
Comments Are Dead. We Need You to Help Reinvent Them - miraj
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/05/comments-are-dead-we-need-you-to-help-reinvent-them131.html
======
jdietrich
Comment sections in exist to drive page views. Online publishers _want_ flame
wars to break out, because flame wars mean traffic.

There's no money in quality comments. Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde
Nast. Kevin Rose might have got paid, but Digg is going down the chute. HN
serves as a recruiting ground for YC and I believe that Slashdot is treated as
a loss-leader to support other Geeknet properties.

Personally, I think we need to take a lesson from the granddaddy of them all,
WELL. Mandate real names and charge admission and you'll get quality
interaction. Contrary to what internet culture might have us believe,
exclusivity and accountability are generally good things.

~~~
pg
_Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde Nast._

Really? How much does CN lose annually on Reddit?

~~~
jdietrich
Fair enough PG, that was bang out of order.

That said, Reddit does look to be in a bad way. They're experiencing chronic
and severe downtime, mainly as a result of technical debt - AWS can only take
so much blame when firms like Netflix got through the outage fine. Even when
AWS isn't undergoing major outages, "emergency read-only mode" has become
rather too common.

When two members of a three-man developer team quit at roughly the same time,
that's a warning sign.

Reddit looks to me to be in a similar situation to 4chan - a huge, highly
influential user base that is actively hostile to monetisation. It looks to me
like the best case scenario is that Nast is deliberately smothering Reddit -
all the other explanations for their current problems bode much worse.

------
RobIsIT
Comments aren't dead. The problem that the author of this article has
identified lies more in moderation then the comment system.

Comments have evolved. Many high profile sites rely on passive, one way
comments that are occasionally peppered with the odd reply, but for the most
part act solely as the receptacle of one-way feedback. This isn't necessarily
bad and at one time, provided adequate engagement.

Today, readers have become accustom to community and participation rather then
simple contribution. We expect more, but we don't receive it.

The solution is a mix of additional functionality, increased participation and
eventually clear identification of authority.

Additional Functionality: We've seen basic moderation systems evolve. From
Digg style voting buttons to full on wiki style comment systems where users
can add sources and refine messages, there have been technological advances
that have been largely overlooked in commenting systems.

Increased participation: This is more then simply encouraging users to
comment. Users need to be engaged and that happens by the author in the
comments. After an article is composed, authors need to become conductors and
individually guide conversations and continue to contribute their ideas and
messages. Generally, commenters need to have their thoughts validated while
the article is thought of as an introduction to a topic while the comments
contain the larger message being presented.

Authority: Comment systems such as Disqus and Facebook Comments gather
contributions across blogs. All of the comments a commenter has made are
available through a common system that supersedes individual articles. This
needs to be expanded and improved. Comment systems need to identify authority
and encourage "cross seeding" through related people, their individual
expertise and the interests they share.

We're getting there. However, we have a long way to go.

~~~
jerrya
Yes, exactly. This morning, in response to a tweet from a developer at ASU's
Cronkite School of Journalism's, I wrote a similar blog post trying to explain
how journalism sites create one way comment systems and then ignore the
comments and then wonder why the communities all go to hell.

At the risk of blog whoring, it's here: [http://jerryasher.posterous.com/two-
cents-on-why-journalism-...](http://jerryasher.posterous.com/two-cents-on-why-
journalism-sites-have-such-r)

~~~
jamesbritt
_At the risk of blog whoring ..._

I appreciate links to other resources of interest, and often it's the author
who knows best of the relevance, so whore away.

------
jawns
I'm a web editor at a regional news site, and moderating reader comments is a
huge pain in the neck, largely because of the inherent anonymity of the web.

A few years back, I tried to come up with a solution. I created Truyoo
(<http://www.truyoo.com>), which essentially requires a user to pay a one-time
nominal fee (less than $2) to confirm their identity. They would then be
issued a Truyoo ID, which could be used to comment on any site that used
Truyoo.

For legitimate, constructive commenters, this is extremely inexpensive -- but
it quickly becomes very expensive for spammy/abusive users.

Unfortunately, Truyoo never gained traction, largely because no publisher was
willing to ask its users to pay even a tiny one-time fee to comment.

~~~
zecho
It has nothing to do with anonymity. It has everything to do with the content
on which people comment. For example, political articles are bound to bring in
opposing viewpoints. And if you allow anyone to comment, you're bound to bring
in a lot of people.

I'm convinced if you want to keep the level of discourse up, you can have a
(mostly) homogeneous group of commenters and a large scale site or a small
group of heterogeneous commenters, but you cannot have both scale and
heterogeneity.

By charging your users to comment, you're probably going to reduce scale.

~~~
jdp23
It's a great point that there aren't any obvious examples in the US of large
heterogenous groups with good comments. That said I also am not aware of any
attempt to do even Slashdot-like crowdsourced voting (including explanation of
reasons for voting, meta-moderation) at scale, or to take the next step and
provide a richer user experience to make it easy for users to be able to
filter out what they don't want do see.

------
popletier
Require sign-up. Implement karma, with voting. Restrict user commenting to
1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X. Put temporary
blocks on users who derail threads or attempt to people-please with one-
liners, etc. Ban users who attack other users.

Most importantly, make downvoting cost one karma point per downvote.

~~~
arkitaip
"Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible
until karma > 2X"

Which would mean that your comment wouldn't be allowed as your account was
created two hours ago ;)

------
tseabrooks
It sounds like their problem is solved by comment voting a la HN,
StackOverflow, reddit, etc... But the article rejects these as not good enough
or not innovative enough. I must be missing something they're shooting for.

~~~
pstack
Yeah, Slashdot kind of solved this a dozen years ago. It's an imperfect
solution, but it's a 90% solution and I think that's good enough.

Part of it depends on content. If you're a real community, then having people
sign up for commenting and rating comments is a good solution. It helps
promote good content and the requirement to sign up keeps the community free
of a lot of hit and run commenter who might often degrade the experience.

If you're a news site, then most of your content is from hit and runs (hits
and runs?). You don't have people hanging around your site all day, waiting to
post on the next story. You have Drudgereport linking to you and then a flood
of mouth-breathers leaving a quick comment about "libtards" or "republicraps"
or a quote from some religious text and so on. In these communities, the
discussion will never be lifted up and no voting system will work, because
nobody is invested in it. Further, if you require a sign-up, nobody is going
to bother.

Then, there are blogs. Sometimes you may want people to have to sign up but in
other cases, you might need or want to just let anyone freely comment without
any hurdles. Nobody wants to go through a signup process if they're only going
to see your blog once or twice in their life (when linked to from HN or
elsewhere, for example). It's hard to choose the right path, here.

I think much of the answer comes down to two things;

1) Human moderation - both by the community itself and designated moderators -
is very valuable. 2) Not every page on the planet needs to allow comments.
Frankly, the local CBS news website doesn't need to accept comments on
stories. Neither does the BBC's articles. Neither do most.

Of course, they have dismissed everything in this article, so the only thing
left is for the government to require every internet user to use their real
identity online and then have a single discussion/forum/conversation system
that all runs on the same API (or have a standard API that ties together very
different discussion/forum/conversation systems). Then, you will have no
choice but to post as your real world identity and every comment you ever
leave anywhere on the internet will be part of that identity and you will be
rated on that identity, always. A truly unpleasant idea and I would rather put
up with having to ignore the dregs of the internet versus losing the option of
anonymity. Of course, people who live their lives in public often have a
different view than this, since their personal desire is to get their own
identity out there. Not everyone has that same goal or desire.

(I won't even bring up my distinct hatred of things like Disqus and Facebook
whatchamacallit that sites implement instead of drawing up their own
conversation tools).

~~~
Spyro7
pstack, I agree with you, but then I wonder how news sites like the Economist
manage to make a voting system work even for extremely contentious articles.
Any article on the Economist that mentions China or discusses bailing out a
small European nation tends to explode into a frenzy of commenting, but the
voting system over there holds up extremely well under pressure.

Regardless of the contention, the community at Economist.com maintains a
relatively civil atmosphere. I have always been perplexed by this - especially
because you can only upvote, no downvoting is in (yet).

The funny thing is that back in the day (when I first started commenting over
there) they did not have any type of voting and it could get bad sometimes.
Users begged for voting and we got it, now things are pretty nifty for all
commenters.

Maybe it is because a different group of users frequents the Economist. In
which case, the answer to improving your comments is to try to improve your
sites culture?

~~~
ThomPete
My guess is that this comes down to what the quality of the majority of people
hanging around in any forum is.

As long as there are more "rational" and civil people in any forum it can
survive on this alone.

------
jonnathanson
Want quality comments? Then you've got to frame your content accordingly. Make
it open-ended, and make it pose an interesting question (literally or not
literally). Controversy helps, but if you're too mercenary in courting
controversy, people will quickly tire of your shtick.

Think of content-comment flow like a conversation. If I'm interviewing
someone, and all I'm doing is making declarative statements to him, how likely
is he to respond deeply and meaningfully? On the other hand, if I ask him
interesting questions, I'll get interesting replies. Also, much like in an
actual interview, I'll need to ask follow-up questions. When I look at most
content sites out there these days, I see little in the way of back-and-forth
exchange between the author and the commenters -- except in the form of
moderation. Sooner or later, smart content authors are going to realize that
their involvement does not end at the posting of the original piece.

Of course, you need to inform just as much as you open up the floor. And
therein lies the tricky balancing act.

~~~
rhizome
This doesn't account for the inverse case, where content can not be framed in
a way that doesn't attract lamers. There are people who will take a crap in
the middle of any thread having to do with Obama, for instance.

~~~
jonnathanson
I'd argue that, to some extent, "lamer" is a relativistic term. What is a
lamer? Someone who posts content that a preponderance of users in a community
think is stupid, non-useful, or distracting. But said content is stupid, non-
useful, or distracting _with respect to the preferences of the majority of
users in the community_.

Using this logic, you could argue that a community with a lot of lamers is a
community that hasn't properly attracted a target userbase, or has failed to
maintain one. In this model, lamers are symptoms and not root causes. The
cause is, as you suggest, a flawed content strategy.

~~~
rhizome
Of course it's relative, that's what separates communities from "everybody."
User flagging is how the community can evolve.

 _you could argue that a community with a lot of lamers is a community that
hasn't properly attracted a target userbase_

A person who sees most of a community as lamers is not a member of the "target
userbase," and has no business speculating what the "target userbase" of that
community should be or even whether they're doing it "properly" (h/t C&C). "If
you look around and all you see are assholes, the asshole is you." Nothing
wrong with this, that's why people form communities and subcultures. Not
everything has to be for everyone.

It seems you're trying to work with a universal definition of "lamer," which
doesn't exist. It's always in context. I'm a lamer when it comes to baseball
and I'm not going to go into a bar and force people to respond to my endless
questions about why bats aren't all the same size and "what is a home run,
anyway?"

~~~
jonnathanson
_It seems you're trying to work with a universal definition of "lamer,"_

Just the opposite, actually. Your point about being a lamer in context of
something you don't understand or like was precisely my point. My point was
that a community full of "lamers" is a community that has somehow attracted
posters or commenters whose tastes, opinions, knowledge level, interest level,
and/or posting intent do not mesh with those of the majority of the userbase.
To the extent that these lamers -- as defined by their context -- exist,
that's usually a function of a community's having lost focus (or never had
proper focus to begin with). Because lamers are defined by context, the only
way to eliminate lamer presence is to sharpen content or context focus around
the set of users you want to keep.

I think we're agreeing more than we're disagreeing here. And if it doesn't
sound that way, I'll concede that my post may not have been worded clearly
enough.

------
kmfrk
Comments dead? What a load of crap.

Comments don't scale very well for popular sites, but a strong moderator
presence is vital to _creating_ a good commenting community.

The problem with this for sites like PBS is that the moderation alienates some
users and feeds the confirmation bias of some people.

You have to decide for yourself what level of discussion you want and invest a
proportional effort. The problem is that most people want good comment
discussions without any effort, and that's not going to happen.

------
Harkins
Two months ago I got a form letter rejection from the semi-final round of the
Knight News Challenge on my proposal to do exactly this. It was based on what
I'd learned about news forums from working at the Washington Post, machine
learning, and a bit of secret sauce. It seemed like an acute problem worth
solving and so far the responses on their site are about 80% ideas I included.
Validation, I guess, but I'm sort of a mixed bag of emotions about seeing
this.

~~~
jawns
I'd like to hear more about your proposal. I, too, submitted a proposal
dealing with these issues, and my submission was passed over.

~~~
Joakal
How would both proposals allow for infinite scale though?

It seems like the machines can eventually learn to emulate human moderation,
but a website like PBS may get 500+ comments. The user would immediately get
overwhelmed at 50+ comments or more (guess). For example, on Reddit, people
are learning to avoid posting if a thread has more than 200 posts because
their highest-level post would be useless.

~~~
Harkins
They don't have to scale infinitely, only a handful of news sites serve more
than 20m pages/day.

As for not overwhelming users or moderators, that was part of my secret sauce.
:)

------
AmazingBytecode
I'm actually really against comments, which is ironic, given what I'm doing
right now. Most comments either reaffirm the reader's view or make the reader
a tiny bit angry. I don't think they're that effective at actually causing
people to think.

~~~
jdp23
Think about how many great discussions there are here, or in the best threads
on Slashdot, Reddit, and plenty of other places. So it seems to me there are
plenty of great comments that help people think, learn, grow, etc. True, there
are plenty of comments that aren't so great ... so one way to look at
"reinventing comments" is to how to magnify what's good and minimize the "get
you angry" factor and other downsides.

------
lostbit
I like the idea of having a single ID for Internet. It reduces the burden of
creating accounts everywhere. The ID could be used in any site that would like
a non anonymous comment or activity. A request for ID info could pop-up for an
accept button. There are solutions in the market, of course, but they have not
yet got critical mass, I guess. The Id together with karma and voting would
help a lot to select interesting comments.

A lot of our browsing activity is not anonymous anymore, I can see the ads are
tracking me! So why not use this 'system' for something else?

~~~
Joakal
OpenID, Facebook Connect and Twitter Login. There's some more if you log out
and look at the log in options on this website.

------
edderly
Personally, I'd to see better editorial tools in comments. Stack-overflow /
exchange achieves this with tagging and a basic rep. system. I'd like to
extend this to comment forums.

------
shasta
It would be nice if comments from e.g. Hacker News were overlaid on the page
you were visiting. A browser plugin could show you comments from multiple
communities. That way you discover the comments even if you find the link
another way, and it would be easier to open a bunch of tabs without
remembering to open the comments too, etc. People wouldn't need to add
comments to pages themselves.

~~~
guynamedloren
I was thinking about a system like this when reading the article. Does
something like this already exist?

------
Sniffnoy
Comments on news articles are dead, perhaps, but were they ever really alive?
Comments on smaller blogs seem to be doing just fine.

------
markkat
Personally, I prefer to discuss content on another site. Not because their
commenting systems are better, but because I have a wide range of interests,
and it is more convenient for me to discuss information where any content can
come in.

Also, on a site dedicated to discussion, I don't have to worry about
moderation or permission of the content creator.

~~~
samengland
Exactly. There is no point whatsoever in commenting on a multitude of blogs
and website across the internet - then your opinions, views and contributions
are fragmented in different places across the internet too; with no way to
keep track of them, and no way to build rapport.

------
cuchoperl
I like Facebook's approach to comments
([https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comme...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/)).

Pros:

\- Most people are already signed-on in Fb, no friction to start commenting.

\- There is a hierarchy of posts, similar to HN, reddit, etc

\- Not anonymous.

Cons:

\- Who owns the data? Probably Facebook.

~~~
spottiness
Why is "not anonymous" a pro? Usually, you can't say what you truly think if
you know that your identity is revealed, particularly if what you think is
negative in nature. In Facebook people wear the same masks that they wear in
real life.

------
samengland
Is upvoting generally a good idea in a community? What kind of commenting
behaviour does it lead to?

------
johnl
The way PG controls comments here is with the up-vote down-vote ranking. It
works in separating the article discussions from the opinion oriented posts.
Without the ranking the opinions mix with the article oriented posts, creates
a sloppy discussion board. Another approach is not to bump opinion posts
downward but horizontal into a new list of posts where you expect the posts to
be bumpy at best and offtrack of the original topic. On the opinion list,
confrontational posts are upvoted, 5 strikes and your out for a month.

------
anigbrowl
Peer weighting.

------
karmafeeder
Twitter seems like a fairly good alternative?

~~~
samengland
Twitter appears to be the problem - further fragmenting discussion across the
internet, not bringing it together.

~~~
karmafeeder
What about twitter search? They have a widget made just for that:
<http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_search>

------
ignifero
one can take a multiparametric approach to traditional voting, like here:
<http://textchannels.com/page/about> . Not much of progress compared to
traditional voting, but it might help tailoring the comments to the subject
matter.

