Irish Times website no longer allowing comments

I find religion fascinating.

So, wondering why the priest turns his back on the parishioners, I find out that, no, in fact they are all facing the same direction - much like a pilot of a plane. That direction is East.

I go off on another tangent. East, where the Sun rises. This is new beginnings. Then it occurs to me why Easter is called 'Easter'. Glaringly obvious, but my mind is blown. Now I'm wondering if 'Estrogen' has anything to do with East.

Easter comes from the pagan goddess Eostre which derives from the same proto-Germanic word East comes from (austra). Oestrogen comes from oestrus which, according to Wiktionary:

BTW a quick check on the map of a few churches I'm familiar with shows that most of them don't have the altar at the eastern end (or are not aligned with the compass points at all)

Yep. Even in the US, the government wants to get rid of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Biden and Trump wanted to get rid of it. There have been some cases in Ireland where legal action has been taken against a forum owner over something a poster posted. A blogger was also successfully sued. The comments sections for a lot of newspapers in Ireland were probably costing more to moderate than they were worth.

Digital subscriptions are not the saviour that they have been made out to be by clueless press release recyclers. The two things that they don't generally post are the type of subscription (discounted/full) and the duration. Even online advertising is problematic because a lot of people use ad blockers and never see the ads. The Irish market is actually quite a small one and the click through on advertising is not great. A comments section often has the same group of people posting every day and they may ignore any advertising.

Regards...jmcc

Freedom of speech also means freedom to not speak,

Obviously it’s up to the IT if it wishes to allow comments under articles or not. There’s no human or constitutional right to be allowed comment on a private website.

But the IT likes to consider itself on a par with other reputable English language newspapers like the FT, NYT, Guardian, London Times etc. All of which allow comments. So by refusing to do so, it’s marking itself out as less confident or less interested in hearing its subscribers views

Yep. Remember that Boards/MCD issue. Ireland doesn't have a Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (US) to protect websites. There were two on Politics.ie. The first was in relation to a tribunal when Bertie Ahern was being questioned. That's when P.ie moved its hosting to the US. The other was when an incorrect statement about an auctioneer was posted. That one got as far as legal proceedings. There were also too many incidents with the media where the trheat of legal action was used to get publications to drop stories.

Regards...jmcc

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would have made legal action more difficult. What happened to Ahern in the Tribunal made any action irrelevant. There was a case with comments made about a solicitor on a solicitor rating site in 2004 (I think). The domain name was a .COM registered via the Godaddy registrar and it had WHOIS privacy which protected ownership. Godaddy tends to roll over on the receipt of any legal paper and removed the WHOIS privacy. The auctioneer case (2010) was settled as P.ie took measures to remove the problem posts and the poster once notified.

For website operators, Section 230 offers some protection in that it does not make them as liable for what users posts as the legislation does in other countries. Free speech and the freedom of the press has more constitutional protection in the US (First Amendment rights).

There is also some protection for websites under the EU E-Commerce Directive. Journalists and publications in Ireland tend to get threatened with legal action quite frequently. It also happens in other European countries. The documentary on the collapse of Wirecard (on Netflix) has a section on how Wirecard employed legal threats to the Financial Times to stop its coverage of Wirecard.

The comments sections on Irish newspapers are potential minefields for defamation but commercial reasons are more likely to have led to the decisions to drop the sections. Limiting them to subscribers and putting them behind a paywall is quite stupid in simple commercial terms as it restricts them to people who are already subscribers and only allows advertising as the main revenue source. Once behind a paywall, they stop being means to get people to subscribe. In terms of defamation, the people posting on those sections have already given up their anonymity but the publications still had to moderate comments. That meant paying the wages of the people who had to task of moderating comments.

Irish newspapers had been very much behind the curve when it came to adding comments sections as they frequently highlighted the poor quality of the articles, commentary and reporting. Despite the propaganda about how digital subscriptions are the future of newspapers, the reality is that Irish newspapers are businesses and it is more difficult to get digital subscriptions due to much of the same news being free elsewhere on the Web.

The comments sections on Irish newspaper websites probably didn't bring in enough money from advertising to justify their costs. The Irish Times has made some poor commercial decisions while trying to be the leading Irish newspaper website. Its first paywall only got 38K subscriptions for the duration of its operation. This was pre-mobile Web and pre-Smartphone. Subscriptions were limited to people with desktop and laptop computers rather than smartphones and tablets. That was a major difference between the size of the potential digital subscriptions market then and the size of the same market now where almost everyone has a smartphone.

The decision by the IT to put much of its content behind a paywall when Google was launching its Adsense Pay Per Click advertising (2003) probably gave away millions of Euro in easy advertising revenue to competitors. The IT's first paywall also surrendered dominance of the Irish news market to RTE's website and the Indo/Sindo website where news and commentary were free. It bought a property website for 52 million or so at the peak of the property bubble which then burst. It rebranded from the category killer ireland.com domain name to irishtimes.com and thousands of ireland.com e-mail users lost their addresses as a result.). It also had some successes and managed to sell the ireland.com domain name to Bord Failte for about 250K having paid about 10K for it in the 1990s. It also hired David Cochrane of Politics.ie as its Social Media manager (think that he is now working for the Sunday Business Post). It is in a competitive business and print sales are continuing to fall. About ten years ago, it was selling over 100K print copies a day. Before Covid, those print sales were about 50K a day.

The comments sections on newspaper websites break the "one to many" publishing model. Where there is a large enough market and enough users, they can make money but Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook have destroyed a lot of the rationale for having them on Irish newspaper websites. It is a complex market for publishers and journalists. People seem to forget that publications are generally in business to make money.

Regards...jmcc

The protections under Section 230 of the CDA limit the liabilities of the website operator over what is posted by others on their site. It doesn't limit the liabilities for defamation as such. With the Irish situation, the website operator is effectively held liable as the publisher of any defamatory comment along with the person who posts the comment.

The ireland.com domain name was what is known as a category-killer domain name. People would also type in the domain name in the browser toolbar expecting their to be a website. When it rebranded to irishtimes.com, it lost a lot of that type-in traffic. Instead of building on the ireland.com website, it tried to be the New York Times. It was really a marketing failure with a domain name that effectively required little or no marketing.

The e-mail address effectively created a community of people for marketing purposes. I think that a company called Commtouch provided the backend on that. The Indo's parent company, IN&M also had a Microwave TV (MMDS) franchise and TV deflector operations destroyed that. The set top box approach was one of those DotCom bubble ideas and it had also been tried in the US. Again, the problem with trying to transplant US technology to Ireland is that Ireland is, for a large part, run by gombeens. Local calls in the US were either low cost/unmetered or free. Telecom Eireann shifted away from the unmetered local calls to a per unit charge for calls. That nearly murdered the infant Internet in Ireland because accessing the Internet via dial-up was much more expensive. Not all of the early ISPs had local points of presence (POP) either so getting online involved a long distance call to Dublin or Galway. This is why the Internet took off so rapidly in the US and other countries while it struggled in Ireland.

Regards...jmcc

They said this about it when they announced the new site design in May:

The vile article from Roisin Ingle this week on Blackrock College (I’m not linking to it, it shouldn’t have been published at all) is exactly why the IT should have kept its readers’ comments section, but almost certainly why it got rid of it - it doesn’t want accountability. There has been an overwhelmingly negative reaction on Twitter to the article but only two short letters shoved down the back of the Letters page. Presumably the new editor is hoping the issue will just go away and Ingle can go back next week to writing about her favourite cafe in Sandymount or whatever

What was wrong with it?

Those two letter writers sound really up themselves. I think I can guess where they went to school. No wonder it's taken decades for victims to speak out.