Have Online Comment Sections Become Specious?

christoofar writes "Gawker founder Nick Denton says online comments have proven themselves to be not worth the trouble, a waste of resources, and contribute nothing to online conversation or even capture the intelligence of readers. From the article: 'In the early days of the Internet, there was hope that the unprecedented tool for global communication would lead to thoughtful sharing and discussion on its most popular sites. A decade and a half later, the very idea is laughable, says [Denton]. "It didn't happen," said Denton, whose properties include the blogs Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9 and Lifehacker. "It's a promise that has so not happened that people don't even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that's a joke."'"

Comments

Use forums instead

[Anonymous Coward]

I think discussion sections work great in the small and medium scale special interest category. A number of smaller blogs I frequent, the comment section/side forum becomes a good area for discussion... and often times particularly good bits end up edited into the original post.

I certainly think they work much better in small niche interest groups than on general news sites. When you have a small group of generally like minded people with a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge in the topic .. you get a good discussion. When you get the diverse public with dissimilar views and often a very surface understanding of the topic.. you get the type of shit we see on this guy’s collection of sites and on youtube and so on.

I think at least part of the problem is that most comment sections are poorly designed and provide little ability for actual discussion. Many don’t have threaded replies, a simple feature that makes any comment section _way_ more useful in my opinion. You can’t really have much of a discussion if replies can’t easily be tied to each.

Also sorting by most recent (descending) in conjunction with threaded comments (threads which have had a comment recently get bumped up) I think works well to keep people talking. Again, can’t have a discussion if you can’t even find the current discussion(s).

On larger sites, I think the best approach is to have a forum on the side with topics linked to the post. This eliminated a lot of crap as there is slightly more effort in posting to a forum than posting to a comment section. Forum software is also generally much better equipped for real discussion than most comment systems.

Re:Use forums instead

[Anonymous Coward]

I am of the opinion that Usenet was a lot more usable for this than any webforum I've ever come across. Split messages/threads view (with proper threading, none of this messages in chronological order within thread nonsense). Proper marking of read/ignored messages/threads. Snappy offline reading. Efficient plaintext presentation. Everything in one place instead of a bazillion differing forums and accounts.

Usenet wasn't *that* bad considering it was next to unmoderated.

Re:Use forums instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem: I just want to comment. Don't like it, flag it, and moderation can remove it. I don't want to register for user account, to have my information stored on a server, possibly sold to marketing companies. I recall one site even wants phone verified accounts? Sorry no thanks, even if the comment was important, I suppose the site will have to do without

Not just tech sites, though. Many local, national, and world news sites want a user account, some blogs want a user account, every forum already wants a user account, and I don't want the hassle of having to manage all those accounts, to have different passwords for all of those accounts, and for many sites--not to be able to permanantly delete my account when I'm done using it.

Re:Use forums instead

[cpu6502]

I think at least part of the problem is that most comment sections are poorly designed and provide little ability for actual discussion

You said what I was thinking. (1) I enjoy reading replies to news articles and am disappointed by those that don't allow comments. (2) The problem is not comments sections, but poor programming by those who create them. You CAN have a worthwhile discussion on news articles if the replies are treated as separate posts & replies are directly beneath them (something that has existed since the earliest days on 80s-era Usenet).

Comment sections like those on youtube and many news sites that just dump the posts on the screen haphazardly are an example of laziness by the programmer(s).

Re:Use forums instead

[Anrego]

I don't want the hassle of having to manage all those accounts

Some kind of single sign in system would be great for this reason. Unfortunately all the sites with enough critical mass to make it happen, I don't want to have much to do with (facebook I won't touch, google I am gradually becoming less trusting of, microsoft.. forget it!).

Re:Use forums instead

[bhtooefr]

There's always OpenID, and becoming your own provider.

Re:Use forums instead

[gl4ss]

the point of the comments sections is to NOT offer you an easy content independent from view access at your own terms. the point is to draw views to the stories, with usenet the content is shown in whatever fashion the client is coded to show it in. it's just plain content.

slashdot excels in that it's unmoderated in the sense that comments don't disappear into the void if a mod chooses so.

but I find it no surprising at all that a guy running gawker media doesn't like comments sections - who the fuck would register there now?-D for gawker they brought a lot of loss.

Re:Use forums instead

[MysteriousPreacher]

I think discussion sections work great in the small and medium scale special interest category. A number of smaller blogs I frequent, the comment section/side forum becomes a good area for discussion... and often times particularly good bits end up edited into the original post.

This! The only places where I've found genuinely interesting and thought provoking comments is on sites with a focus specific enough to attract a certain crowd of people. Unfortunately though with such places it's difficult to avoid it becoming an intellectual circle jerk.

I never read YouTube viewer comments. Nowhere else have I encountered such a graphic example of what happens when everyone is handed a bullhorn and invited to comment on anything that comes to mind.

Re:Use forums instead

[oakgrove]

Unfortunately in many instances you would be setting yourself up for a lower overall experience as everything you read would be the result of your own confirmation biases. I think that for something like this to work, there would have to be a built-in safeguard so that at least some intelligent dissent could make it through.

Re:Use forums instead

[vlm]

There's always OpenID, and becoming your own provider.

I looked into that years ago, and back then, everyone wanted to be an openid provider to anyone else, but no one wanted to accept openid from anyone other than themselves. Has the scene changed any, over the years?

Re:Use forums instead

[vlm]

True but, the internet is full of Different echo chambers... you can learn a lot from listening to the ZH echo chamber and comparing it to the similar although different HBB echo chamber (HBB was much more interesting pre-bubble burst than post-bubble burst although still occasionally interesting)

For example the machinist page I mentioned has a groupthink in love with cheap Chinese metalworking machinery (lathes and mills) but you go to practicalmachinist or PM or whatever its called and the mods there hate Chinese iron and will not tolerate its discussion.

I donno if its possible to not have a groupthink where there are like minded people if whenever a splinter group wants to, they can just ... splinter.

Re:Use forums instead

[Opyros]

I've been thinking about creating something like a usenet 2.0

It's been tried. But the idea never really took off; there's evidently almost no traffic on Usenet II.

Re:Use forums instead

[Compaqt]

People like to complain about /., but the fact is, even 1-rated comments are much better than many/most sites, certainly including Gawker, wonkette.com, and HuffPo.

Agree or disagree with a comment, it's rarely just pure bile.

Re:Use forums instead

[Ihmhi]

slashdot excels in that it's unmoderated in the sense that comments don't disappear into the void if a mod chooses so.

It won't for long. Take a look at that little flag on the bottom right of every post and imagine what that means for us now.

Re:Use forums instead

[Pausanias]

The really amazing thing is how nobody else has adopted Slashdot's commenting system. It was a brilliant invention 15 years ago and still no takers?

I mean, come on, it's not that hard. Assign random mod points to people, and more mod points to people who have been modded up. You don't need to work in the whole Karma thing, or work in the nuances of "Interesting, insightful" etc. Just have thumbs up/thumbs down allocated randomly in proportion to total number of thumbs ups posted (plus a few extra random ones to make the system work).

Re:Use forums instead

[WuphonsReach]

You may like and prefer that, but it turns out that no one else wants to even see (much less have to mod) 500 posts of your bullshit anonymous trolling. I say "your" because in this context anyone who is anonymous is basically the same shitty asshole of a person, and in "free/open" comment sections from Kalamazoo to Cucamonga the anons turn a thread into a 5 mile long shit fest before you can even blink.

The real story is that the news sites are not willing to pay to moderate / police their comments. Which requires a lot more work then simply tossing up a "comment" form protected by some brain-dead captcha or requiring people to register.

If you don't moderate your forums / comment threads, then you will get the garbage of society. If you want a higher class of posts, then you had damned well better moderate in such a way that brings about that result.

Ask a Microsoft or Apple question here...

[StuartHankins]

Ask a Microsoft or Apple question here and find out. After all, that is our religion.

Re:obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not have been inclusive enough.

Don't listen to Nick

[ronocdh]

Nick Denton is an idiot. He runs Gawker Media, which is itself a joke of a syndication network. He hires wannabe journalists and gives them bags of cash to bribe industry insiders into leaking stories so he can put them on his blogs. Of course the comments sections on Gawker Media sites are stupid. He also dismisses the politically charged and logically sound comments on Jezebel, which I wouldn't call the epitome of intelligent discourse on the internet, but it's definitely heads and shoulders above anything else hosted by Gawker.

Look at the comments on this Ars Technica piece: all topical and useful. Look at this comment thread (particularly this one! one of the most helpful comments I've ever read) about someone learning how to program in Perl.

In TFA, Denton says:

Give other commenters more power to "up-vote" or "down-vote" posts? "We don't really believe in the democratic process of decision-making when it comes to discussion," Denton said.

What a prick. Of course he doesn't believe in the democratic power of anything, because he's authoritarian, narrow-minded, grossly incompetent as a "journalist"—and deplorable as an editor, too—and all Gawker media sites (I'd entertain a counterargument defending Jezebel) operate on one rule: feed the trolls. Not all the examples of good comments I gave above have user-moderation systems in place, but the ones that don't just have good content that attracts good readers. Nick wouldn't know anything about that.

Maybe not a joke, unfortunately.

[BaronHethorSamedi]

Maybe Gawker, et al, need to come to grips with the terrifying possibility that online comments absolutely do capture the intelligence of the readership.

Who speaks?

[LoudMusic]

The ignorant are often more outspoken than the intelligent.

How quaint...

[jklappenbach]

A comment forum commenting on comments about comments.

"Capturing the intelligence of the readership"

[Winkletron]

Such a statement assumes that intelligence exists in the first place. Comments sections can work. But, as soon as a sufficiently large audience shows up, it devolves into cesspool of ridiculous, poorly thought through, extreme opinions, and personal attacks. *Insert something racist/homophobic/sexist/generally hateful here*

He has a point

[Zouden]

Comments on blogs and news articles (and youtube videos of course) are almost entirely worthless. Almost no one puts thought into their comments, even when it's attached to a well-thought out article. They don't "capture the intelligence of readers", rather they capture the unintelligence. Another example is twitter. Choose a trending topic, read some of the tweets, and weep for humanity.

On the other hand, forums can be extremely valuable. I'd class Slashdot into that category, even though technically these are still comments on news articles. Forums can be excellent at capturing the intelligence, wisdom or experience of its members. Some examples that come to mind are Whirlpool or XDA-Dev. Of course you still get ill-thought out nonsense, but the format encourages continued participation in the discussion, rather than blogs where people write some bullshit and then move on to the next story.

Still useful

[hawguy]

The only thing that keeps me going to my local newspaper's site is the anonymous comment section. While there are some crazy and trolling comments, the anonymous nature of the system leads people to post more provocative points of view (and possibly even more honest opinions, but in any case, many opposing viewpoints are posted and discussed). Sure, there are sometimes personal attacks, but overall it's interesting to read opinions from other local people. There's a minimal moderating system where abusive comments can be reported (and sometimes that system itself is abused by people that want to get rid of opposing viewpoints), as well as a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system.

When another semi-local paper switched to a non-anonymous facebook commenting system, the usefulness of the comments went way down. (as did some of the more extreme views, but I don't mind reading those extreme views, or even wading through a number of useless "first post!" comments if it means getting more interesting comments).

Re:obviously

[jcreus]

Maybe the fact stories do not have like or dislike buttons so that people can say "314 people like Microsoft" or "21 people work for Apple"?

Re:obviously

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Slashdot, it must be said, continues to be a great source of insightful comments (a thing which is becoming extinct on the Internet lately). I think it can be put down to its great moderation system...

I'm sorry, but I really cannot agree on either point of this comment. Though we do have far fewer youtube'esque comments here, we have a mountain of comments attempting to bait the word 'Insightful' next to their names. For example, every cell phone article for YEARS always had several "I just want a phone that's just a phone!" comments, nearly always modded up. That's just one example. Now we have a massive Smartphone OS war going on where people chuck phrases like "walled garden" around. Any time there's a story about some technology, there's a big race to point out the big obvious downside, often to the tune of 'what could possibly go wrong'. I mean, really, I've seen "Life will find a way!" posted here several times in the last year. Now we're quoting Jeff Goldblum! We have people trying to be funny, that overlords joke still won't die. We have people being contrarian, afterall a nerd that's hard to impress is an impressive nerd indeed.

I could keep going, but the big annoyance I see with Slashdot's moderation is the sheer repetition of comments. Somebody occasionally makes a good comment, it gets modded up, then we see that comment repeated over and over and over again, modded up over here and over there. I don't consider that a 'great source of insightful comments', I see a game everybody plays to earn points. There is way too much posing going on.

And, yes, I'm one of the jerks that does this. How else would I post at +2?

Re:obviously

[dzfoo]

That's because, while everybody else was going Web-two-point-oh-rounded-corners-kumbaya, Slashdot looked like a remnant from Geocities.

Slashdot has always been ugly and pedestrian, if extremely functional.

        -dZ.

Re:obviously

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The slashdot moderation is a meritocratic method to increase the signal:noise ratio for the lowest common denominator, not to only show you the opinions you agree with.

Bullshit. Popular opinion is what gets modded up around here. That's what happens when you randomly give badges and guns to people, but don't provide a means to keep them honest. Again, Slashdot's comment section is a game, not a forum for intelligent discussion. If it were the latter, the phrase "RTFA" wouldn't be all that popular.

I did give Slashdot's moderation policies a roast here, but I will say something on their behalf: I think it's great that Slashdot doesn't let you edit your post after the fact. I've been burned by this a few times, but it has made me more aware of what I post.

If asked what I'd do to fix it, I'd only make one simple change: Moderators would have to be trained. That, in my view, would make all the difference.

Re:Capturing the intelligence of the readership, d

[nine-times]

I agree that's part of the problem. Take the fact that he's the guy who founded Gawker. So you post a story on Gawker about how Jon Hamm Hates Kim Kardashian, and you wonder, "Why am I not getting the most elite brilliant comments in response?" Even sites like CNN are full of trash. How can you be surprised that your comments are ignorant flamebait with no dignity when they're in response to stories that are ignorant flamebait with no dignity?

But also, honestly, if there were an interesting story on CNN, I wouldn't want to bother commenting on it on CNN. I'd wait until it got posted someplace like Slashdot, and then I'd comment there. It's a better audience for my comments, and there's a better moderation system.

But there's more to it than just that-- Slashdot is *where I have my discussions*. If I post on a million different web sites, I can't keep track of who I'm talking to and who has responded to my comment. Even if the people on cnn.com were great and their discussion system was great, I wouldn't really want to post comments on Gawker *and* CNN *and* MSNBC *and* wherever else an interesting story pops up. I'd rather wait until the story shows up on an aggregation service I'm used to, and then comment there. The consistency of having one site (or a couple) to engage in discussions is part of what makes it work.

So essentially, I agree that comments may be a waste of time on Gawker and CNN. It's better to assume that there will be news aggregation and discussion sites (like Slashdot) and people can go there for discussion.