“Our brand carries a certain set of associations, and an erudite readership is not something we see ourselves as having,” said the site’s managing editor, Daili Mell.
Tel Aviv, July 8 – Israel’s largest provider of online news and analysis announced today that it would soon impose a ceiling on the level of intelligence that would be permitted in comments posted to online articles.
Ynet, the online sister to Israel’s daily tabloid Yediot Acharonot, took action amid concerns that readers were getting bogged down in nuance as erudite, thinking people weighed in on each article, inevitably contributing something constructive to public discourse. For a publication that never goes more than 21 hours without an article and photo shoot with a bikini-clad female celebrity as one of the featured items on the home page, the presence of eloquent contributors struck a jarring note that editors intend to remove.
“Our brand carries a certain set of associations, and an erudite readership is not something we see ourselves as having,” said the site’s managing editor, Daili Mell. “Reader engagement will only take the business model so far, when we’re in it to get as many ads to display as possible, which means trying to get users to load a different page, which means creating disincentives to remain on the current page for very long.”
The technical aspects of the intelligence restriction remain to be ironed out in their entirety, but Mell explained that Ynet would soon create a short quiz to be completed before a comment may be submitted. The quiz topics would have nothing to do with important issues or current events, instead focusing on celebrity gossip, recently released action movies, and television. That set of categories automatically eliminates 95% of intelligent humans, but Mell said more thorough weeding would have to take place if Ynet is to ensure that no intelligent people submit comments.
“Because there are occasionally some programs, films, or celebrity news items with some redeemable value, intelligent people might still get through the quiz qualification,” he noted. “We will also have to frame the quiz as an opportunity to enter a drawing for a new sports car, or to meet a local B-list entertainer. That should filter out that vast majority of the remaining thinking people.”
To comment, users will be asked to create an account and take the quiz, after which they will be allowed to freely post feedback. An announcement on Ynet’s site generated upwards of two hundred comments in response, about half of which appeared to express at least the level of intelligence necessary to reason one’s way out of a paper bag, a statistic that Editor-in-Chief T. Pesh calls “troubling.”
“This is not the sort of publication that should be encouraging ‘reader engagement’ as a value,” he said. “Our goal in purely journalistic terms is to provide our dumber readers with the satisfaction born of yelling his or her reaction onto the page. Smart people have better things to do than submit comments on Ynet anyway.”
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