Comments are Free but shouldn't Be
Oliver writes about the problem that is the comments on the Guardian's mega-blog, Comment is Free. Some posts tend to have good comments, but some, particularly those about the Middle East, tend to be near-deranged (Oliver gives some examples but there's many more to choose from). If you haven't visited CiF, imagine Harry's Place commenters after 20 cups of coffee.What can be done? Would it not be possible to have a system where to comment you need to buy credits, say 100 comments for £2? I don't think the cost would need to be much higher than 2p per comment to stop much of the madness. Of course there could be many problems in the implementation - in particularly dealing with small amounts of money might be so costly administratively, the cost per comment becomes prohibitive. However I've used websites where you get credits and they seem to work OK, so perhaps these would not be insurmountable. My main concern is that such a commenting system doesn't seem to exist anywhere, which makes me feel there may be a major drawback I've missed - or perhaps experiments show the amount which scares off the loonies scares off all commenters.
posted by Matthew @ 8/18/2006 08:16:00 PM
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