The demise of Message Boards?

[circle70]

Today, mlb.com has eliminated the "comments" section of their stories, where readers can post their opinions.  ESPN has eliminated comments when a game is in progress. A couple of months ago, Illini HQ eliminated the comments section not only for sports, but for all of their stories.

The point:  are these Message Boards the next to go?

[Big D]

I don’t think message boards are going anywhere anytime soon. They have a purpose; they fill a void...without them, where will people be able to communicate online, at their convenience, about something they care about, and have an archive of thoughts spanning many years at their fingertips? Reddit is basically a huge message board and is probably one of the most popular sites on the internet.

I think moderating comments takes a lot of effort...maybe not on this UIC board, where 12 civil people stick to topic and don’t push some political/social agenda, but when you’re talking mlb and ESPN, you’re talking about thousands of people and a lot of bad seeds that can’t help but post spam or other racial/political comments, or just outright attack other commenters. I think maybe these companies just don’t want to deal with it. The Trib is a good example of the evolution of commenting. They once allowed all comments, even from anonymous users. Then they tightened it up to registered users only. Then comments were only allowed on certain stories...e.g. if a story was likely to end up in a race war in the comments, commenting was just disabled from jump. Now, I can’t tell you the last time I saw commenting as an option on any story at the Trib site. Costs money to moderate the cesspool of comments.

Further, could these companies ever be held responsible for things posted on their site? What if someone posts a threat and ultimately acts on it...once posted, even if deleted, the deleter was made aware of it...and what if it went unreported? How do you tell the difference between a real threat and a fake threat? Plus all the drama about favoritism nowadays, with Twitter and Facebook being accused of deleting posts and/or banning/suspending members expressing certain political viewpoints. Maybe these companies just don’t want to risk getting tangled up in that mess in today’s world. Easier to just turn it off.

As long as proboards (and other board companies) are making money, message boards will exist. Even if they all closed shop tomorrow, people will still use open source message board software on their own servers. Small boards like this one are easy to run...the more people you have, the more drama, and the more moderators you need (look at reddit, which is heavily moderated). I don’t think moderation will ever be so difficult that message boards will cease to exist. They’re too valuable.

[keepitneale]

i think theyll come back. reddit is a joke these days.