Quicken Loans Arena

At cleveland.com, we want to host a debate about a proposal to remake Quicken Loans Arena. We think we have a method for bringing civility to that online debate.

(JOSHUA GUNTER)

I can't let the year end without writing at least once about the third rail of journalism in the digital age, online comments.

And we have good news: After years of experimentation, we believe we have struck on a potential solution for constructive, thoughtful conversations, without the mean-spirited sentiments that can pollute comment streams.

Making comments successful is important to us. No other platform exists where people can get together to discuss many of the subjects that get debated on cleveland.com. And, because our audience is so big and our content appeals to people on all sides of the political spectrum, we are about the only place in Northeast Ohio where you are likely to hear from people who are not of your political stripe.

Think about that. In most commenting communities, such as Facebook, you are surrounded by people who think just like you, because they are your friends and associates. When you enter your Facebook page, you enter an echo chamber, where your thoughts get amplified by the agreement and repetition of those who believe what you believe.

But cleveland.com is a place for people who follow sports, the arts and everything in between. Fans of the Indians, Cavs and Browns fans are not politically aligned, but they are here. You come -- regardless of whether you voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton -- for breaking local news, analysis and suggestions for how to spend your entertainment dollar.

We are unique -- a gathering place for an enormous group of people from all walks of life who don't share beliefs and philosophies.

The problem, as many know, is that a tiny fraction of our commenters can make the platform a horrible place to visit, resulting in many of you avoiding it. We have rules and systems to stop these folks from spewing their bile, but our success has been limited.

Recently, however, we've hit upon what we think is a solution. We call it pre-curation, and when we use it, no comment gets published unless someone on our staff reviews it first. We make sure the comments follow our requirements for civility and are on topic.

The result is remarkable: a thoughtful, friendly discussion by people with varying perspectives and opinions. Those who would poison such a conversation quickly realize they can't break through our moderation and go away. Or -- and I've seen this happen -- they edit their thoughts to make them civil and join the conversation.

One of the best examples happened this week, with the news of a proposed makeover of the Quicken Loans Arena. Public spending on sports facilities is controversial and worthy of the kind of robust public debate that we want to host.

For such a debate to be thoughtful, people need to be informed, and because we knew this proposal had been in the works for a while, we invested a good bit of time this year preparing for the announcement. We collected information on arenas across the nation and how they are financed. We got up to speed on the state-of-the-art in arena design to understand why the Q is becoming outdated. And we worked to get early access to the proposal so we could clearly present it, to inform the debate.

The result was that cleveland.com was the authoritative source for everything you could want to know as well as the host of the resulting conversation. We used pre-curation to keep out the poison, and you can see in the debate that ensued that people with strikingly varied viewpoints came together for a civil, civic discussion.

We had an equally civil discussion on a column I wrote a few weeks ago about how cleveland.com can improve its politics coverage.

And reporter Sara Dorn hosted a good debate involving Justice for All, our ongoing effort to reform the bail system in Cuyahoga County.

We can't pre-curate comments on every story we publish, because it is full-time work. But in 2017, we hope to do it with a topic nearly every day.

For those who think pre-curation means censorship, I ask only that you read the discussions mentioned above. They are loaded with criticism of our work, which we welcome as long as it is civil.

Finally, a word about comments on crime stories. For reasons that elude me, crime stories elicit the worst kind of comments, so last year, to build a constructive conversation about crime, we shut off the comments on individual stories. We directed commenters to a single article each day to talk about crime.

I love the result: We no longer have a lot of ugly sentiment at the bottom of our crime stories. People are participating in the daily crime discussions. And the small group of people who had been leaving the ugly comments regularly let me know they are distressed. Good. They deserve to be distressed. The general public, however, regularly thanks us for shutting crime comments down.

If you've avoided our comments because you found them lacking in civility, please give them another chance. Look for a conversation that we are pre-curating and see whether you might feel comfortable joining it. The more perspective we can add to civic conversations, the better.

Update: After this column was published, we curated the conversation in the comments for the next four hours, following the process explained here. The comment stream below is the result of that.