The tech blog Engadget has temporarily turned off commenting for a bit “until things cool down”.  Apparently the tone in the comments section has been completely out of control the last few days, it  “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable”.

The comments section dust up started when certain Engadget regulars became offended over this spoof article (Do you Hate Apple News?) which pretty much mocks readers for whining about reading too much Apple news.

Engadget is doing some cleaning during their down time right now banning trolls and spammers. But will it be enough?  What’s to prevent those people from coming back again? Remember when Kurt Greenbaum took it upon himself to police a vulgar post at the St. Louis Post Dispatch?  The internet can get ugly real quick.

Is it all the readers’ fault?  Maybe Engadet didn’t have to provoke their readers.  And how the heck can a baker’s dozen or so readers shut down the entire Engadget comments section.  Yikes!  I’m trying to think of what PRINT newspapers do and if there is one takeaway from how they handle input from the public it is that they attempt to tune it out and work above it.   Having said that, I really like metafilter’s solution ($5 lifetime membership), which, through the “broken window theory” builds a sense of community and increases self policing.

Personally I let akismet catch everything it thinks is spam / junk and I read through the posted comments to ensure they are legit. Then again Engadget gets 1.5million visitors per month and metaprinter is lucky to get 1.5thousand :(