You have lost control of your comments.

Avatar
fresbrg
  • updated
  • Under review

Seeking Alpha is a business and investment oriented website. However reading the comments on many, many articles is like reading the Russian Troll posts.  Political extremists of every persuasion seem to think the purpose of this site is to throw bombs at those who see the world differently than they do.

You should establish and strictly enforce commentary parameters.  Limit comments to legitimate business and finance posts.  I am a finance professional and I fed up with having to sift through a ton of political polemics to see if there might be something of value said by someone.

It seems like ‘Trolls Rule!’ has become a pretty accurate description of public discourse in this country.

Replies 11
Avatar
-2
SA Editor Jeanne Yael Klempner

We agree with you completely that comments on Seeking Alpha should focus on finance and investing. That's why we remove any purely political comments that come to our attention, and send the following notification where appropriate:


"While President Trump and his policies bring out strong emotions in people, for or against, we want to make sure that Seeking Alpha comment streams don't veer off-track into purely political discussions. To that end, we require that comments should be relevant to investing, and not simply political in nature.

Seeking Alpha’s Moderation team would like to ensure that article comments only focus on the analysis in the article. While you may strongly feel that your comment adds value, if it is not in sync with the article topic and diverts the discussion, then it contravenes our TOU."


You (and other readers) can help to keep our site clean of these sorts of comments by clicking on 'report abuse' under any comment that you feel is a violation of our terms. Since upwards of 10,000 comments a day are added to the site, it's not possible for us to police every one of them without the help of our community.


Together we can keep Seeking Alpha focused on the topics that users visit the site to read about.

Avatar
-1
Capt Jack Daniels

From what I've seen  its been blatantly one sided.  People are able to make political  comments with profane language assaulting the PRESIDENT  of  the UNITED  STATES  and  even after clicking  on  report abuse,  they are not removed.  Others while not  mentioning the President by name use even more disgraceful terminologies such as Orange Bad man.

Avatar
1
RegisFinancial

The comment moderation system is atrocious and I’d say about 5% of the comments on any given article are helpful, while the rest are trash. I’ve stopped using StockTwits for the same reason and am about to abandon this app as well.  

Avatar
-2
SA Editor Jeanne Yael Klempner
  • Under review

@RegisFinancial, can you please expand on why you say our moderation system is atrocious? We'd be glad to address your concerns if you can be more specific.

Thank you.

Avatar
1
RegisFinancial
Quote from SA Editor Jeanne Yael Klempner

@RegisFinancial, can you please expand on why you say our moderation system is atrocious? We'd be glad to address your concerns if you can be more specific.

Thank you.

The reason you have to ask that question proves that moderation is lacking. 

If you want an example go read through comment threads for Boeing. It’s constantly filled with comments of no substance related to the article, non-sequiturs, and childish petulance that look like what you’d find on Facebook. There is almost zero value to comment discord and the voting system should be similar to Reddit. 

*I tried to provide some screenshots but as usual the app is buggy. 

Avatar
0
AEGISBMD

Only Premium users can comment?

Avatar
0
igor555

haha you dont remove anything. i report comments all the time from the same people and not one gets removed and those people keep posting week after week

Avatar
1
noslptillmnhtn

Reviving an old thread here on the commentary section losing out to non-essential discussions (particularly name-calling, political posturing, etc), I wonder if a simple development solution could be to simply deactivate viewing comments for those who choose. While comments and content do not go hand-in-hand, they do tend to mar the credibility of the site.

If the comment section of a support post about inappropriate comments is full of inappropriate comments, all hope may be lost for the purely financial minded. 

Avatar
0
Michael1944
Quote from AEGISBMD

Only Premium users can comment?

not true.

Avatar
0
bagholder1

i would consider premium if people would stay on topic and stop constant bullying. look! even in this post you have someone doing it! why not let authors control it?