When did voicing your opinion get so hard?

Scoping out a few major news sites this weekend like Yahoo!, MSNBC, and Excite, and I once again noticed a bunch of inaccuracies and typos among the articles. When I went to send a comment, I found it was next to impossible though. It reminded me of the complaints people have regarding the process of leaving comments and what they have to go through just to get their opinions heard.

There’s a few things going on though that make this less than a slam dunk when it comes to solving the problem. Issues of privacy, a person’s right to voice their opinion, censorship and even the actual process of signing up need to be factored in.

Take privacy issues. I noticed the girl RIOT went off last week on Ad Age and their registration process. George Parker has recently noted some of the issues too. All in all, if it's just a simple username and valid email address you want, I think that’s fair.

Some publications do not. They want blood in the form of 20 fields that you have to fill out. In that case, privacy concerns arise because I just want to leave a comment—not provide demo info for someone to use and sell to someone else. I have to deal with that crap enough as it is with snail mail and telemarketers. (Even then I’m thinking most people don’t put down their real info unless it’s LinkedIn, etc.) Still, if I have to fill out my life’s story on your blog, I’m gone.

Then there’s the issue of content in comments. Like Parker, anyone’s free to say what they want here. HighJive, copyranter, AdRants, etc. All us ad bloggers are good like that. Only once have I deleted a comment, (and only then because it was a pro-Al Qaida recruitment rant). In general, there’s still a wide spectrum of what’s tolerated online these days and what’s not. Civil comments at Breitbart, Huffington or YouTube? Good luck, it’s a free-for-all—the result of an open policy that ignores any TOS they may claim they enforce. Short of death threats, seems like almost anything goes.

One site’s community policing is another’s Wild West.

Then you have sites and blogs run by people who have a policy of deleting comments because they disagree with what the poster wrote, or who might view engaging them in heated discussion which the blog owner views as disruptive. At a minimum, the comments will just be ignored. However, when someone becomes abusive or threatens physical harm, then something has to be done. Otherwise? your policy should just be to chill. Really, if you take the time to blog your opinions, then be prepared to discuss them or at the very least put up with dissenting opinions.

Which leads me to the last problem I have with those aforementioned news sites in the first place: There are still too many different commenting platforms running with no agreed upon standard. Most bloggers choose the platform they like and that which allows easy access for visitors. (Blogger, WordPress or TypePad.) But the major news sites don’t, and the features they do offer are as advanced as the office equipment featured in Mad Men.

I should have the option to delete, edit or stylize a comment. Period. You can do that here on Blogger, but not everywhere. It’s funny how blogs take the heat for many things, but on the whole, they’re far better at letting people voice their opinion than major media sites.

The three sites I came across at the beginning of this rant, who make it all but impossible to leave a comment on a story there are also a few of the culprits who instead are now focusing more and more on building Digg-like community-based ratings features into their sites so people will drive traffic back by linking to a given story...

That they can’t comment on.

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