A better conversation

Jeremy has been making some good comments about community. As he suggests, the place to respond is in a post, not in comments, so here goes….

Jeremy points out, rightly, that most comments are useless. Digg is one of his given examples, and I’ve even thought of writing my first Greasemonkey script to stop displaying all comments on Digg articles - damn annoying.

However, Digg is still useful, and it’s still useful because of, not in spite of, the community - it’s just the comments that are pointless.

But given that the mainstream media are just beginning to ‘get’ blogs, and that comments are one of the major obvious distinctions between an article and a blog post, it seems a shame to turn the comments off just yet. It would be better to try and find a better system.

Reasons why comments suck

  1. people like having their words published - no matter how pointless those words are
    The most serious problem is that they offer anyone the opportunity to make their voice heard. We’ve all seen those “look at me - I’m the first to post - little old me - on a big site like this - yippee” comments. It’s the blog equivalent to being the first to piss on a piece virgin snow on Everest. So ego and the inevitable flip-side to having no moderation/filtering is a major issue.
  2. comments can only be linear
    This is a major problem. My assumption is that the point of comments is to allow the community the opportunity of developing the topic of the post. However, most comment systems aren’t threaded (in fact all comment systems, now Dunstan’s blog is no more). This is a serious problem, as far as I’m concerned: unless users can react to each other in a sensible way, comments will always only be an informal, quick and fairly irrelevant form of interaction. A classic is A List Apart: a great site, with some superb articles, and one that does actually attract a disproportionate number of useful comments. However as the comments are just displayed in chronological order there is no way of allowing the debate to develop, or of users being able to react to each other.

Making comments useful

Firstly, as Jeremy points out, comments should be disabled - some of the time.

But more importantly, blog applications need to provide a way of allowing meaningful, threaded discussion.

The threaded bit is easy - well, it’s just a matter of a lot of planning, hard code, and testing.

The meaningful bit - more tricky. The inevitable tempation is to moderate all posts: filter out the “hello worlds” and just leave in the really good ones. But this turns the author into an editor, taking away the point of opening a debate to the community at all. After all, moderation is censorship by another name.

Coming back to ALA, some of the most meaningful comments can occur on page 3 of 7, but by then many readers might never know.

So my solution is to provide a running summary of the key comments - when they warrant it - above the comments. So comments aren’t censored, and readers get a quick way of keeping track of the conversation, without having to wade through pages of dross.

Yeah, it still means the author plays editor, in picking what is really a highlight, but hey, it’s their blog anyway…

Any comments, anyone?!

Posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006. Read the comments and add yours. This item is tagged with .

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