This is a recipe for disaster, as Gawker Media’s Nick Denton explained at The Future Of Media 2009.

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And my hat goes off to AJ for bringing new writers into Deadspin and taking back the site from some commenters who thought they were in charge. Every transition is painful. AJ found that early when he started banning last month. But commenters on every site will be restive after we reinstitute the class system in comments tomorrow midday.

The favored commenters will be silent; and the illiterate ones will rant, well, illiterately. But we’ll be able to encourage the kind of discussion that *we* want — not one that is dominated merely by the most prolific of our commenters. It’s our party; we get to decide who comes. (More on this tomorrow from each site’s lead editor.)

The new Gawker commenting system

[What is banned:]

1. snark for snark’s sake,
2. comments about Gawker,
3. IM-like conversations,
4. attacks on your editors,
5. comments pointing out how stupid other comments are (do not engage the trolls),
6. and basically anything else that we don’t like.

Midas Oracle = About + Archives + Authors + Best + Contact + Information Technology + Links + Probabilistic Predictions + Post-Mortem Predictions + Prediction Exchanges + Prediction Software + Publish Your Post + How To Publish