Rechecking that retraction of articles saying Dominion from the “American Thinker” blog, I saw another post of theirs where they said they’re shutting down their comments sections that accompanied each article. It appears they were on Disqus at one point and moved over to another platform about two years ago. Not sure what it was, but it doesn’t matter.
They explained the decision with some victimhood bullshit, writing “It is news to almost nobody who reads American Thinker that a political witch hunt is underway. Parties in and out of government are looking for excuses to suppress and destroy voices that oppose the left. Because [American Thinker] lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time [then why’d you ditch Disqus?], and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.” Probably not a coincidence that the very next day they posted their retraction and apology to Dominion, anticipating the blowback.
In any case, it was a chickenshit move and they’ll regret it when their traffic takes a beating. Indeed, apparently they already got some abusive emails from angry right wing readers, so much so that they asked them to stop in another blog post today. Comments on news stories are valuable.
And I know that’s a ridiculous statement to make. Yeah a lot of them are complete horseshit – spam, racism, right wing anger, incel anger – but just as often you can get some great analysis and perspective, which is especially helpful when the implications of a news story may not be immediately clear by reading it. Shutting that down because you can’t handle the trolls is a punk move and a fuck you to your loyal fans. Yahoo has burned their comments down twice now in the last 15 years. That brand’s not in great shape right now, and that was a suicidal move to do it again. I love The Atlantic, but they’re pants-pissing worms for shutting down their comments. Same with CNN. Both of those dweebs kicked Disqus and created a market for sites like Political Wire (which was National Zero’s inspiration) to excerpt their articles and give folks a chance to sound off on the news. All said, for as much as we hate The Hill’s terrible, pointless moderation, we’re lucky to have it given the alternative, which is no comments at all.
National Zero will shut down entirely before its comments are shut down. This site is its community and we’re nothing without it. We will never shut you down and then act as if nothing happened, publishing into the void without any feedback or interaction from readers.
And for the record, only TMZ had the right idea killing their Disqus, since angry MAGA trolls don’t really fit in well with an entertainment news site. I give them a pass on that.