Washington Post's Plan To Limit Anonymous Comments

The Washington Post, this story claims, receives more than 320,000 comments a month across blogs, stories and opinion columns. Each day, some 300 comments are deleted, after being flagged by readers or deemed inappropriate by moderators.

The Washington Post has decided that free anonymous comments by readers are too important to its business model to do away with completely, but they're now working on a upvote/downvote system favoured by aggregators like Reddit.

In a few months, The Post will implement a system that should help. It's still being developed, but Straus said the broad outlines envision commenters being assigned to different "tiers" based on their past behavior and other factors. Those with a track record of staying within the guidelines, and those providing their real names, will likely be considered "trusted commenters." Repeat violators or discourteous agitators will be grouped elsewhere or blocked outright. Comments of first-timers will be screened by a human being.

When visitors click to read story comments, only those from the "trusted" group will appear. If they want to see inflammatory or off-topic comments from "trolls," they'll need to click to access a different "tier."

Whose going to bother reading the "troll" pages? Presumably the plan is that those who come only to shout and hurl abuse will tire quickly of never having their comments reach "the trusted group" and will go away.