We held a live chat with Gazette Editor Steve Buttry this morning, and it went quite well. The first comment left for us got me thinking.
Regarding the message boards on the Gazette website: The comments left are generally angry, mean and hateful in nature at worst…and ill-informed or flat out lies at best. There seems to be no single reason to have these message boards out there. Why doesn’t the Gazette remove message boards from the website? Please don’t use the canards of freedom of speech or of expression or the press, because these are meaningless arguments as the freedom are already available in our society and message boards are a duplicitous and demeaning substitute for those freedoms.
I’ve been thinking about comments a lot lately. I’ve written about them twice on my personal blog, here and here. To save you the reading, I talk about why it’s important to have comments and am kicking around what expectations we should have for comments on our site.
in a nutshell, comments are important because the news isn’t a monologue anymore. People are talking about our stories and all the comment function does is give them a place to do that.
That being said, I have had people tell me, both in person and over e-mail, that they avoid our comment boards because of the bile being spewed their on a regular basis. We do our best to remove truly offensive comments, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to get worked up about on there.
So my question to readers is: What do you think of the comment function? Do you ever use it? Is the forum we provide too free? Not free enough? What would you do differently? You can leave your replies in the comments, or you can e-mail me.
October 13, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Before you decide to remove the comment feature altogether, why don’t you try to introduce a registration before users are allowed to comment? I think that this would change many of the objectionable behaviors seen on the message boards.
October 13, 2008 at 1:05 pm
We actually do require registration to comment already; anyone can view, but you have to log in to comment. But making it more strict might help.
October 13, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I like the ability to comment; it adds a level of engagement to the experience of digesting local news.
I have problems with The Gazette’s particular implementation of commenting functionality. Because there is such a high cost of entry convenience-wise (having to register, then remember a user/pw) it probably discourages many of the more moderate opinion-holders from entering the discussion and leaves the extremists who are willing to jump through hoops to get their ideas out there. That, in turn, further alienates the “moderate middle” from entering the discussion.
GazetteOnline’s commenting functionality is also rather limited compared with more mature commenting systems on blogs. The formatting is pretty sub-par. The required “title” field is bizarre and amateurish-feeling, since it’s not really standard protocol. (The ending :00 representing seconds in the posting time also reflects poorly on implementation. Why include it if it’s always :00? There is, in general, a pervasive lack of fit and finish on GazetteOnline. Visible font tags, anyone?) Threading, quoting, linking, and text formatting in general are not supported (or not supported well). All of these things are done much better elsewhere on the Internet and would make the feature much more attractive and substantive.
One quality-control idea would be to have editors select some of the more germane, well written comments to highlight, which might help attract more quality commenters to add to the conversation. Salon.com does something similar. Digg.com allows users to essentially vote for or against other people’s comments and then hides those that fall below a certain threshold of public approval by default. (Users can still choose to read the hidden comments if they so wish.)
Implementing clever improvements to the user interface and default display settings might do a lot to improve the quality of comments on the site. I, for one, would hate to see the feature removed without first trying to make it better.
October 13, 2008 at 1:28 pm
MV:
Thanks for that! You’re right about the lack of fit and finish; and that’s something we’re working on, including looking at entirely new commenting platforms. I can’t give a timeline, sadly, because we’re sure of it, but it’s a priority, and not just for me.
The voting idea from Digg.com (and slashdot.com before that) is interesting.
I have been highlighting the most interesting comments for the last few weeks on the blog here, do you think it would be more useful for us to highlight them on the GazetteOnline homepage?
Thanks again!
Jamie Kelly
October 13, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I should add that I don’t expect The Gazette will want to spend a single penny making their commenting feature better, and for that reason, I don’t expect it to get better. It’s a common problem in today’s business world, where progress is so often linked to IT development, which is expensive, time-consuming and requires a hard-to-attract and retain talent pool. I don’t mean to suggest that the technical shortcomings of the site and its features are the fault of the staff; rather, it’s just very expensive to do things well and make the necessary constant investments to keep up with best practices. So instead of making things better, people come up with work-arounds (manual font color=red tags, for instance )or easily implemented changes that don’t fix anything, like making people register, which is actually counterproductive to encouraging free commenting, and also a poor attempt at quality control, which could better be addressed through smarter functionality.
Wow, I guess I had a lot to say on this issue. I apologize if it reads as a rant; it’s meant to be constructive criticism. Or at least potentially constructive. Okay, fine, it’s meant to make me feel better, but still. I am, as they say, just sayin’.
October 13, 2008 at 3:18 pm
It’s fine like it is. You are editing now and that’s as it should be. Some just want to spout off and play or stir things up. It’s not a sanitary world, so don’t try to clean it up for me.
October 14, 2008 at 2:32 pm
[...] Yesterday, I asked what you think about comments, and I got some good responses, including the fact that making people jump through hoops discourages good, moderate commenters. [...]