I started reading Jezebel.com when they reported on Terry Richardson‘s bad behavior, earlier this year. I was really impressed by the muck-raking spirit of the writer, who followed the story with several updates.
One was about how awesome Tavi was to openly condemn Richardson on her blog. I wrote to the author to whine that I had blogged about Richardson weeks before Tavi did, but she graciously ignored me.
I wanted to at least get in on the comment action, so I typed into the comment box, innocently thinking that mere mortals could state their opinions. But no, far from it! I’ve been meaning to share this discovery for ages, so here, let Jezebel explain it to you in their own words:
How do I get approved to comment?
We only approve the comments we love–so make sure you’re adding something of quality to the post. Stay on-topic and seek to further the conversation. Leave us a juicy story on the #tips page or throw your hat into the ring of our open forums.
If we approve your comment, your username and password will be activated and you’ll be able to login and comment freely from then on (or at least until you get banned).
Do you have any tips for auditioning?
Leaving multiple high-quality comments on different threads with your newly created account increases your chances of getting approved.
Show your stuff–make your audition a worthy addition. “Firsts!”, “yays” and “nays” will be summarily ignored. See Lifehacker’s Guide To Weblog Comments for suggestions on how to begin.
We value intelligent contributions, respect for community etiquette, good grammar, and not feeding the trolls. Proper use of punctuation, capitalization and time taken in typing will earn you extra points. Ignoring any of the above will subtract considerably.
Whoa! Life is too short to spend time auditioning to comment at Jezebel, don’t you think?
uh! I am so glad I stumbled across this post when I googled ‘commenting on jezebel’. I’ve tried multiple times to comment on there and have had no luck, due to technical confusion/errors/not really understanding the process. Spending ages looking for a ‘comment’ button and just not really getting how the heck it works/why the heck i need to script amazing and hilarious comments to work for jezebel’s approval.
Tonight was the final straw! I tried to post a response to an article, and this time i tried replying to a comment that was posted. Everything seemed to go fine, i entered my email address and it told me i would have to wait for a verification email. I got the email and clicked the hyperlink to confirm my email address and submit the comment, and it just lead me to a page that stated “This comment was flagged as spam. This usually happens with short comments or comments that have too many links in them”. Spam? Does my carefully worded mid-length paragraph with zero links need to fit certain other criteria to somehow avoid being flagged as spam?? Providing feedback should not be such hard work.
I think people don’t understand how the commenting on Jezebel really works… you don’t need a star to be seen by others. The star (given by other starred people or staff, I believe), means you’re some sort of extra-special commenter with extra privileges (like approving other users or having “featured” comments). But as long as your comment isn’t entirely in pink (which should only happen to the first one or two comments you make), it can be seen by everyone else. I was put off by their wording when I first went to comment there, but my first comment got approved within a day, and I’ve never had issues posting there since. It was not a suck-up comment either, but rather one calling out someone else’s super-misogynist comment.
Now granted, they do a piss-poor job of explaining this commenting system. I ended up finding a helpful article on Gizmodo about it (all under the Gawker umbrella).
Also, yes. There are a lot of seriously stupid people commenting on Jezebel articles. The articles themselves are sometimes pretty bad too. But I still like a good deal of it. I’ve commented below posts that I thought were stupid/exclusionary/anti-feminist, and said so. I’ve never had an issue. I’m not starred either… but so what?
As an above commenter said this site was hard on my self esteem I am also a feminist and writer. I find their articles to be poor excuse for feminism and I was being cyberbullied and harassed on there and it was very hurtful. Did anyone else notice that Ms. magazine doesnt link to them in their blog roll anymore…? They used to.
I just had the same problem you are talking about with Jezebel. In my case, I am a PhD scientist and a single mom by choice. You would think that they would be interested in my opinion, right?
In my case, I responded to comment written by some lady who thinks that sperm donation should be outlawed. My post was neither obscene nor libelous nor irrelevant to the conversation. Was it polite? Not particularly. Was it controversial? Absolutely! In any free-thinking society people have the right to be impolite and controversial.
What bothers me the most is that Jezebel likes to pose as some kind of progressive blog page (I guess that is what they are). In fact, there is nothing progressive about censorship.