It’s easy to complain about the comment sections of news websites. It’s harder to improve them. They’re as problematic as they are essential, and no single website seems to have gotten the balance just right. Comment moderation is time-consuming, and often more trouble than it’s worth—especially for sites with relatively low traffic. Spammers and troublemakers can discourage meaningful dialogue between writers and readers just as easily as poorly-designed and confusing commenting software can.
Meanwhile, the traditional news story format is stretching and evolving to include blogs, explainers updated in real time, and automatically “Storified” aggregation of social media content. It doesn’t make sense to leave the comment thread behind.
“Beyond Comment Threads” is a Knight-Mozilla challenge to radically reimagine the traditional comment format—and they’re doing it by imagining they are starting from a blank slate. Along the way, everything that has gradually become commonplace over time must be questioned. For instance: Why do so many sites display comments chronologically, when it makes so much more sense to group them in thematic conversations? Why should a comment written on the bottom of one story always be associated with just that one story, isolated from the rest of the online conversation that’s happening externally from that website?
The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership—called MoJo for short, a combination of Mozilla and Journalism—is a new collaboration between the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation (the nonprofit creators of the open-source browser Firefox) to explore new technology for online news production. It is looking to find fifteen fellows to place in newsrooms around the world. This year’s news partners include Al Jazeera, the BBC, The Guardian, Germany’s daily paper Die Zeit, and The Boston Globe.
Other projects that the MoJo partnership is exploring include the future of web video technology and of the production of “People-Powered News.” But a reimagination of the comment thread was an obvious first choice: it’s something that the news partners were the most interested in, and the challenge seemed a good match for the technical interests of Mozilla’s developers.
“Obviously, you could say, ‘Comments on most sites are a wasteland,’” says Ben Moskowitz, MoJo’s media program officer, who also teaches at NYU’s ITP program. “And not only on news sites, but everywhere on the web…the natural impulse that you get from people is ugly sometimes. Go to YouTube; the YouTube commenters will really open your eyes.” So, he says, the goal of this particular initiative is to figure out how to improve both the social dynamics of web commenting, as well as the technical and design aspects of the comment systems themselves.
“So we are looking at the role of anonymity, the role of persistent identity, how you enforce social norms, and how you reinforce good behavior,” says Moskowitz. “But also the technical architecture of commenting, and what we can do to make comments more contextualized. Because it’s not the whole story just to say, ‘We want respectful and intelligent comments.’ We also want well-contextualized comments.”
One of the ways that comments could be better contextualized, Moskowitz explains, would be by creating a program that would facilitate “global commenting.” That is, a program that would embed comments with metadata—about the comment’s author, the topic of the piece the comment was attached to, even the commenter’s particular point of view—that could then allow that comment to be automatically incorporated into other relevant online conversations outside of the particular thread where it first appeared.
There’s quite a wide range of ideas being batted around on the “Beyond Comment Threads” webpage. One contributor advocates making commenters pay for the privilege, while another suggests that commenters should get a share of the ad revenue generated by the page on which they are posting. Another person imagines a very complex-sounding three-dimensional visualization of comments displayed in various levels of brightness and color.
Hello.
The interesting name of a site - www.cjr.org, interesting "http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/the_great_comment_challenge.php" here is very good.
I spent 1 hours searching in the network, until find your forum!
#1 Posted by HaniUnitilik, CJR on Wed 25 May 2011 at 06:28 PM
Question: if we get spam comments on this particular post (see above), should we leave them up, just to show we have a sense of humor?
#2 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 10:22 AM
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#3 Posted by QueuemoAssern, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 10:41 AM
(sigh)
#4 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 10:43 AM
Love to laugh, but the 2 comments bookending your post drive me away from participation, just as 1990s 'flame wars' did. If you delete crazy outliers, this is so exciting to learn of. A "cloud" or Wordle for every article? & beyond? Wow!
#5 Posted by CR Dykers, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 12:29 PM
Welcome, CR! Thanks for being the brave first (real) commenter. I agree - some very interesting ideas coming from this MoJo crew.
Do you have any suggestions for how to make comment systems better?
#6 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 12:52 PM
Hi, Lauren. The matter of "real" vs. anonymous commenters concerns me a lot. Not everybody who adopts an alias does so for underhanded purposes.
Time was when one wrote a letter to the editor under one's own name, address, and phone number, but knowing that it was being published to a limited audience (even if that was all of NYC) and would effectively be accessible for a limited amount of time. The internet is effectively universal and forever, and I think there's a legitimate privacy interest in not putting one's own name out there. As well, while personally I want to be accountable, professionally I also want to keep my political ideas and personal opinions independent of my Google-searching client base. (If I'm commenting in my field, by all means I use my full name.)
I ask myself, is the use of a nom de plume not a historically respected device for writers addressing different forums? Or, if I'm truthful in giving my real name and other identifying information when I register at a given site, am I not practicing accountability, even if my commenter name is a fiction?
I am less interested in the creative reorganization of the comment world than I am in the quality of the content there. If it's a fact that personal accountability correlates positively with responsible commenting, then are there not creative ways to rethink that angle, as well?
(I'm posting under my real name, since this topic belongs to everybody's field.)
#7 Posted by Meg Hyre, CJR on Thu 26 May 2011 at 06:44 PM
Meg, thanks for those points. I tend to think that attaching (real) names makes people more thoughtful when commenting, but I understand the Google fear, as well, if you want to express yourself but not be skewered by it later in your real-world political/business relationships. But I wonder - would comments actually show up prominently in Google searches? I don't know, but it seems to me they would be pretty far down on the list, given the sum of our Internet-selves scattered all around.
#8 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Tue 31 May 2011 at 02:20 PM
Hi again, Lauren,
Prepare for a surprise: I Googled myself just this minute and my comments on this story show up as the third, fourth, and fifth items.
Granted, a Google search for me turns up very little---an interview in a book, a recorded talk in an archive, my name in the acknowledgments of books or articles I've edited, a Marketplace transcript. But two times (now three) a Google search turned up comments on websites:
One was in the (London) Observer, if I remember correctly, when President Obama was getting heat for his use of the word "enormity." Word usage is part of my craft, so I signed my name.
The other was on my local NPR website when they posted a thank you note / comment about an interview. That one embarrassed me by its somewhat fulsome tone, plus it contained social opinion. Turns out it's not their policy to post full names; it was a slip, and they fixed it when I requested them to do so.
A poor internet-self, I admit, but mine own. And I'd prefer to keep it that way, with the exception of the business website I'm looking at launching.
A last note: I don't know about other people, but when I google somebody I read through as many pages as possible, so I at least would probably turn up buried comments...
Hope this hasn't gone too far off topic. Thanks for your reply.
#9 Posted by Meg Hyre, CJR on Tue 31 May 2011 at 04:40 PM
Not at all off-topic, Meg, very interesting. I stand corrected!
#10 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Tue 31 May 2011 at 06:53 PM
One of the reasons that internet handles on blogs became common early on is because a number of people on the liberal blogs of the day became the target of the rightwing loonies on Free Republic, the former version of LGF, and even Dan Gainor's and Michele Malkin's and Drudge's thugs. On the basis of posting a liberal comment, these thugs, on a number of occasions, would call the person's employer, stalk them around their home, harrass their children, initiate frivolous lawsuits against them, post their contact information along with death threats and the like. I know of several instances where a commenter who denounce the Iraq War was fired from their job because these rightwing thugs called the person's boss. Just about the only people at that time who dared use a traceable name were attorneys and journos.
Journos post their name because it has always been a professional standard to do that; in addition, they have institutional backup and protection from physical and legal harassment. Lawyers, of course, know their way around the law and have a certain amount of respect and credibility with the law enforcement community, and thus had less fear of using their own name. Us normal people had none of the institutional backup or resources, and thus in order to exercise our First Amendment rights of dissent and free speech, also took to employing the same privileges as George Sand and Elia Lamb in adopting a pseudonym.
Now, any blog has the absolute right to require verified ID and full names of their commenters if they choose. But know this, these rightwing thugs, as well as the GOP operatives that are into deep, deep oppo research, are still at work, and normal people out there are still at risk of being hunted down and harassed by these thugs.
A separate issue is the need for many people to keep separate their political work, including commenting on political blogs, and their work, which in many cases needs to be kept on a professional level or outside the realm of the political. For example, government workers, who have the right to have political opinions and to do political work outside their jobs on their private time, cannot have their professional name associated with, say, a bunch of radical rightwing blogs, or liberal blogs. And yet, it is their First Amendment right to do this. So they assume a pseudonym. A good example of this is the much-loved and deeply missed commenter Hilzoy. You can read about her reasons for the pseudonym on the google.
These are issues that the journos "in charge" of this discussion don't face or acknowledge, or perhaps don't realize. All of that said, yes, we should find a way to make comment streams more civil and intelligent. Ask New York Times how they do it. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates.
#11 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 1 Jun 2011 at 11:08 AM
I would suggest dividing online commentary into separate threads for stand-up citizens who post under their real names, and threads of their very own for COWARDS who want to avoid any kind of accountability by hiding behind pseudonyms.
And on the thread for COWARDS, wouldn't it be even better to eliminate all those cutesy nicknames and simply assign numbered monikers like COWARD_8523, COWARD_8524 and so on?
The optimal outcome wouldn't be much more than average citizens belaboring the obvious, but at least we could (further) marginalize SICK SHIT like Daily Kos, Free Republic, Youtube, and all the rest of the pseudonymous blogosphere.
On the upside this is really a tempest in a very small teapot, as even MoJo's guiding light Ben Moskowitz implicitly acknowledges in the article above.
"Go to YouTube; the YouTube commenters will really open your eyes.”
And why would they "open our eyes," Ben?
Because the vast majority of Youtube's clientele NEVER READS THE COMMENTS, and that's the bottom line for all the abject pseudonyms of the pseudonymous blogosphere.
Would YOU have read these comments, if you didn't plan to post one yourself?
#12 Posted by Jacob Freeze, CJR on Sat 4 Jun 2011 at 06:16 PM