The ARLnow comment section is legendary.
Over the past 16 years it has hosted a daily exchange of ideas on local topics with a volume of comments more typical of a large city newspaper than a hyperlocal website. It has been a place where a (mostly) anonymous group with usernames that became familiar over time could gather, joke and commiserate over the news of the day.
At its best, the comment section provides additional context to stories and a palpable sense of community and belonging. It’s the local bar where everyone is gathered to watch something on the TV. Sure not everyone is friends, but most get along in the end and support each other through dark times.
This compares to other local news sites that turned off their comments over the past decade, directing their readers to social media — an even worse place for meaningful discourse — to continue the discussion. While those sites maintained solid local reporting, they have often felt sterile and one-dimensional after the community has been shooed away. The former DCist comes to mind.
Some of the biggest and most successful news organizations, meanwhile, have kept the comment section active, at least on many stories. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have not followed the lead of their smaller peers in turning off comments. That seems notable.
For almost as long as the ARLnow comment section has existed, people have been complaining about it. But reader surveys and user behavior consistently show that people want to read the comments, even if they say they don’t.
There was a brief window after the site’s launch in 2010 — at the tail end of the golden age of blogging, when the structure and norms of online communities were still evolving and online spaces felt more like a semi-exclusive clubhouse than an extension of “real life” — where there was a legitimately idyllic quality to the comment section. But as ARLnow grew in popularity and more people flooded into the comments, it had most of the ills of other open online communities within a couple of years. The same stuff people complain about today also existed during the Obama presidency, just at a different scale.
The volume of comments in the early-to-mid 2010s was manageable enough that we were able to closely moderate the comment section. That began to change later in the decade, as the volume continued to increase and the tenor of comments turned more negative and pugilistic, reflecting a change in American society with the election of President Donald Trump.
That’s the other thing about complaints about the comment section: it’s a mirror on society. Your complaints about the comments are also complaints about society at large. The only difference between the comment section and “real life” is that people are less likely to openly share and fight about their various opinions with strangers in everyday life, and are more likely to self-associate with people who share their values and general worldview.
Into the thunderdome of online discourse, ARLnow — along with its sister sites — has had to figure out a way to efficiently and effectively moderate comments. Over the years, we have directed more of our resources to focus on local reporting. We do significantly more local journalism now than 10 years ago, when site editors and reporters had to switch between journalistic work, social media management, comment moderation and other odds and ends.
Today, editors still pitch in to help moderate at times, but the heavy lifting is done by the automated moderation tools offered by our long-time comment platform, Disqus, and 1-2 members of a remote team that handles various back office functions for our company. In a setup like this, it’s impossible to moderate in a way that considers the full nuance of ideas and phrasing. Instead, you have to have a defined set of rules and coach those doing the moderating to be as consistent as possible and to remove the worst of the worst as quickly as possible.
Also, there’s the matter of the human moderation largely taking place during business hours, since we’re not staffed at nights, on weekends and on holidays.
We’ve tried our best to address good-faith concerns about comments, which has led to the following recent changes.
- AI based pre-moderation
- Holding comments of new commenters and those with a poor ratio of downvotes to upvotes (as determined by Disqus) for manual review
- Disabling uploaded images and animated gifs
- Implementing a button to open the comment section, so users have to take a proactive step to access it
- Disabling comments on Daily Debrief
There is more we would like to do — limiting the number of comments one can post in a given day and on a given thread, only letting Press Club members post, and hiding comments in pre-moderation queues rather than holding them entirely — but we are limited by what our technology vendor offers, despite our advocating for some of these changes over the past few years.
Our moderation efforts have only been partially rewarded.
Back-and-forth flame wars among commenters persist and complaints about comments and comment moderation seem to be getting louder. They’ve also taken on a political tone, with the head of one local party threatening to “drop all the receipts” about alleged moderation transgressions and, earlier this year, a social media effort on the other end of the political spectrum to call for a boycott of ARLnow due to an alleged lack of moderation.
The latter, which often took screenshots at night and on weekends of comments that were later removed, was followed by a current County Board member. ARLnow has also seen at least one letter sent to the County Board as part of this pressure campaign.
We’ve long believed in the importance of a local comment section and not just offloading comments to the vicissitudes of social media algorithms. But becoming a political punching bag and having our business — and thus, our ability to carry out our core local news mission — threatened because of the comments is not part of the deal.
This is a new-for-2025 development that has us questioning the way forward. Potential paths include just trudging on as is, closing the comments on more articles (like the NYT, WaPo and WSJ often do), closing the comment section altogether, or some sort of technological middle ground, like further building out our new-ish Letter to the Editor section as a forum for local discussion. (We do not see increased or decreased moderation as a viable solution.)
As we are wont to do, we’re putting it to readers: what do you think we should do about the comment section?
