Yahoo Puts its Comment Feature Back Up

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

After three years, Yahoo News has decided to reinstate the comment feature to its stories.

In an article by Joseph Tartakoff, Yahoo says that the decision to pull comment boards off the site was made in 2006 because of "poor quality of discussion". The company has added filters this time to try and keep quality comments at the top and control offensive ones.

But why did Yahoo News make the decision to put comment boards back up in the first place? Mark Walker, head of Yahoo News in North America, said users basically demanded it.

“We sort of looked at our customer satisfaction research and some of the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their first amendment rights,” he says.

People are already using this right to its full extent on the site, with one story having more than 2,200 comments on it.

This is just more proof that news consumers have a lot of say in what the future of the media will look like.

1 comments:

Rachel Gull March 4, 2010 at 8:23 PM  

This is something we've been talking about a lot. News media is no longer a platform for someone to TELL you what to think. Instead it's a conversation between the media and the public. By removing comments in the first place, Yahoo was trying to make its conversation one-sided; and if you do that, nobody will want to talk with you.

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