So the Story
It’s kind of funny… There I was skimming through articles on motherboard when I came across an article that spiked my interest.
As I read through it, I came across misrepresentation after misrepresentation. It was a willfully ignorant article. It was as if somebody had read the blurb on Wikipedia about something and merely parroted that back in their own article without any real understanding of what they were talking about.
And that bothered me.
People were going to read this and think that what this person was saying was factual, truthful, complete, and helpful.
Well it wasn’t.
So then I scroll down the page to find the comment section to tell any readers and the author that their article was poorly written and not factual.
But as I hit the bottom of the page…
I remembered, Motherboard in its infinite wisdom had removed all comments!
So now the only option I had was to write a letter to the editor!!!
Now I don’t know about you, but you know what I never read? The *corrections* blurb in newspapers. Why don’t I read them? Because those corrections occur long after the articles ran and have no meaning.
And that’s exactly what would happen here.
If I were to write a letter to the editor, if anybody would even bother to read it, at best the letter would appear long after the impact from the article had taken place. People will already have read the article and moved on with their life not knowing what they read wasn’t very factual.
And there is the rub.
By removing comments, Motherboard has ensured it has control. But a side effect of their increased control is that nobody can mention to other readers just how shitty an article is. Nobody can point out mistakes. Everything must go through them and even when it does… it may never reach the end-user.
That is highly problematic.
As a business, all Motherboard is doing is restricting its very own users. All it’s doing is destroying user engagement. Instead of allowing users to build a community, allowing them to ferret out information you as a business may not have, allowing them to share personal experiences that are helpful to people, or even have them just share a reminder to other commentators that the world doesn’t always work so well… Motherboard took all that away in one click.
User engagement is the life blood of any art business.
And while Motherboard has a right to do whatever the hell it wants… I also have the right to call them got dang morons.