What Is Topix.com? Conversation With Topix CEO Chris Tolles

Is the website Topix.com an honest community discussion board or a place for people to bad mouth and slam others?

WIBX First News with Keeler in the Morning welcome Topix CEO Chris Tolles on to discuss the issue. As is the case for many in the Utica community, there is certainly a difference of opinion as to whether Topix.com's positives outweigh its negatives:

Has it morphed into a sleezy place where people tell lies about other people?

''What we intended was giving people a place to say their piece.''

How do you stop what Utica Topix has become...it's a bartender and people are saying sleezy things about them, cyber bullying, etc.?

''It doesn't matter what the platform is, people will find a way to misuse it. We are certainly not the only place to post things about other people on the internet. But, you can go in and see what's going on in the news, you can get/give opinion about local politicians, you can have your opinion about various laws. There really isn't really a place to do that outside of what we're doing. If you go to the newspaper, they're going to have commentary and its going to be of the same quality of what we have,'' Tolles said.

''We have a feedback form and take a look at any issue that comes in within 48 hours.  We'll often take down...if there's a problem that a person has, we'll take down the comments.''

What about identifying users?

After Keeler and Tolles discussed taking someone's email address, and whether that was a valid way of truly identifying a contributor to the forum, Keeler suggested taking a credit card number as verification. Tolles called the idea 'ludicrous'.

Full conversation, including Keeler's Dirty Laundy parody song about Topix: