Commenting on a News Article? First, Pass a Quiz

Comment sections on technology websites can be scary places.

Kingdom of norway's public dissemination network has come up up with a pretty ingenious solution to combatting those who annotate without reading an article: requiring that people pass a quiz about that article before they can post annihilation about information technology.

According to CNN, visitors to NRKbeta, the technology section on Norway'due south public broadcasting network'southward news website, must respond 3 multiple-choice questions about an article before they can comment on it.

Every bit sites increasingly disable commenting altogether due to harassment and detest speech, the hope is that this new solution leads to more than meaningful discussions while preventing people from reading a headline and commenting on a story they know nix nearly. "The aim is to brand people take thirty seconds before they annotate, to take the edge off," NRKbeta editor Marius Arnesen told CNN.

On one recent commodity near a new search tool called Stalkscan, for example, potential commenters had to reply the following questions correctly, according to CNN: Who developed Stalkscan? Should you be terrified of Stalkscan? When did Facebook Graph Search launch? Each question had three possible options, and the correct answers could all exist found in the story.

"When we share our manufactures on the domicile page, they concenter a lot of readers not familiar with the topics," Arnesen told CNN. "They just read the headline, assume sure things and race to the comment field."

Whether this new technique successfully cuts down on nasty comments remains to be seen, but Arnesen told CNN that early on reactions have been positive.

Nearly Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's practiced on fettle and smart home products. Pedagogy yoga for nearly 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of continued health products including fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, strength training machines, treadmills, and more. Angela also tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, only to name a few.