The ARLnow Daily Debrief was launched in October 2022 with three goals in mind:
- Provide one-stop navigation to the day’s articles and the next day’s events
- Show the day’s sunset for those who missed it
- Give commenters a venue to discuss things we did not cover that day, in lieu of bringing back the ARLnow forums
There are now some reasons to question the third goal. What we envisioned as a free form discussion venue for local issues mixed with some discussion of what’s happening across the Potomac has devolved into a preponderance of back-and-forth fighting about national politics.
Of course, such a trajectory for a relatively open online forum is not unique — or new. In 2020, we reported on the increasingly toxic levels of discourse on local Facebook groups, local listservs, the social network Nextdoor, and the ARLnow comments.
In response to the more recent rise in political pugilism, we recently disabled image uploads in the comments after copy-and-pasted memes became overly disruptive to substantive discussions. We also have started using the AI moderation tools offered by Disqus, our commenting system.
Now we’re contemplating another move: disabling comments on the Daily Debrief altogether to put more focus on local issues, while making moderation a bit easier (we generally do not moderate comments on nights and weekends, leading to big moderation queues).
But we first want to hear from readers: what do you think about comment-less debriefs?
