I have similar feelings about article comments in general. Most of it is noise not worth reading. Exceptions are communities with a specific focus, or communities where the comments are at least mostly segregated from the content and easily blockable.<p>Here's a small plug for my AdBlock browser add-on that blocks most user comments on the Internet: <a href="http://mute.bradconte.com" rel="nofollow">http://mute.bradconte.com</a>.
This seems so wrong. By giving up, they're just letting the trolls win. I'd rather keep the option to read and post comments, even if that means that there is the occasional uncivil one. Heck, I'd even keep the anonymous comments on Youtube, although they are 90% crap.<p>There is no need to hide the comments, make them more civilized, unanonymized or something like that. Rather, what we need is media literacy - the learned ability to weigh the importance of comments correctly.<p>There is this thing that they call "shitstorm" over here in Germany (I'm sure it doesn't mean in English what they think it means). Basically there's some minor event, and a very vocal minority complains about it on the internet (esp. on twitter). The media jumps onto the bandwagon, it gets completely blown out of proportion, and suddenly there's an artificial public outrage. This is the exact same thing. We have to learn to ignore the vocal idiots, and filter the important from the unimportant information. This is a social skill we have to develop. The social development hasn't kept pace with the technological development.
Unfortunately, it's way to easy for a select group to ruin an article with their negative and factually incorrect comments. In particular for a science site, I think comments should be restricted, at least from anonymous drivers-by.
Unmoderated comments are inevitably a disaster. Shame they didn't look at previous evidence before deciding to repeat other people's failed experiments.