Why does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?

It is an official channel.

By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.

No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized.

If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.

Well in practice, if the police department doesn't care about your "tips" (not every station has a "tips" drop box, right?), there is no reason why they should care about your comments.

I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.

I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.

I challenge you again - wht is this any less official than any other officially controlled, officially monitored communication channel. You have offered absolutely no argument to that, yet you continue to say it.

That's a rather silly thing for an adult to ask. There's multiple reasons why a police report is more official than a tweet.

* A police report is a legal document.

* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.

* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.

This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.

The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.

> The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.

But people don't bother looking on non-interactive platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to hit 100% of the public, ideally.

Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.

My experience with comments on announcements from public entities (like a police department) is that they are more toxic than informative.

I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is?

Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)

No, it only appears as a gotcha. It's actually providing an insight. There are read-only sites and there are sites that people use, and for the most part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that others interact with.