I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points.
As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations.
Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others.
I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.
The advantage of our technical solution Talk [1] is that we provide a flexible plugin layer. The benefit is that tools like the Perspective API [2] that provide machine learning tools to augment the experience. So really, we're providing a framework for newsrooms to attach more sophisticated tooling to solve the issue from both a technological perspective and a social one.
I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points.
As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations.
Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others.
I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.