Raw Data: How Registration Affects Comments

Membership

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"Corruption Isn’t Just Another Scandal. It’s the Rot Beneath All of Them": That's where we explain why Mother Jones is going big with a new Corruption Project. We aim to hire, build a team, and do time-intensive reporting to understand corruption as a pattern, not just isolated incidents. If you like how that sounds, help us go all in with a tax-deductible donation today.

A few weeks ago we started requiring registration with email verification for commenters. So how has that worked out? Here are the basic stats from our tech wizards:

22% decrease in total comments
22% increase in Twitter logins
257% increase in Facebook logins
45% decrease in comments our moderators decided to delete

So there you have it. We’re getting fewer comments, but not a lot fewer, and anecdotally, the tone of the comments section seems much more civil.

The moral of the story is: Register today! You can use your Twitter or Facebook login, but you don’t have to. Just submit your name, you’ll get an email address with a verification link to click, and you’re good to go. You only have to do it once.