to the extreme, blackmailing would-be customers, using the natural tendency of people to be nice in order to make a buck for themselves, hijacking the existing social goodwill to pad their own pockets, and managing to sow distrust and resentment between their customers and their friends. How perverted is that ?

Social media, indeed… Anti-social media, more like.

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Clairvaux, I would like to add you to my list of contacts on Linke… er…

Yet another controversial part of Microsoft.

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@Clairvaux,

Two weeks ago the Telegraph changed their paywall.

They used to have a daily limit (I think of 6 or 8 articles) that readers could access for free, but the limit could be easily re-set to zero just by clearing cookies — which most people did.

Now they have a different paywall system —

They are calling about 20% of their articles “premium”, and those are behind a “hard” paywall that there is no way to get around (except for paying/subscribing).

The other 80% of their articles are totally free to read, and have no limit at all.

After I made a couple of visits to their site after the new paywall system was started, I realized that the “premium” articles are basically the only articles that I would wish to click on there; for me personally, I now view the Telegraph website as generally being behind a “hard” paywall, and I don’t visit it anymore.

The Telegraph says that in each calendar month, their columnists who write the “premium” articles will have 3 weeks of their newly-published articles’ being behind the paywall, and 1 week of their newly-published articles’ being in front of the paywall and free to read, supposedly in order to make sure that they don’t lose readers, and entice new readers to subscribe. The “free” week of the month for each columnist will be different, and not spelled out anywhere.
I think that is a barmy idea. In the past 2 weeks, I’ve already had enough of clicking on headlines on their site that I wanted to know more about, and getting the “oops, you have to subscribe to read this” notice. I’m not going to keep checking their site and wasting my time in the hopes that if I’m lucky I will hit upon the special week of that month that one article which catches my eye might be “free” to read.

Yes, I could pay them to subscribe, and I understand and sympathize with their need to make money. But I don’t get that much value from the paper, especially since their general quality has tanked so much, to pay to read it. When it was free, I would look at it to get another perspective on the news and enjoy some other features, because it was one of the few mainstream UK broadsheets that didn’t have a paywall.

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@fp, is your site computer-related?

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@LL: “Facts matter and you do not have the liberty of creating your own.”

That statement is positively anti-patriotic!

—-
C.P. Scott, the editor of the Guardian, in a 1921 essay, on the centenary of the Guardian’s founding:

“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”

“The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair.”

“There are people who think you can run a newspaper about as easily as you can poke a fire, and that knowledge, training, and aptitude are superfluous endowments.” [poohsticks: hmm, reminds me of something current…]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2002/nov/29/1

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@clairvaux,

Exactly!

—-
Earlier this year, LinkedIn had to pay out money in a class action suit, because they had snaffled up some members’s email account contact lists and mailed every email address in their address book with an invitation to connect to that person on LinkedIn, and then they kept sending out reminder emails, when they hadn’t quite told the members who shared with them their contact address books that this was what they were going to do — or something like that (I don’t remember exactly what happened).

There was someone who had stopped being my friend years ago, but I was suddenly getting LinkedIn emails to be friends with her, and they kept sending reminder emails to me. I thought it very unlikely that she would want to be friends with me on LinkedIn, at least without first having some normal, one-to-one contact with me again, so I just let the invitations go unanswered. It was only when I read about the class action suit that I realized that my email address must have been in her email account address book from years before, and she probably had given LinkedIn access to that, without knowing that LinkedIn was going to send out invitations to everyone in it.

I never liked it or used it, but I did start an account when someone personally invited me and enthused about it, but my profile has been x% unfinished ever since, and I haven’t been on LinkedIn in many years, but there are people who have “recommended” me on LinkedIn, whom I wouldn’t know well enough to lend them my toolbox for a weekend DIY project. ?

I’m sure if I logged in now, Microsoft would have “nodes”
(it’s a technical term.
(obviously I have no idea))
flashing all over their global network, connecting more dots of my life, and putting it into their dossier on me.
Well, that dossier has great big holes in it, and it’s going to stay that way. Even when they merge with Google and Facebook and all the rest of it.
It’s not going to make much difference, probably, but, “by cracky”, I’m going to not make it easy for them.

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Interesting, poohsticks. I hadn’t realised all of that.

For a while, my Firefox setup allowed me to circumvent all limits on free reading (I don’t know why). All I had to do was open a new private tab. Then they changed something, and I could get only one free article before begin told to SUBSCRIBE, YOU DUMMY. Clearing cookies did nothing.

However, switching to a barebones Opera (no extensions) allowed me to continue reading after clearing cookies. Marginally doable, although not for hours.

I once subscribed for the very good price of 20 € for a year. The following year, they sneakily pushed up the price to 40 €. They hadn’t said then that the 20 € was a promotional offer for the first year, and they didn’t say now that the price had doubled. I almost clicked to pay when I realised the scam, and I was so annoyed that I refused to renew. Very Microsofty on their part if you ask me.

Now subscription price, as far as I can gather, is as expensive as it was when people read news on paper. That’s totally unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. Subscribing to a daily newspaper at those prices is a luxury for an individual.

They don’t even tell you if subscribing will allow you to get rid of advertising (I suppose not).

I had noticed the new premium scheme, but I had not realised that 80 % of the paper was now totally unrestricted. That’s certainly not the impression I got when browsing the site. I’ll check again.

Also, I’ve never seen all those changes explained on the Telegraph. Don’t they think their readers deserve to know ?

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@Clairvaux,

“Subscribing to a daily newspaper at those prices is a luxury for an individual.”

I agree.

—
“They don’t even tell you if subscribing will allow you to get rid of advertising (I suppose not).”

They don’t say, but I think that subscribers still see all the advertising that non-subscribers see.

And the Telegraph ads are really annoying — jumping around, playing without being prompted, scrolling constantly — I sometimes read the Telegraph site by propping up a binder against the edge of my computer screen so I am not distracted by the whizz-bang stuff going on at the side of the page.

—
“I had noticed the new premium scheme, but I had not realised that 80 % of the paper was now totally unrestricted. That’s certainly not the impression I got when browsing the site.”

Exactly, that was my impression — it felt to me like at least 50% of the articles were considered “premium” now.

They have mentioned that 80/20 split (and also mentioned a 15/85 split, which is even less a true picture of reality!) in several sources, though, so it’s their official line on the matter.

—
“I’ve never seen all those changes explained on the Telegraph. Don’t they think their readers deserve to know ?”

Yes – I had to go to other sources to find out what the deal with the Telegraph was.

Even on the first day that they quietly switched from one type of paywall scheme to the other, as I was clicking around and befuddled that I wasn’t allowed to read beyond the first paragraph of articles, I didn’t see any explanations from the site about what was going on.

The Guardian’s Media section had a couple of stories about it, and the Press Gazette, and some bloggers.

Poor communication, poor implementation, poor logic (I don’t think the new system will make them more profit than the old system because it will push away a lot of site visitors).

They are tightening up and becoming more expensive and exclusive (in the sense of excluding potential readers) when their quality is on the wane – not a winning combination.

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Don’t bother with binders, there are some very useful extensions to keep ads away. I’m on Firefox, but I suppose the equivalent exists elsewhere.

I use AdblockPlus with NoScript added. Before that I even had anti-tracking extensions such as Disconnet and Ghostery : blocking ads is not their primary goal, but (AFAIK) one of their side effects. I also forbade third-party cookies (don’t know if it helps).

My anti-tracking add-ons seemed not to like my other add-ons so I removed them, but they are an anti-ad tool to be considered.

NoScript is a bit of a pain because it breaks many useful functions on many sites, but you can whitelist pages/sites temporarily/permanently.

This setup is so effective that I sometimes have trouble authorising ads when I want them (such as here), so I sometimes use my unsecured Opera to have a quick full view of some sites.

Some media sites will block you if you use an adblocker, however there are not many of them. Many of those are not intelligent enough to block anti-tracking or NoScript addons.

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If Infoworld had kept Google+ in the mix, I could have dealt with this change. But Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have always eluded my comprehension.

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