Rojas to end Engadget comments
Turns out, that freedom to comment thing? That made Engadget better than Gizmodo? Not gonna stick around. We ganked an e-mail from Pete Rojas to his writers:
We’re closing comments on the main Engadget. The amount of spam, combined with a serious decline in the level of discourse on the site, has left me no choice but to close comments until further notice.
Terrible discourse. For instance, this Christmas lights thread:
my favorite xmas display ever was next door to a house that was just obliterated with lights, the neighbor house was festooned with fixtures that must have consumed the output of it’s own small country..
the house I loved? a sheet of plywood, with holes punched in & lights inserted it to spell out the word “ditto” and an arrow pointing at that house.
You don’t need that shit. You need a 90-word non-review of a camphone.
This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 1:01 am and is filed under Gawker Media, Peter Rojas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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on November 22, 2005 at 10:52 am Sean wrote:
Your opinions are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
on November 22, 2005 at 11:43 am Nick Douglas wrote:
Aw, Sean, thanks for the memories.
on November 22, 2005 at 12:27 pm Johnny Felch wrote:
Ironic, now that Gizmodo is making the slow move to reader comments on their own site.
Engadget seems to be losing quality as they struggle with their recent acquisition by AOL. The comments section was an improvement over Gizmodo, and they seem to be a little bit quicker to post than Giz, but I’ve stopped reading it because of the quality of writing.
If I’m looking for entertaining writing, Gizmodo is a lot better (for example, their writers are allowed to speak in the first person). If I’m looking for serious reviews or tech news, I’ll hit the source sites, like MobileBurn, PhoneScoop, Akihabara News, ThinkSecret, etc…
on November 22, 2005 at 6:45 pm Jason McCabe Calacanis wrote:
We’ve just been hit by massive spam and flame wars… it’s taking hours and hours a day to clean up the comments, so we’re taking a pause to put in some new technology that will keep them cleaner (i.e. Blogsmith’s star system, etc).
on November 23, 2005 at 4:21 pm Peter Rojas wrote:
We didn’t eliminate comments from the site — we shut them down for a day so we could implement some better anti-spam software. Amazing how people jump to conclusions — not a single person spreading this “story” bothered to contact me or anyone else at Engadget or Weblogs Inc. for confirmation. Really sad.
P.S. - Nice of you to cover the “news” that comments are back on now. Guess that’s not much of a story, huh?
on November 23, 2005 at 4:28 pm Nick Douglas wrote:
Sorry, I hadn’t noticed an announcement about that yet. And you’re right, I need to do quick contacts more often. Can you e-mail your AIM name to nick@blogebrity.com?