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Comment Experiment Ends At SCOTUSblog

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

From the very beginning -- in the pre-Internet dial-up BBS days -- online discussions have been infested with intellectual ankle-biters who have little or nothing of substance to add to the discussion and simply sling insults at those who do. This pollution of an otherwise valuable medium continues in the form of comments on blogs. A year and a half ago, SCOTUSblog tried an interesting experiment to clean up its comments by requiring commenters to use their real names. The experiment was a partial success, in my view, but not enough for the sponsors of the blog. A post there today states, in part: At the beginning of OT06,* we instituted our current comment policy, whereby commenters will not be approved unless they leave their full names. We did that to prevent what we saw as unproductive sniping by a tiny minority of our readers that took away from the overall quality of the blog...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on April 01, 2008 (boomark / email).