me & her

Advertising Age, reporting on comments made by Gawker Media’s Nick Denton at the “Media Evolved” conference:

Owner of an online media empire that spans the flagship Gawker to sports-oriented Deadspin to io9 for sci-fi diehards and racks up a combined 20 million unique views per month, Mr. Denton told the audience that there are plans in the works for a product launch that would aim to enhance the commenting environment in the hopes of attracting smarter readers who are currently wary of entering the conversation.

Denton, of course, is right to want to fix this. I’ve got serious doubts, though, that Gawker Media is the conglomerate that is going to tackle and/or solve the problem of comment porn. 

Anyone with any interest in intellectual honesty will admit that the Gawker Media modus operandi is, by and large, controversy over quality. Nick Denton is in love with page views, and I doubt very seriously that there’s any real introspection going into this mystery product.

Gawker Media’s problems run too deep, and Denton’s interests are too aligned with the comment porn he’s decrying, for him to ever make a serious effort at managing it. 

But, he’s right about the problem, even if he’s (probably) full of shit about being able to (or even wanting to) fix it.

An organization that truly wants to offer a comment system that is as good as their best content must do a few things:

• The site must offer content that is worthy of smart comments. If your best isn’t very good, game over. There’s no sense in hoping for comments that are smarter than the content you’re offering and, let’s face it, most of the Gawker Media sites aren’t offering smart content, produced by smart people, driven by smart focus.
• The site must be willing to sacrifice page views in the short term and maybe even in the forever term. In some ways, doing this and doing it right will involve a line in the sand and choosing between conflicting reputations. I suspect Gawker won’t be willing to make this sacrifice, because they clearly love their tawdry, tabloid-style reputation. 
• The site must understand the problem. There’s trolling, there’s commentary, there’s fake smart vs. real smart and there’s general chattiness. Denton, at least, seems to recognize that general chattiness is, in many cases, the biggest problem. Chattiness does not respect smart content and it does not engender intelligent commentary. Trolling, as Denton suggests (but as most sites don’t handle well enough, or with a firm enough hand) can be handled via deletions and censorship. (Let’s not pretend that removing content — even when it’s warranted — is anything other than censorship. Solving this problem will require an embrace of censorship, applied appropriately.) A site must assess what they’ll accept, and what they won’t, and curate for it. 
• Solving the problem won’t be free. Sites which produce great content pay to get it. Sites which hope to produce great comments should, as well. This means hiring people who are smart, who like to talk about great content, and who are good at it. I’m not sure what you’d call them, but they’d be there to lead by example and to set the tone. They would, in essence, take ownership of the conversation.
• Ideally, authors would take an active role in shaping the discussions found underneath their content. My experience on Gizmodo, though I don’t comment there, is that most of the authors are assholes who — if they participate at all — do so to feed trolls and/or ban those who disagree with their premise or call into question their intentions. Any site which is determined to include smart comments should make author participation a requirement.
• Anyone who wants to participate in these smart comment threads, but who is not paid to do so, should only be allowed in based on reputation (invites, perhaps?) or via a premium pay wall. I’d pay $10 a year to jaw with smart people, over topics I’m passionate about, if I knew that I’d not have to put up with certain elements.
• This should be a privilege, not a right, and it should be possible to lose this privilege. 
• Comment threads shouldn’t go on forever. Conversations are best when they’re fresh. Some sort of self-destruct mechanism would be a good idea, at which point the conversation is there for posterity.
• In this way, it would be possible to supplement great content with great commentary. One could be as important as the other.
• Such as system wouldn’t necessarily have to replace a more traditional comment system, but it should be the more prominently featured system. (It might even be possible to recruit smart commenters from the traditional system, once they’ve proved their mettle.)

Again, I have my doubts that Nick Denton is taking this seriously enough to disrupt the worthlessness they’re facing, but it sure sounds good to make bold proclamations in interviews at tech conferences.

Any viable solution will require honest-to-God soul-searching and, frankly, Gawker Media doesn’t have the requisite soul.