Popular gaming site IGN has decided to crack down on shitty comments. Given that a single IGN article attracts thousands of comments — the post describing the proposed changes currently has 2,309 and it was only posted a few hours ago — this is very much a good thing.
I’ve never really read IGN all that much. I had a couple of pieces posted there a few years ago — here and here (I was not responsible for the dreadful headline on that one, by the way) — but I’ve never really felt the need to engage with the community. There’s a few good writers there — a couple of whom I know personally — but it’s not, on the whole, a site I check regularly. And, by extension, it’s not a site I tend to look at the comments form.
My God.
Yeah. They need this crackdown. The comments section is a mess. Just on that one post linked above, there’s a surprising amount of negativity ranging from people insulting the writers (and their names… yes, his name is Steve Butts; grow the fuck up) to perpetuating stupid fanboy platform wars. The few positive comments that are there are quickly drowned out or reacted to with further abuse, and the “upvote/downvote” system the site has in place courtesy of popular third-party comment solution Disqus is completely abused; “good quality” comments aren’t upvoted, but dumb comments from “popular” posters are. Meanwhile, people advocating reason and praising the site’s changes are downvoted. Ridiculous.
I have to question how on Earth it got like that in the first place, and I can only assume it was a matter of complacency — of assuming that problems would sort themselves out after a while. But, since a lot of Internet commenters on sites like IGN are seemingly children and teenagers (or at least act that way), they’ll try and push the boundaries. If they encounter no resistance, they’ll continue to push further. It’s exactly the same as in teaching; if you don’t set expectations up front, you are only making life difficult for yourself down the road.
I’ve been fortunate with this blog that I only get a few commenters, all of whom are very welcome, and pretty much all of whom I’d call friends. Meanwhile, over at my new professional home USgamer, we’re already building a strong community of intelligent, articulate commenters who have plenty of value to add to the conversation. The quality of our content and the way in which we have written it — to provoke and inspire discussion — has helped set those initial expectations in place, so hopefully things will continue in a positive direction. I have no doubt we’ll have to deal with troublemakers before long — we’ve already had one charming chap call Kat Bailey a “bitch” for not liking Project X Zone as much as he did, and we swiftly and positively dealt with it — but for now, I’m very much liking the rather mature, erudite community we appear to have attracted for the most part so far.
Internet comments are both a blessing and a curse, as the cliché goes. On the one hand, it’s great to be able to have discussions around things that writers have posted on the Web; on the other hand, there’s little value in them if they always descend into trolling, name-calling and insulting. Fortunately, a lot of sites seem keen to put a stop to the bullshit; it remains to be seen if, in the long term, anything good will happen.
