Oh, I'm not saying that Polygon's coverage (especially the article in question) has been "fair" to the project. The author was Owen Good, who I am decidedly not a fan of.
It's their site, however, and they can moderate the comment section the way they want. When a post about a moderated comment makes a sub dogpile to that extent, especially when the article was factually correct, I have to start looking at why.
The reaction to today's article is a riot, though. "Hey, this one's good, so they're ok now!"
I think the problem with Polygon's moderation policy is that it indeed is trying to shield criticism, whether factually correct or not. Maybe in this case it was slightly justified, but I have a totally different view on how a comment system should work.
I ran a almost no-name community blog. The thing that I found out was that people don't care about the actual news, they can get that from anywhere. It's about you present that news, and form well thought out opiniated pieces on them. When a user criticised something, I went in dialogue with them and laid out all facts, the positives
and the negatives from something. This tactic worked really well since you create a great community base that visits your site often, instead of having to rely on clickbait for that one day. At one point in the better days, we had 80k unique visitors, which wasn't bad for a small site. Then again, the news was rather sparse and we had like only two to three articles on busy days, which makes it possible to do all this time.
I understand that a site like Polygon needs to push all the news as fast as it can, push out those previews, review and opinion articles but it's sad that the touch with community gets cast aside in the whole scheme of things. You can't expect an author residing in the comments for hours a day, but I wouldn't mind if they sometimes actual did something with the criticism. All it looks like is criticism getting deleted or just ignored, with the occasional comment when someone posts something positive. I still do think they have to make sure it doesn't get into personal attacks, but criticism of yourself shouldn't be deleted on the spot, you better react to it.
I do hate the way that Derek Smart is all over this though. Maybe it's time to create some script that changes Derek Smart references to the 'Our Lord Savior Derek Smart who Defiantly Battles the Unholy Game That Is Star Citizen', maybe then I'll at least have a laugh out of the guy.