Over the past year, the average number of comments we receive on Hoodline each month has doubled. We're truly thankful that so many people have so much to say about the stories we cover.
Unfortunately, some recent conversations have been going in pointless, vitriolic directions, as a few readers have decided to derail productive discussion. This tends to happen when we cover hot issues like homelessness, housing, transportation and crime. Increasingly, we've had to shut off entire posts to reader comments, something that punishes the rest of our readers who might have constructive viewpoints to add to the discussion.
We're a small team, and we don't have a full-time moderator. Instead, we've been forced to spend too much of our time lately moderating behavior that violates our long-standing policies, including the use of hate speech and the creation of multiple accounts by the same commenter.
Our overall goal remains to let the people who live in, work in, or simply care about a neighborhood talk freely about the problems and solutions they might have. We will continue to let readers create anonymous screen names so they can choose to express their views on sensitive neighborhood issues without exposing their personal lives.
But we need a better structure to keep our site discussions open and productive, and our time free for reporting and writing. So, after an internal review and a lot of discussion amongst the entire Hoodline team, we're going to institute two minor changes to our commenting policies.
Starting today, we will no longer allow guest accounts for commenting on Hoodline. If you want to post, you'll need to create a Disqus identity.
We will also more heavily police against ad hominem attacks. And we will continue to delete comments or ban accounts that violate our terms.
Here is a friendly reminder about what we don't allow:
- Hate speech
- Threats to others, even in jest
- Defamatory or libelous content
- Comments that are purely promotional/spam in nature
Impersonation of other commenters, or creation of multiple accounts per user for the purpose of amplifying a viewpoint
- Comments containing copyrighted or confidential material
- NEW: Ad hominem attacks
Hopefully these changes will allow Hoodline to remain a place where readers with differing viewpoints can engage each other without devolving into personal attacks or defamatory conversation. We'll monitor things moving forward, and will continue to revise our policies as necessary.
One other issue we'd like to address is our editorial policy regarding the description of crime suspects, as this is something our readers frequently ask us to clarify.
When reporting on a crime, Hoodline includes a physical description of the suspect(s) when we have three or more descriptive details about them. For example, we would report if a suspect is a "white 20-something female last seen wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt." However, we will not simply report that a suspect is a "white female," as racial background alone is not enough of a suspect description to be useful to readers, and could contribute to profiling.
Our terms of service will be updated soon to reflect all of these policies. As usual, if you have suggestions for how we can do things better, let us know.
And thanks, as always, for reading.
