

Sometimes I Think About Reinstating the Comments System - citizenparker
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14117

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ajdecon
_What follows is a pretty standard lament about online communities_

In my personal experience, the comment sections I've found on any web site
eventually fall into three painful and unsatisfying categories:

\- Ghost towns: the blog or forum has so little audience, nothing gets said.

\- Worthless hole: enough people have become involved that there is no way to
have a discussion without trolls trying to derail the conversation.

\- Benevolent (or not) dictatorship: moderation is strictly enforced to keep
things civil.

There's often a period shortly after the Ghost Town attracts an audience,
where an open forum may seem to be doing ok. But once it gets popular
everything falls apart and moves into the Worthless Hole. I'm waiting
nervously for this to finally happen to HN, as the community moderation
doesn't seem strong enough to prevent it.

The strict moderation model seems to work in a lot of places (I particularly
enjoy Scalzi's blog, and the Loving Mallet of Correction), but I'm not sure it
accomplishes a real discussion of opposing views... It works better in
settings where all conversations are one-sided or at least light-hearted.

I do occasionally find a mathematics blog or something which has a good stable
of commenters and fun discussions, and persists for years. Maybe the secret is
to confine your community to a small enough niche that the trolls are never
attracted?

~~~
tprice7
Or maybe the secret is to use a ranking system that keeps the trolls
invisible. This is something I have been working on, if you are interested see
this: <http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution>

I would very much appreciate feedback.

~~~
jerf
Google the term "hellban".

No, seriously, google it. I'm not just giving you the name, unless I'm looking
at an overpersonalized search results page, the result page is a fair gateway
into both sides of the controversy around the practice as well.

~~~
tprice7
The way that trolls are made invisible on Thought Ocean isn't really analogous
to hellbanning; it's closer to how people who aren't your Facebook friend are
invisible to you on Facebook. Thought it's still pretty different from that
also.

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dredmorbius
Sturgeons law: 90% of everything is crud.

At Internet scale, 99.9999% of everthing is crud. Hey! We're six-sigma
compliant!

What's necessary is a comment moderation/surfacing system which can cope and
scale. And yes, occasional gems _do_ surface.

------
donall
I don't think anything new or especially interesting has been said about
comment quality, but the author displays such a wonderful command of swearing
that I enjoyed the article immensely. It's refreshing to see such eloquent
profanity on the web!

------
anateus
I think the invitation into the home analogy Warren Ellis uses works pretty
well here so I'll extend it slightly and stay away from the piss aspects. What
you do with a comment system is try to host a salon on a topic, which may or
may not go well. But then you leave, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few
days. When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people
milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the
reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves
at home.

Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on
twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely
ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.

~~~
ajdecon
_When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people
milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the
reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves
at home._

Interesting. I wonder if a comments section could be more resistant to going
to hell, if the author always closed comments as soon as they were done with
it?

------
raldi
And that's why you make the comments threaded, collapsible, voteable, and
sorted via the Wilson interval method.

Just cause you insist on flat comments doesn't mean commenting systems are
hopeless.

~~~
ajdecon
Here's the thing: I think threaded/collapsible/sorted comments are good for
technical discussions, or for discussions which break apart into sub-
conversations you want to be able to ignore. I know that's a very natural
model for me, and for people accustomed to computing or other "hard" sciences.

But I know a lot of people in humanities, arts, or social sciences who _hate_
threaded comments because they view a complex, interleaved conversation as the
best result. I'm not sure they're wrong, either... I certainly have more
trouble following those discussions, but they also seem much more broadly
connected. And back-and-forth flame wars between individuals are (slightly)
rarer.

~~~
raldi
In small or restricted communities, that can definitely be the case. But I've
never seen a large community with good comments that didn't have some or all
of the above features.

Have you?

~~~
ajdecon
The one that comes to mind immediately is MetaFilter. Not huge, but a pretty
decent-sized community and above-average comments. No threading or non-
chronological sorting involved.

John Scalzi's blog Whatever also has a pretty large pool of commenters in a
standard Wordpress setup.

The thing both of these have in common is active moderators.

------
toemetoch
I've often wondered how big the impact is of the text "comment" or "post
comment" we see on the button below or next to a textbox. I think it's part of
the problem, acting like a red cloth on a bull. English isn't my mother's
tongue and "comment" has a negative connotation.

Anybody know of another implementation that funnels intent differently? E.g.
buttons with "contribute", "refute" or "criticize". Could make an interesting
A/B test.

