Commenting on the Comments: Meet West Side Rag’s Comment Moderator

By Ann Cooper

In May, Carol Tannenhauser told the story of how she and her husband Bobby came to own West Side Rag in early 2022. Carol and Bobby continued the Rag’s tradition of allowing readers to post comments at the bottom of each story, but they added something new to the process: a dedicated comment moderator, who plowed through all 22,000 comments written last year, publishing most, but not all of them.

That moderator – the guy some of you love to complain about when your comments don’t get posted – is co-owner Bobby Tannenhauser, who also runs the business side of the Rag.

I talked with Bobby recently about the moderator’s job, and he described several things that can prompt him to block a comment.  Often, he said, the writer just goes on way too long, ignoring the 100-word maximum set in the “leave a comment” note at the end of each story. “Some people, they’re writing term papers,” he said.

Or the writer ignores the “leave a comment” note’s admonishment to “keep them civil.” Insulting another commenter or the author of the article will definitely get you blocked, Tannenhauser told me.

“You can criticize an article, but I’m not going to publish insulting comments,” he said. Nor will Tannenhauser publish comments where “somebody tries to say something is factual, but it’s opinion.”

And then there are these occasions: “You’re being screened because that was an extremely racist comment!” he said.

Don’t expect to hear from Tannenhauser which of those reasons got your comment blocked. It’s not that he refuses to say. It’s that the comment system is based on anonymity; you have to give an email address and screen name when you write, but you can make up both (a sampling of names used by commenters: UWS Dad, Rock Guitar, Wendy, Michael, anon, and West Sixties). So an email sent to a commenter might be seen by an actual person – or it might just land in a black hole.

There’s another reason why you’re not likely to hear from Tannenhauser.

“When I get up in the morning, there’s probably 25 comments” waiting to be read, and then either published or blocked, he said. Carol, co-owner and editor, sends out an email newsletter midday, prompting another flurry of comments, and “Then, after dinner, it picks back up again.” Since the beginning of this year Tannenhauser has monitored 12,000 comments and published “maybe 60%” of them.  Last year, he handled a total of 22,000 comments – an impressive number, but not the record 30,000 that readers wrote in 2020, when many were homebound by the pandemic.

Tannenhauser’s resume – retired lawyer and businessman – does not suggest a career leading to comment content moderation. He acknowledged that he never wrote a comment on a Rag story before he and Carol became co-owners; in fact “I hardly ever read the Rag.”

When he did begin reading the Rag and its readers’ comments in 2022, he was dismayed. “Some of the people were so nasty. And some people were so long-winded. And it was the same 10 or 12 commenters all the time,” said Tannenhauser.

There is still plenty of snark in the contributions of some commenters, but “We’re not getting as many racist comments. And we’re not getting as many comments insulting other commenters,” he said. “A lot of them have stopped commenting because I just keep trashing them.”

Tannenhauser says he sees more names now than the 10-12 who took up most of the comment space in the past. But there’s still a core group of several dozen who dominate with their frequent comments, and Tannenhauser would like to hear from more – particularly commenters who can add to the Rag’s reporting. Recently, for example, when the Rag ran stories using city government information on the locations of Upper West Side public restrooms and swimming pools, readers were quick to post corrections in the comments columns (some venues the city said were open actually were closed), enabling the Rag to follow up with more up-to-date information.

Does reading thousands of reader comments – some of them nasty, some of them racist – take a psychological toll, I asked Tannenhauser.

“I don’t let it get to me,” he said. “It’s the same psychological toll listening to the news every night. If you get crazy about the same stuff going over and over again, how can you live your life?”

Next week: In recent years many news organizations have ended comments sections on their websites, citing increasingly nasty discourse and diminishing resources to moderate the comments. I asked moderator Bobby Tannenhauser if the Rag will follow suit.

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