Denver Post hopes for civility in new online commenting system

There’s a reason that news sites’ comment sections are second only to YouTube’s as the most stereotypically awful places for discourse on the internet.

Most sites, including The Denver Post, use one of a handful of free commenting systems that — like rich manure — are fertile battlegrounds for all manner of trolls, racists and spam artists.

But in our current social and political climate, the community needs a public place to discuss the world we live in that isn’t inside the bubble of self-selected Facebook feeds, and one that is safer from trolls and bots.

So beginning Tuesday, commenting on denverpost.com articles will be handled by a service called Civil Comments.

How it works

With Civil Comments, you’ll be asked to rate the civility of several other comments from the site — and then your own comment — before you’re allowed to submit it. This kind of crowdsourced moderation is a unique way to try to ensure higher quality comments without the heavy hands of moderators deleting offending posts.

You’ll still be able to log in with a Facebook or Twitter account, or create a standalone Civil account using your email address. If you already have a Civil Comments account from elsewhere, you’re all set.

Once you start commenting, and rating others’ posts, the machine-learning algorithms will get to know our commenters, and its ability to weed out trolls and spam will gradually improve.

If you’re making questionable comments, as judged by the community, you’ll likely hear about it from Civil’s system. Same goes if your voting behavior looks fishy. With these and other tools in the system, Civil hopes to make trolls a thing of the past.