The Trinity Tripod editorial team has made the decision to turn off comments on our website. While we understand that this may elicit a negative reaction and could be perceived as stifling expression from our readers, we are sure that this is a necessary decision which we endeavor to explain in this letter.
Every comment must be filtered manually from our website. I personally filter these comments, marking each as either “Approved,” “Trash” or “Spam.” I find myself clicking the latter often. For every human-written comment, the Tripod receives around 80 spam ones. This is time-consuming labour that could instead be spent on improving other areas of the paper, like writing, copy-editing, formatting or supervising articles.
Additionally, our guidelines for acceptable comments have eroded our paper and are oftentimes irrelevant and/or false. Our policy, as it previously stood, called for me to approve any comment that follows a loose criteria: it must be human-written and it must not contain any profanity or threats of violence. This allowed for a myriad of comments to be approved that contained misinformation.
This is not uncommon. I have often found that many of these ill-researched comments could be avoided if the comments writer had read the complete article, or were familiar with basic publication policy. This is not the discourse the Tripod hoped to spur, and can hardly be defined as “discourse” at all.
This feature, while it gives the community an outlet for low-stakes discourse, has been abused by members of the community, is a waste of resources for our staff and is thus decidedly no longer a fensible practice for the direction we hope to take this paper.
Anyone who wishes to express an opinion on our articles or editorial practices are welcome to write a letter to the editor, however short or long, following the guidelines for LTEs. This means it must have a (real) name attached and will be published in the following issue of the Trinity Tripod. These can be found on our website, or you may email tripod@trincoll.edu.
If you have a comment or suggestion but are not comfortable with it being published online or in print, you can send it to us in an email at tripod@trincoll.edu, or leave a comment on our instagram (@thetrinitytripod). We are open and accepting of feedback, as long as it has legs and is based in truth.
We hope that our campus community can understand the decisions of the editorial staff, and that they continue to engage with the Tripod through other channels.
In Peace,
TBC