Comments on: What would happen if we killed off BBC Have Your Say?

By: Looking at The Times’ new paywall | qwghlm.co.uk

Looking at The Times’ new paywall | qwghlm.co.uk — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:10:39 +0000

[...] it also raises some interesting possibilities. I’ve discussed here before about the tragedy of comments on news and how it devalues news websites so. But by fencing off the Times all of a sudden now [...]

By: How (not) to promote healthy discussion online | NativeHQ

How (not) to promote healthy discussion online | NativeHQ — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:21:47 +0000

[...] very insightful post by Chris Applegate takes the example of the BBC Have Your Say forums and offers some observations of where they go [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:36:21 +0000

@ibster – Good point. It could be that some people are employing multiple personas online, some literate & courteous, and some less so. However I think most of what I said holds if you refer to personas rather than people – and this raises the question: should we be encouraging people to employ the nastier personas?

@Jane-May – Have duly subscribed :)

@John – Apologies – I wrote part of the post in MS Word on the Tube and it shows… have now fixed the broken links.

By: John

John — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:10:40 +0000

Good stuff. Yee gads, imagine if you could somehow funnel the energy expended on HYS into something useful along the lines of stackoverflow.com

BTW, the last two links are broken (an extra ” at the end of each).

By: Jane-May Cross

Jane-May Cross — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:29:18 +0000

Christopher darling, please stop using American spellings!!!

I have taken your advice and started my own blog. Aren’t you proud?

JMC x

By: ibster

ibster — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:04:20 +0000

Interesting stuff. I have a question of clarification though: how do we know that the people on HYS and the other news websites aren’t the same people on Twitter and the other social media sites? In other words, how do we know that all those numb skulls posting obnoxious belligerence aren’t actually the “digerati” in disguise?

Flame wars didn’t come about with the arrival of news site comment sections; they’ve been around forever. From IRC to ISCABBS to eljay to HYS – where there’s anonymity there’s an opportunity to be a pissy little twerp or an outright bullying twit.

I suppose I am just really agreeing with you- in order for HYS to become useful it has to become a community where people take responsibility for their opinions.

By: Jared Earle

Jared Earle — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:45:13 +0000

Send ‘em back!

Wait, am I in the wrong place?