Meet the West Side Rag Comment Moderator

By Ann Cooper

In May, Carol Tannenhauser shared how she and her husband Bobby became owners of West Side Rag in early 2022. Carol and Bobby continued the Rag’s tradition of allowing readers to post comments at the bottom of each story, but they added something new to the process: a dedicated comment moderator, who went through the 22,000 comments written last year, publishing most, but not all.

That moderator—the guy some of you like to complain about when your comments aren’t published—is co-owner Bobby Tannenhauser, who also runs the business side of the Rag.

I recently spoke with Bobby about the moderator’s job, and he described several things that can prompt a commenter to block a comment. Often, he said, the author overextends himself, ignoring the 100-word limit set out in the “leave a comment” note at the end of each post. “Some people write essays,” he said.

Or the author ignores the “leave a comment” note’s warning to “stay polite.” Insulting another commenter or the author of the article will almost certainly get you blocked, Tannenhauser told me.

“You can criticize an article, but I’m not going to post insulting comments,” he said. Tannenhauser also won’t post comments in which “someone tries to say something is factual, but it’s an opinion.”

And then there are those occasions: ‘You’re being stopped because that was an extremely racist comment!'” he said.

Don’t expect Tannenhauser to tell you which of these reasons got your comment blocked. It’s not that he refuses to say. It’s that the comment system is based on anonymity; you have to provide an email address and a pseudonym when you post, but you can make up both (a sample of names used by commenters: UWS Dad, Rock Guitar, Wendy, Michael, anon, and West Sixties). So an email sent to a commenter might be seen by a real person—or it might just end up in a black hole.

There’s another reason you’re unlikely to hear about Tannenhauser.

“When I wake up in the morning, there are probably 25 comments” waiting to be read and then published or blocked, he says. Carol, co-owner and editor, sends out an email newsletter at noon, which triggers a new wave of comments, and “then after dinner, it picks up again.” So far this year, Tannenhauser has monitored 12,000 comments and published “maybe 60 percent of them.” Last year, he processed a total of 22,000 comments — an impressive number, but not the record-breaking 30,000 that readers wrote in 2020, when many were homebound due to the pandemic.

Tannenhauser’s resume—a retired lawyer and businessman—doesn’t suggest a career in moderating comment content. He acknowledged that he never wrote a comment on a Rag article before he and Carol became co-owners; in fact, “I rarely read the Rag.”

When he started reading the Rag and its readers’ comments in 2022, he was dismayed. “Some of the comments were very mean. Some of them were very long. And it was always the same 10 or 12 commenters,” Tannenhauser said.

There is still a lot of sarcasm in some commenters’ posts, but “we don’t get as many racist comments anymore. And we don’t get as many comments that are insulting to other commenters,” he said. “A lot of them have stopped commenting because I keep criticizing them.”

Tannenhauser says he sees more names now than the 10 to 12 who used to occupy most of the comment space. But there’s still a core group of several dozen people who dominate with their frequent comments, and Tannenhauser would like to hear more feedback, especially from commenters who can contribute to the Rag’s reporting. Recently, for example, when the Rag ran stories using city government information about the locations of public restrooms and swimming pools on the Upper West Side, readers were quick to post corrections in the comment columns (some places the city had said were open were actually closed), allowing the Rag to provide more up-to-date information.

Does reading thousands of reader comments—some mean, some racist—have psychological consequences? I asked Tannenhauser.

“I don’t let it get me down,” he said. “It’s the same psychological burden as listening to the news every night. If you get upset about the same things that keep coming up, how can you live your life?”

Next week: In recent years, many media outlets have shut down comments sections on their websites, citing increasingly unpleasant language and dwindling resources to moderate comments. I asked moderator Bobby Tannenhauser if the Rag would follow suit.

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