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Comments About Comments

Posted by samzenpus on from the talk-talk-talk dept.

theodp writes "This weekend's NY Times is all-about-the-comments. First, Michael Erard recounts the history of Web site comments and explains how their technical origins have shaped the actual commentary we've come to expect as usual today. On dealing with people-behaving-badly, Erard writes, 'Only a few [high-traffic sites] seem to have tried user-moderation systems like the one developed by Slashdot's creator, Rob Malda. Founded in 1997, Slashdot rapidly began to suffer from what Malda called 'signal-to-noise-ratio problems' as tens of thousands of users showed up. Rather than embracing the chaos (which was a hallmark of Usenet, another digital channel of communications) or locking things down with moderators (which e-mail lists did), Malda figured out a way for users to moderate one another. Moderation became like jury duty, something you were called to do.' Next, NY Times community manager Bassey Etim, who oversees 13 comment moderators, offers up his comments on comments, agreeing that 'the comments are where the real America is.' Finally, there's Gawker's next-generation Kinja, which aims to further blur the lines between stories, blog entries, and comments."

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The most valuable part of some sites by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I same those comments as bookmarks. I wonder why there's not a "favorite" option to save them.

    Everyone should have a single "Supermod" point once per month that would work as a normal mod point except it would allow going past +5.

    So after the holidays we could quickly read the articles with only the very few +6+ posts.

  2. Since moderation is on-topic ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since moderation is on-topic ...

    The biggest weakness with Slashdot's current system is the way that early posts get a disproportionate amount of attention, and mod-points. When a new story shows up, so long as I post within 5-10 minutes it's pretty easy to get modded to +5, even as an AC.

    Try it yourself - as soon as a new story hits, quickly summarize your gut reaction to the summary, hit post, and watch the mod-points accumulate. The downside, of course, is that anybody who shows up late will struggle to get heard amongst the noise.

    Oh yes, and I really dislike it when 50% of an entire comments section consists of replies to one post. This seems to happen because people want their post to get noticed.

    Can anybody think of a good solution to these problems? Or are there other moderation problems which need dealing with?