One of the closing presentations at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in 2010 tested a claim newspapers were making about their own comment threads: that opening the page to readers raised the level of public debate. The paper, Comments in News, Democracy Booster or Journalistic Nightmare, analysed comments on newspaper websites in Catalunya and measured them against a Habermasian standard — whether a thread carried logical and coherent argument, or something else.
David Domingo of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona presented the findings. Most users left a single comment in a debate and did not come back, which Domingo read as evidence that people were not following the conversation: “They drop in, leave a comment and never come back.” Participants rarely articulated an argument; they expressed feelings about an issue. Viewpoints were diverse, but a great deal of what commenters said about each other was disdain, and instances of one commenter saying they valued another’s contribution were very rare.
The conclusion turned on motive. Newspapers wrote participation rules that described a democratic debate, then did not put in place the measures that would have held users to them — and sites with strict moderation showed no higher level of debate than the ones that let users rant. Comments, on this evidence, had been adopted as a business decision about traffic and reader loyalty.