When is commenting disabled?
Once again a story about Apple and China has had commenting disabled; could we get an official explanation on how the thinking goes when you turn off commenting on an article?
(I understand how it's sometimes tempting to avoid comments to avoid a future problem of policing a thread, but now we're approaching a point where it feels like the real reason is to avoid comments on anything where people will end up criticising China…)
(I understand how it's sometimes tempting to avoid comments to avoid a future problem of policing a thread, but now we're approaching a point where it feels like the real reason is to avoid comments on anything where people will end up criticising China…)
Comments
I tried pushing back that frontier of what starts open and what is closed from the beginning over the last few months, and forum-goer behavior got worse. So, here we are.
If you're referring to the "rejection of voting app" story, it started open.
But, I kinda sorta guess I did get my answer, because it will never be "cost-effective" to let people discuss such a heated subject as the implications of how Apple navigate the Chinese market/appease the CCP.
(Interestingly enough that makes the situation here very similar to the problem that Apple has, that it just isn't financially sound to allow criticism of the CCP; which creates a form of indirect censorship of criticism of the CCP.)
AppleInsider is not a hobby.
The reactions you speak about are the Like and Informative buttons below the forum post text. We haven't done anything with those in literally years, and I don't believe that there is an action we can take to disable them.
It isn't politics that's the inherent problem, it's how you all treat and talk to each other on political topics.
We have forum rules, and we moderate as is required by section 230 of the communications decency act. If the rules we've posted were consistently heeded, then comments would be open on everything.
But, every time we try and loosen the rules, an effort that I am trying to push, we hit a wall of incivility and rule-breaking. So, here we are.
In regards to Powell Jobs, we are very frequently requested to cover what she's doing. We understand that this doesn't appeal to everyone, in the same way that tips on how to do basic things with devices don't.
As a reminder, AppleInsider is for everybody, and the forum-goers are a very small percentage of AI traffic. What forum folks like isn't what the non-forum goers like, and we try to appeal to both as best as we can.