Building a better comment system
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.
Are Gizmodo readers misogynists or do they just fear what they haven’t experienced?
Rosa Golijan recently posted a seemingly lightweight piece about Lady GaGa’s recent trip to Apple headquarters in Cupertino. She asks:
Why on Earth Did Lady Gaga Visit Apple Headquarters?
Before I make my case for misogyny, I’ll answer the question, as a plausible explanation seems fairly obvious to anyone who follows tech:
Apple will be holding a special event in less than a month to announce new iPod-related products. These events almost always feature a guest entertainer at the end of Steve Jobs’s presentation.
Do the math.
Back to Gizmodo’s core audience, and their shrewd analysis:
otterman was here says
Because she’s a media whore.
Also, she needs the attention so she can validate her existence.
I pity her.
I’m not sure there can be a bigger insult than being pitied by a guy whose achievement for the day is probably going to be a douchey Gizmodo comment.
beehunt says
She needs permission to use Apple’s new liquid metal to create a new mask to more efficiently hide her ugliness
Make no mistake: beehunt would totally fuck Lady Gaga, if he could. Because he can’t, he’ll instead insult her.
Driver 86 says
Steve Jobs, blowjob. Who blew who is still a mystery.
Success = slut. Apparently.
Colgatem says
To have her iPhone removed from whatever orifice she left it in?
Success = kinky slut. Apparently.
showbiz2 says
To give everyone herpes
Success = irresponsible kinky slut. Apparently.
MazdaMania says
If by thinks different you mean “steals bits from Ace of Base, Madonna, underground House/Progressive Base acts and various popular 80s pop-music beats and then sells it in a vulgar package to easily amused teens and people who don’t know any better”, then yes, she is a bitch.
Oooh. So close. This guy seemed content to merely be a know-it-all music snob, but came around by calling her a “bitch” for no real reason, at the last second. Sneaky.
fusionaddict says
She’s endorsing the next generation of Mac-based annoying harpy technology, iCunt.
Several comments in, and fusionaddict finally drops the cunt bomb. Slow. Clap.
FThorn says
She seems like a trampy (and that’s hard to do) Madonna, but an ugly version with gads more hype than talent.
Double tap! Madonna and Lady Gaga are trampy whores. Lady Gaga is just an uglier, trampier whore.
xSix says
Ant-iHermaphrodite
I don’t really get it, either. I guess, because Lady Gaga likes to dress theatrically, she must really be a dude, with a cock? So many of Gizmodo’s readers see “dude” when looking at an attractive woman that I’m left wondering if they’re not just, you know, into dudes.
That should just about do it. I skipped several which were slight variations on the “she’s a whore” theme, and I was just about to copy and paste one which said “she’s there so I can go punch her in the head” (really) when I accidentally closed the tab.
Make no mistake: There are hundreds of comments in the thread. You might think I’ve cherry-picked a few, but almost every single comment is either about her (ugly) looks, her (alleged lack of) talent, or her (overt and slutty) sexuality. I only saw two or three comments which seemed to be serious answers to the question of why she’d be on the Apple campus. I thought maybe I’d see a few responses calling the worst of the comments out for what they were, but…no.
Where’s the moderator? This thread was created by a woman. You’d think she’d have enough self-respect (or respect for her gender) to step in and actually say something but, apparently, no.
It must suck to be the token vagina on a website like Gizmodo.
Perhaps I’ll see something on Jezebel about this.
Avoiding the Comment Wasteland
I wrote an article recently about the amount of effort required to successfully moderate a comment thread on a popular website such as Daring Fireball. I concluded that, for most authors, the time involved would be better spent writing content.
What about those who consume content from various online outlets? This crowd (me and you and pretty much everyone) outnumbers the content creators and we spend a lot of time reading and responding to comments which, in many cases, we find frustrating.
Why?
On this issue, I can only speak from experience: I spent over four years as an active member of the Newsvine community. In that time, I posted hundreds of articles (evenly split between original content and content linked from other sources) and read hundreds more than that, while participating in thousands of comment threads. I suspect I typed out more text in comments than I did in producing over three hundred articles.
The reason for that is simple: In any social situation, engaging the active community is key to building up your own presence. More people read your content when they know who you are and the more you’re out and about commenting the more visible you become. You’re selling yourself.
And then, for whatever reason, people—I’m no exception—like to argue. We want to throw in our two cents. We want to be heard. We feel like we’re a part of something when we participate. Web 2.0 (yes, I know, you hate that phrase) was pretty much built on this foundation.
At some point in January of this year, I gave up my active participation on Newsvine. I hadn’t run out of things to say (see: this) but I had run out of patience with the community at large—primarily as it is represented in the comment threads.
To be fair, Newsvine lives and dies by social interactions. It is, by design, a social-news website and I saw little point in being “that guy” who posted content to a social media site with comments turned off. Dick move. Newsvine already has that guy—and he’s a total douchenozzle. (Not just because of the comment thing.) It takes a lot of ego to post content to a social website without allowing the social commentary aspect to play out and, well, I guess I don’t have enough ego to insinuate that my content is too good for comments. More importantly, people on Newsvine expect to be able to comment on content, and those who don’t allow comments don’t last long.
So, I took my growing and very deeply felt disdain for a large percentage of the Newsvine community, and left. No more content, no more comments. My anger and annoyance got to the point where I could literally put myself in a foul mood by reading a lengthy comment thread and it seemed stupid to stick around.
This wasn’t because (or wasn’t only because) it was over-crowded with people who didn’t share my opinions—it was, to an extent, but there were just as many who agreed with me on subjects I care about—it was because the entire “social” experience was so devoid of thoughtfulness, effort, and intelligent thought. I got tired of arguing the same points with the same faceless people, and even got tired of reading the same banal (and often desperate) arguments proffered by those who I agree with.
This is not a phenomenon specific to Newsvine—and Newsvine isn’t even the worst of it—nor is it an issue that hasn’t been pointed out elsewhere.
Two issues, I think, are at play:
- Posting a comment that actually adds value is a skill that most people seemingly do not have and which isn’t encouraged or taught because;
- Authors/moderators allow comments which devalue their content.
The fact of the matter is, the first issue will always be an issue. We can’t magically make people more thoughtful, or less dickish. We can’t force people to provide value or insight. (Well, we can, but we don’t.) The signal to noise ratio will always be incredibly high on any site with an open and anonymous registration system.
The only solution, then, is to change the behavior of those with the power to control the threads. The problem is that a lot of larger “corporate” websites fear the inevitable “censorship” and “favoritism” labels that come with setting and enforcing high standards, or else they simply don’t pay enough people to make a difference. Newsvine, an active community of thousands, is moderated by an active team of one guy. On the other hand, any level of moderation whatsoever will result in accusations of censorship and favoritism. With that in mind, I’d advocate a heavy hand rather than a wishy-washy response. If you’re going to be accused of something, you may as well earn the accusation.
On Newsvine, everyone is subject to the Code of Honor. You can’t call someone a name with cause or without. (Sort of like High School: “I don’t care who threw the first punch, you both threw a punch, so you’re both expelled.”) Unfortunately, anyone willing to cross over the line of the CoH (or, as often as not, leap well beyond it) is at an automatic advantage. I know of one person who called someone a cunt and often expressed pride (“I said it then, and I’ll say it again…”) at having done so, and he was around for a couple years afterward, despite other similar offenses. At one point, he even made sure to let me know that he’d kick my ass if we ever met in real life. Total waste of space. He was finally banned after I left, but probably two years too late.
He lasted as long as he did primarily because he had friends on the site. People who would vouch for him and who would let his misogyny slide for fear of losing a sympathetic conservative voice. People who would write articles and throw a fit if he were banned. He posted content generally within the rules and was smart enough to space out his really bad behavior. Suspensions here and there.
It’s amazing what people will defend when it’s one of their own.
I eventually gave up because I was at a point where I was either going to 1) start calling people dumbfucks and assholes when warranted, and get banned from a site I’d put a lot of hard work into and which is owned by people I really respect or 2) leave on my own without making a scene.
The problem: The same issues persist virtually everywhere comments are allowed and as I alluded above, the rhetoric is often worse on other sites. (Check the comments on YouTube or Digg.)
Recently, Jezebel (a Gawker Media outlet) posted an article about John Stewart’s The Daily Show (The Daily Show’s Woman Problem) alleging sexism in the hiring practices concerning the writing staff and correspondents and even implicating, to a degree, Stewart himself. That inspired an open letter from some 34 female members of the DS staff, in support of Stewart, contesting the allegations.
Jezebel struck back and the comment thread involves the sort of man-hating, knee-jerk support of “our own” that you’d expect to find on any other site dedicated to a specific niche audience, and frequented by the niche. Nevermind that they were supporting allegations from two or three former staffers while ignoring the opinions of several dozen current (and long-time) staffers. No one is thinking. They’re too busy posting.
That article was written to create that comment thread. Sensationalism is the name of the game, and the longer people stick around commenting, the more people will keep coming back, creating more and more ad impressions. Reactionary bullshit feminism is now sponsored.
Gawker Media’s Gizmodo (at least lately) does the same thing with anti-Apple comments: You either support Gizmodo, or you’re an Apple fanboy. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (no comments allowed) can inspire a legion of followers to espouse and defend his point-of-view on any blog he mentions. The common factor amongst all of this wasted typing is a lack of thought and originality. Pick a point of view and fight for it. There’s nothing unique about the commentary, it’s the same hastily written crap applied to a different topic.
The same sterile boring jokes are repeated. (I’d almost rather read a belligerent rant than a joke that wasn’t funny the first time—posted the fifth time.) The same talking points are tossed around. The same trollish behavior wearing a different fake name. The same opinion-making masquerading as fact. Anything can sound true when stated with a straight-face. Legal opinions? Why not. We’re all lawyers, right?
One long-standing member of Newsvine spends her time finding negative articles about Apple and posting them to her column. Her entire existence is summed up by her efforts at trolling Apple articles. She leaves a comment to get things started, and then leaves her own threads. The rest is fairly predictable, but Newsvine is essentially paying this person to be a complete bore. She’s figured out a way to exploit the system within the rules. What a waste of life and effort, and I’m not sure if it’s worse that she sets up the trap, or that people continue to fall into it. If she’s sad and pathetic, her comment threads are filled with people who aren’t much better. I scratched that itch for far too long.
We tell ourselves “if I don’t correct the nonsense, people will assume it’s valid” and 50 comments later, we’ve wasted hours of our day away for someone who doesn’t give a good fuck about the topic she obsessively seeds anyway. She doesn’t even have the talent or can’t be bothered to take the effort to write her own negative content, so she lives off the collected negative reporting of others.
Let it stand.
Some sites are worse than others, but the problem is pretty widespread.
So, when someone like Joe Wilcox lambasts Gruber for refusing to offer an open playground for reader commentary, I have to chuckle:
John’s post “John Battelle on Apple’s Banning Google from iOS App Ads” is what set me off. I wanted to comment—to correct the competitive marketing lies asserted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that John repeated as fact. Since I can’t respond at Daring Fireball, I do so here. If I’m going to respond here, I might as well express something held back for some time: My disdain for the brutal effectiveness of John’s storyline—where he hits and jabs others with sarcasm and spit but isn’t man enough to receive jabs back. The story is incomplete, because only one side is presented.
The amusing aspect of all that (leaving aside the idiotic blah blah blah about John Gruber having the audacity to “only” post John Gruber’s perspective on John Gruber’s personal website) is the idea that Gruber isn’t “man enough” to take jabs, as though it’d be a fair fight were Wilcox to show up on an official Daring Fireball comment thread. He’d be eaten alive, and most of the commentary would be belligerent bullshit and worthless back-patting by people hoping to catch Gruber’s eye, at which point the new Joe Wilcox meme would be about how unfair Gruber’s sycophantic followers are towards those who don’t drink the Steve Jobs and/or Daring Fireball kool-aid.
Suddenly, Gruber wouldn’t be “man enough” to fight his own fights.
Comment threads on most sites aren’t democracies, they’re not well-structured public debates, they’re public lynchings, often ignored (or worse: sponsored by) the content creator, cheered on by a bloodthirsty, venomous and usually ignorant crowd. The winning argument is the loudest, the most obnoxious, the most oft-repeated, and the one backed by numbers. People will fight about—or for—anything.
Some personalities are too popular, too…followed…to allow that sort of thing to go on and the wisest choice in that scenario is to go the Daring Fireball route and take comments out of the equation. Joe Wilcox should be thanking Gruber, not vilifying him.
Sadly, some who do let this form of bullying go on actually believe that their own walled-garden of comment-vomit somehow validates their points; that the lack of dissenting voices validates their commentary.
So, it’s all self-perpetuating madness.
Which brings me back to the point: Nothing can really be done about it until (unlikely to happen) authors clean up their own comment threads or (not going to happen) commenters become less boorishly predictable and assholish.
The first option involves some hard choices and serious comment curation by content creators and the decision makers at the bigger outlets: Deleting comments which don’t meet the standards of your own content. (Why anyone would accept even one comment written to a lesser standard than their own content is baffling enough, but hundreds of comments?) Deleting sentiments you agree with if delivered in a tone you don’t. Certainly, it’s a shame that so many decried Blizzard for making the decision to require full names on their privately owned forums, because I think such a requirement would go a long way towards discouraging trollish behavior. (Sadly, they backed down from that decree before implementing it, due to the backlash. It wasn’t a fix-all solution, but it was an actual attempt to address a real problem.)
As I argued before, this is too much work for independent authors, in which case, it’s smarter to just leave the comments off. If larger outlets aren’t having monthly meetings about improving the discourse on their sites, they should probably just shut their comments down, as well.
The second option is one that can be taken by anyone who is fed up with the comment wasteland, a step I intend to (try to) take:
I’m going to stop reading comments. I’ll read articles posted to Gizmodo and Engadget and Slashdot and Newsvine, but I won’t read any comments attached to content on any website unless it’s proven that they take content moderation seriously enough to weed out stupid and vile comments with what many would consider a heavy hand. (This doesn’t mean weeding out civil or even passionate disagreement.)
When I stopped participating on Newsvine, it was three or four weeks before I got past my automatic need to post a comment, or vote for content. My hiatus was to be temporary, but I soon realized I was happier having left that community behind. Newsvine’s motto is “get smarter here” but it’s apparent that the current state of communication on comment threads isn’t going to lead to anyone getting smarter, there or anywhere.
I imagine I’ll have similar issues of withdrawal when it comes to avoiding comment threads, but I think in a few days, I’ll be in a better mood.
As a side-effect, I expect something else to become very clear: I’ll discover which sites write content specifically to create the sort of commentary I hope to avoid, at which point I’ll learn to avoid the content, as well.
