Kiyoshi Martinez – nerdlusus blog the geek wants out

Comments, content creation and creating real value

Almost a year ago I wrote about the need for publishers to tackle comment identity and filtering if they desired for their online communities to be successful.

Since then, I’ve come to a few conclusions about comments on Web sites:

• Comments are a form of content on a publisher’s site.
• Comments should be treated with the same level of care as the original content that it’s paired with.
• Bad comments (ie: “stupid” comments) are the equivalent of bad content.
• Like all bad content, bad comments bring down the value of your product and/or service.
• Publishers shouldn’t allow bad comments and should use moderation/filtering techniques. Or maybe not allow comments at all.
• If you allow bad comments on your site for the sake of increasing traffic and page views, then you really don’t care about your site’s content, users or overall value.
• As your site scales, the amount of bad comments typically will be exponential.
• If you allow one troll to post a bad comment, then you’ve established a precedent for an infinite amount of trolls to post an infinite amount of bad comments.
• Bad comments increase the amount of junk inventory on your site, thereby increasing the amount of page views you must fill with remnant advertising, which only adds more bad content to your site.
• Creating good comments — and therefore more value — is hard and takes more work than most publishers want to bother doing.
• Very few sites building traffic upon page views that allow bad comments are successful financially, simply because advertisers recognize bad content from bad comments.

I used to be completely in favor of allowing comments on news sites for the sake of increasing dialogue, debate and openness on the Internet between publishers and readership, however, I’ve since changed my viewpoint dramatically.

There are very few sites whose comments I read. And there’s even fewer sites at which I’ll post a comment. I’ve found that most of the time when I’m tempted to comment, I rarely have anything of value to add beyond the original post or it’s not worth my time to refute/debate with the post’s writer. I think if more people took this approach, we’d have a lot less comments and higher value in the discussions that did take place.

The good thing about Twitter, Facebook and other sites that focus on personal thoughts on shared media is that we’ve now outsourced and begun to silo commenting to separate sites away from the original content. I think this is a good thing and hopefully will be encouraged. A “tweet this” link is better than “post a comment” in most cases. A “reblog this” link, however, I feel is even better. A StupidFilter would be best.

Here’s a list of recommended reading that’s helped frame and shape my thoughts on the subject of comments:

• NYT: Comment is King
• Howard Owens: If you’re not doing comments right, you shouldn’t do them at all
• iA: Kill blog comments?
• Ryan Sholin: Why commenting on news sites still stinks
• Paul Graham: Trolls
• Shawn Blanc: Blog comments are like cash
• Marco Arment: Comments
• OJR: How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online
• Joel on Software: Learning from Dave Winer

And here’s a few humor-related links on the topic:

• CollegeHumor: We didn’t start the flame war
• xkcd: Listen to yourself
• Penny Arcade: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

So it appears you were very careful to say “sites” and not “articles” or “blog posts.” Do you mean this to apply to all article-type content, including blog posts? Because I would draw a further distinction between a kind of article/post that invites conversation or feedback (maybe including Op-Eds) and one that is cut off from feedback, an authoritative type of article or essay. (“Don’t talk back to ME; I am the big expert!”)

And then, there’s the wiki model. Another animal altogether. No comments, but feedback is in the rewrites.

I didn’t intend to draw a distinction between sites, articles and blog posts. I think it’s pretty much universal that comments across the board on sites that contain content of all sorts have a definite problem with the cultivation of good comments from users.

While I agree that content inviting feedback generally fairs better with guiding the conversation, that conversation must be actively handheld throughout the entire discourse, otherwise it’ll devolve into what we commonly see.

Mainly, I am advocating for publishers to take back their sites and put forth an effort to produce good content across the board. The anonymous Internet has spoken and it’s largely filled with “stupid” noise.

I think WikiPedia’s got it right in a lot of ways, but it’s a great example of a large-scaled guiding hand. Unfortunately, most publishers don’t have that kind of audience and users to self-police.

I agree that the wiki model will not work well in most journalism contexts (except a closed system, e.g. where reporters use a wiki to source and research a topic). But I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish between comments on articles and comments on blogs.

The reason is that I see most bloggers (especially on single-author blogs) embracing a symbiotic relationship with their audience — what Dan Gillmor wrote about years ago when he praised how much he learns from people in the audience. The difference with articles is the authors usually see them as a closed system — I wrote it and now it’s finished.

The blogger has a different attitude (in many cases, not all) toward the blog post — it is open. It invites debate, additions, contradictions.

I’m not saying blog posts and articles are the only kinds of content units, but I’m suggesting that for a value proposition for comments, they are two different cases.