Cuba, China and news website comments

I'm not big on reading what columnists have to say in the Star-Tribune. Mainly because their biases are painfully obvious and the content is of little interest to me. Today, though, I clicked on a headline in my news reader which led me to some great writing (if you can avoid the worthless comments section).

I'm sure you've heard that China is drilling for oil off the shore of Cuba. What I'm also sure of is that many haven't heard that it's complete, total, election-year bullshit. Unfortunately, the actual decent writing of Nick Coleman is overshadowed by the knuckle dragging cave dwellers who took a well-worded and informative column and turned it into what nearly every comments section on StarTribune.com turn into -- a partisan shit-slinging free for all where only a handful of comments have any value.

And I'm not alone in seeing this. WCCO's Jason DeRusha blogged about the value (or lack of) comments on news websites and plenty of others agree. He does, too, bring up the valid point of why companies open up comments. It's all about the page views. More comments = more time spent on the website and that means more page views and with CPM advertising, you have more inventory to sell. And I thank you for that because it pays my bills (to a certain extent).

I agree with the comments that civility and moderation would be great but that fine line could open up an entirely new can of worms and, in the end, alienate those loonies who drive up your page views. The commenting situation on the big sites will eventually work itself out but for now maybe y'all should just comment here instead.

Hey, there's plenty of opinions at MinnPics but they're all about photos from Minnesota's best photographers and if Erica digs it, it has to be good.