Amusing to me that there is no comment section on this piece.<p>Elsewhere on the Guardian there was an article [0] talking about the issue (with comments open), and a lot the comments were along the lines of 'maybe if you stopped deleting any disagreement'<p>[0]<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/31/comments-audience-censorship-criticism" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/31/comments-audien...</a>
Curious if how abussive commenters would respond if they weren't blocked, but comments were hidden so only mods & them can see them. Basically, auto-consume as much of the abussive commenter's time as possible; have there pages load slowly, have comments be buggy, give them CAPTCHAs, have auto response comments viewable to only them requesting they be civil/nice, etc.
I do wonder what options for 'nudging' people away from these comments there are.<p>For example, warning people their comment looks abusive, and pointing out what a large fraction of people comment appropriately.<p>If a comment looks uncivil, you could show the author how generic and meaningless prejudice comments often are, giving other examples of prejudice comments that have been deleted.
The Guardian could really do with a downvote button or similar. It seems one of the easiest ways to deal with iffy comments. Not sure why they don't have one.
The Fashion section attracted at least twice the proportion of blocked comments as any other section. Not exactly a section I'd associate with (presumably sexist and racist) straight white men.<p><pre><code> Articles about feminism attracted very high levels of blocked comments
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This has me curious whether it is the subject matter (rather than the sexual/racial identity) of female and minority authors that plays the largest role in the negative comments.
Related current story: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478835" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478835</a>