Before you flame me, read the post 😉

As we know, most Tamedia papers have sections with user comments. While comments in media like “20 min” are obviously a complete shitshow that nobody should ever consider looking at anyway, it’s a bit better in their paid newspapers.

Being a subscriber of the “Tages Anzeiger” I sometimes write comments there. During the last couple of years something rather strange occurred to me:

*The “dumber” / more polemic my comments are, the higher the chance that they are published.*

*Or the other way round: The more “well thought out”, reasonable, argumentative and source-based my comments are, the higher the chance that they are refused.*

This very counterintuitive moderation style actually conditioned me to write worse comments there. Because I learned: If I just quickly type some half-polemic rant it will get published. If I come up with something better, maybe even do quick research, it’s a waste of time because most likely it won’t be published anyway.

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Now today they had an [article](https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/zu-besuch-bei-zwei-fleissigen-schreibern-219545491898) where they were actually writing about their own comments section and the readers who comment on their articles.

I took this as an opportunity to describe what I have described above. Guess what. The comment was rejected 😉

So because it’s impossible to write about the Tamedia regime in their comment section, I write it down here.

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Has anybody experienced the same? What do you think is the reason that they prefer low-quality comments to high-quality comments? I mean it can’t be in their interest to turn their paid papers into the same cesspool that their free papers already are, can it?

10 comments

  1. Hardly any places have managed interesting and constructive comments sections. Tamedia definitely hasn’t. I feel that fact that the comments are not really prominently displayed, probably shows how important comments are to them.

  2. Absolutely !

    Worse, I keep a copy of the texts I submit for comparison, because they sometimes edit in grammatical errors.

  3. Glad Im not the only one who noticed this. Yes, I have exactly the same thoughts about ongoing censorships at 20Min. The well thought out arguments you mentioned will be censored, definitely. Im not saying that my arguments are the only acceptable opinion or even right – but for sure I follow their comment rules.

    I can even imagine that there are real people filtering out those kind of comments. They would need a pretty advanced AI to sort out reasonable comments (or am I too naive?).

    And on the other hand if you land a funny and/or “offensive” one-liner that summarizes the article to the bare minimum that often is misleading as well, your comment will most certainly be published. As long as youre supporting the average commenter’s opinion of course. Exception for that rule is when you are against the mainstream-wutbürger-opinion and write a dumb comment that will make you an easy target for getting flamed by angry commenters.

    Not a light accusation against one of the most influencal media outlets in our country, but I stand by it. Definitely worth investigating imo.

  4. Just stop. Stop reading the comment section, and stop writing. I used to waste half an hour a day on NZZ for this crap, the more you put into it the less traction it gets, or isn’t published all together. Stupid rants and stupid absolutisms is all they care about.

  5. During covid and when the 20 min comment section was open to people without a login, I tried to fact check, they were rarely published. And journalists are the first one who say they are the only defense against fake news and are the sole fact checkers, they created the problem themselves.

  7. Everything is very bizarre! Sometimes they have blatant errors in their content and if I contact them by mail I’ll never receive an answer nor do they correct…

  8. I noticed the same a few years ago on Tagi. Felt like they hired some interns who happened to be right-wing fans and published accordingly. But as this has been going on for a long time now, it must be Tamedia’s official strategy.

  9. Honestly sometimes it‘s very random that comments are rejected and it depends on the algorithm which can be very bad.

    For example, just normal words can suddenly be automatically filtered out because they are used in a bad context once.

    Or, which will often be the case if you write a wall of text: the people who have to check the comments don‘t have time to read all of that so they just block it to be safe. That is especially a problem since covid and with the war right now, because the amount of comments more than usual is actually insane.

    Tldr: it is very unlikely there would be some hidden „agenda“ behind what comments get through, it‘s often extremely random.

  10. Totally agree. If I write things in regard my left leaning political opinions they get deleted 99.9% sure.

    Any criticism, even typos that you mention about the article – gets deleted.

    If you contribute something like additional facts, links etc – gets deleted.

    If you citicize federal politics in Bern it may depend on their mood, they may or may not delete it.

    Maybe I’m being paranoid here but I guess they have very strict rules and push some kind of agenda what they allow and what not.

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