Vos Iz Neias changes their comments policy – is this the end of the madness?

Vos Iz Neias is the first website I look at when I open my computer, right away I know all the scandals, chillul hashem’s, arrests and other drama happening in the frum community and when I just needed a laugh I would read the comments and watch the insanity unfold before my very eyes – the comments themselves were a great disgrace – considering plenty of non-Jews and non-religious Jews read Vos Iz Neias and probably take away from the site that orthodox Jews hate non-Jews (partially true anyway) and couldn’t care less if they were dying en masse, unless they were frum.

I always felt that Vos Iz Neias had an edge on many sites because they didn’t force you to login to their site to comment. One of the best ways to kill the interest of your website is to make commenting a pain for people. For instance, if I go to a website and want to make a comment but it asks me to fill in a captcha (one of the many reasons I hate bloggers who use blogspot software) I make a mental note never to return. This has always been one of the main reasons that Yeshiva World News was crushed by Vos Iz Neias – along with their unwillingness to print scandalous articles about their own.

All good things must come to an end and I have noticed lately that the comments on Vos Iz Neias aren’t what they used to be, there aren’t many of them in the first place and the one’s that are there are too tasteful for my taste. The cause of this is the new Vos Iz Neias policy that forces you to login when you comment, now people simply don;t comment anymore and I can bet you that their traffic and page views are lower.

So why did Vos Iz Neias change their commenting policy?

I personally think they were asked to by some Rabbis or community leaders and threatened with some sort of cherem. Of course they could just be farming email addresses for sale to companies who want to email blast you, this is one of the ways in which Saw You At Sinai makes money – you can send an email blast to all of its 27,000 subscribers for a fee – so maybe Vos Iz Neias decided that blinking advertisments for Orah Chinese auctions aren’t that high paying after all.