All Posts Tagged With: "user comments"

To continue on my recent commenting theme, I noticed that the new Bay Citizen non-profit online news venture edited by Jonathan Weber is taking a no-anonymity line with its user comments. Here’s Weber in his editor’s blog yesterday:

“There are a number of ways in which people can be part of The Bay Citizen, and each has its own dynamics. There are comments on stories, and we decided to require real names for comments in the hope of engendering a more civilized and useful conversation than is often found in the discussion threads of news sites. Already, though, we have had people register under fake names, so we may have to spend more time policing that than we had hoped.“

This follows my preference for user comments on general-news websites: require real names; no payment required to post comments. Despite the people who will get around the policy by signing up with fake names in order to stay anonymous, this still will improve the quality of the comments discussion, and require much less policing than allowing anonymity.

If too many people register under fake names, Weber can always implement harsher measures, such as requiring a credit card number to confirm a person’s identity, or requiring people who want to comment to authenticate through a service like Truyoo.

Or take my earlier suggestion: Flag accounts that you can identify as people signing up with fake names to have their comments go through a moderation queue, while real-name users post directly to the comment threads.

Civility (and lack thereof) on many news websites, the topic of my previous blog post, is clearly worth more discussion. A bit of brow-beating of me by Josh Young, social news editor for HuffingtonPost.com, today on Twitter gives me the opportunity to continue the conversation … and fight back:

@jny2 Seriously, @steveouting, what do you know about news sites handling tens of thousands of comments a day?

@jny2 I led huffpo’s comments operations for a year, till recently, and I can say that Steve’s piece is thin and unoriginal.

@jny2: @umairh what did you like so much about this unoriginal and, frankly, tepid “fix” for commenting at news sites?

Josh, I’ve been operating and reporting on online communities since 1994. Much has changed over the years, obviously. When I started my first forum (an e-mail discussion list for online-news professionals), we didn’t even have spam to deal with for a couple years. Some of our members preferred to remain anonymous; they let their words and their intellect speak for themselves. I don’t see that as much anymore, and on a professional forum someone not using his/her real name is less likely now to be taken seriously.

True, I have not run a site that handles tens of thousands of user comments a day.

HuffPost does better than most news sites at handling comments, which is hardly surprising. Unlike legacy news brands, HuffPost is an online pure-play where user participation is understood to be critical, and the site utilizes many features to make the comment experience better: Commenters can have “fans”; commenters can get “badges” to gain social status; community moderators watch over things; users can click “flag as abusive”; viewers of comments can select to read all comments, HuffPost editor picks comments, comments from the user’s social stream, etc. But the site still has trolls, and it’s far from perfect.

My suggestion was aimed at the news websites that don’t have the resources (or cultural imperative) to do a good job with controlling user comments, and where trolls run wild and the level of discussion is, for the most part, lame. That would describe many newspaper websites. They have a problem in need of solutions.

What might solve their problems would not be appropriate for other types of websites. Niche and professional sites, in general, have less of a problem with abusive commenters and trolls; there’s more agreement among the user base, whether it be rock climbers or elementary-school teachers. Even HuffPost has more homogeneity (left-leaning audience) than your average newspaper, which draws people across the spectrum of controversial topics who can get heated up quickly.

So, Josh, while you may find my suggestion “tepid,” it may be for you and HuffPost, but not for news sites that serve the broad political spectrum and lack the resources (or knowledge of solutions) that you do to devote to commenting.

I will admit to being idealistic when it comes to online community and discussion. You’ll find evidence of that in an old blog post of mine: “Ender’s Game and the intelligent ‘nets’.” Perhaps, in time, discussion forums will become what Orson Scott Card envisioned: valuable to society.

You could argue that some of the more prominent news brands have created user commenting that is of high quality and value: The Economist, NYTimes.com, etc. For most news sites, and certainly the dominant one in my town, no way; the troll population and the lack of civility keeps out many of those who have something of value to contribute.

Josh: With your experience at HuffPost, what would you suggest as solutions for the type of news sites that I’m talking about?

Have you been watching the Honolulu Civil Beat news experiment? That’s the Hawaii news website edited by John Temple (former editor of the defunct Rocky Mountain News) and financed by Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay).

While I have doubts that its business model (asking $19.99 a month for full access to the news site’s content and discussions) will work, I do think that it’s heading in the right direction with its user commenting policies:

• Commenters must be paying subscribers; free visitors to the site can’t leave comments on articles or join discussions. (A cheaper option is to pay 99 cents a month for a “Discussion Membership.”)
• Commenters and discussion participants use their real names; anonymous comments are not allowed.
• Civil Beat reporters serve as hosts for discussions and regularly interact; they don’t sit on the sidelines but rather mix it up with readers, and keep things “civil.”

As the site’s name implies, the goal is to create valuable, intelligent, civil online discussions on local and state issues where there are divergent views. While the paid-subscription model limits the size of its audience for full content and for participating in discussions (anyone can still read discussions for free), the tenor of the public conversation on the site is far better than the typical local news website where user comments are a free-for-all.

An unusual option: Honolulu Civil Beat’s “Discussion Membership” for 99 cents per month

Here in Boulder, we have the opposite of civil with the user comments on DailyCamera.com, website of the dominant daily newspaper. A recent major story demonstrates the problem with the Daily Camera allowing commenters to hide their identity.

A few weeks ago, an employee of a stove and floor store killed the couple who owned the business, then killed himself. The married couple left behind a young teen daughter and were beloved by many people. The employee-shooter was a 50-year-old ex-computer programmer described as socially awkward, oddly compulsive, never married and no children, who lived alone with his cat, and apparently was disgruntled about a change to his commission structure.

The best media outlet to follow the tragedy has been the Daily Camera and its website, which examined the lives of those involved and (controversially) covered the store owners’ emotional funeral. But what was awful about the Camera’s online coverage was the user comments that piled up under any article published about this sensational tragedy.

DailyCamera.com uses IntenseDebate for its web comment hosting, and while to comment on a story you do need to register, there’s no requirement to publicly identify yourself. You can use a nickname (like “SwitzTrail,” a frequent commenter) and hide in anonymity. IntenseDebate hosts an archive of SwitzTrail’s comments posted on DailyCamera.com and other ID-using sites where he/she has posted, but there’s no profile information on that person. You don’t have to identify yourself publicly if you don’t wish to in order to post a comment.

This stove store shooting story confirms my strengthening opposition to commenter anonymity when it comes to local general-news sites. Many of the user comments I read online during the height of the coverage were truly abhorrent, with wild speculation that maybe the business owners were too greedy and that’s why this happened, and suggestions that current government policies may result in more stressed-out people going whack-o. (I could point you to many other recent examples of Boulder stories with comment threads filled with anonymous, abusive, and downright stupid posts. It’s the same at too many news websites.)

This is the stuff that sane people would not publish if their real names were attached. I hope the orphaned daughter was not exposed to this anonymous drivel.

DailyCamera.com’s editors removed some of the worst comments. To get an idea of what got nixed, and some of what remained online, here’s one of the more rational commenters:

“It’s sickening the way some of you are rationalizing the murderer’s actions. Who cares whether or not the compensation package was fair or not, he could have quit at any time. This guy was a murderer and a psychopath, and I hope he is rotting in hell! Scary to see how many people sympathize with this guy!”

I’m not trying to be anti-free speech, and I believe that anonymity can have its place. But here’s what I’d suggest for DailyCamera.com and other news sites where divergent views are the norm:

1. Require registration for anyone who wishes to comment, including entering their real name.
2. Use real names as user IDs — no self-chosen nicknames allowed — so that real people are standing behind their words; that will cut out most of the abusive and garbage comments. (Yes, of course, some people will easily get around that with a fake “real name.” But if the majority comply, you’ll have less incivility entering the comment stream, and people who don’t comment now because of the ugly tone of the discussion threads may return.)
3. Allow a registered user to create a comment that is listed as “anonymous,” but such comments must go through a moderator for approval; no instant posts.

Additionally, a local news site like DailyCamera.com could institute a “Discussion Membership” fee, a la Honolulu Civil Beat. That might cut user participation so much that it’s not a wise move; then again, it might be successful enough to add a needed extra revenue stream while also moving the needle on user comments from Dumb and Dumber to Quasi-Intelligent and above.

So the solution is quite simple for those news sites needing to improve their public online discourse. Just say no to anonymity, except in exceptional circumstances.

(Update: I’m finding this application to be buggy on my Wordpress blog, so I’ve turned it off for now. I might try it again if the developers improve it.)

I’m fond of trying out new technologies and digital services, and I’m often willing to use this blog as a sandbox. So today I’ve installed a new add-on to my blog called Insight App, which allows readers to highlight text and then easily rate it or comment on it, for everyone to see. With photos, like the sample one I’ve included with this blog item, you can click on the little blue icon added to the photo and then you’ll get the various options for rating or leaving a comment.

You probably recognize this photo. Use your mouse to hover over the photo, then click the little blue icon and rate or comment on the famous image.

For now, I’ve only installed Insight App on my article or “single-post” pages, so to try it out please click on the headline for this item (if you’re on my main blog page); if you came directly to the article opage, then the functionality should be visible to you now.

So, what you can do is highlight some text, then you’ll see a small icon in the lower left of the screen, which when clicked gives you various options for leaving your mark or thoughts attached to this blog item. I have the ability to customize what gets asked, but for now it’s just the default options.

I’ve turned off comments on this post so that you can comment using Insight App instead, and tell me what you think of it.

At first glance, I found it a bit confusing, but then grasped the interface. What do you think?

I do think that it’s about time that we got beyond the standard user comments at the end of an article and tried something more sophisticated. It looks like Insight Apps is trying to do that, so give it a workout during its beta testing period.

(Note: After publishing this item and playing with the feature some more, I found the interface for adding my comments and ratings a bit clunky and not intuitive enough. And the default ads are kind of annoying; if I took the trouble to sign up with Insight Apps and got better matched ads and some money-share from the deal, I might not mind so much. The concept looks promising, but I think it needs some tweaking.)

Egads. It was painful reading through the reader comments on this column by Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News, bemoaning the impending doom of his newspaper. (It seems highly unlikely that there’s a white knight in the Rocky’s future, which means it will probably shut down in early 2009, after 150 years of serving Denver.)

Reader comment threads often bring out the loonies, and the thread on Littwin’s column was full of them blaming the Rocky’s failure on its “liberal bias.” I get the occasional e-mail from someone saying that about newspapers in general, since I write a lot about what ails the newspaper industry; I normally write off such comments as the rantings of someone who doesn’t have a clue about the news business.

(You want liberal bias in your news? Listen to or watch Democracy Now. Want right-wing bias? Watch Fox News.)

But the amount of “it’s the liberal bias that’s killing newspapers” (in a country that just elected its first Democratic black president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress) in this comment thread surprised me; Denver is a pretty “blue” city and long has been.

To those who buy the “liberal bias” argument, I say bullshit. Do some research on the industry; read back over columns that I’ve written for Editor & Publisher Online for many years. Newspapers are suffering mightily now because of the catastrophic hit they’re taking in this recession, on top of secular changes in media consumption habits and advertising shifts that have been evolving over the last decade. On the latter, newspaper executives haven’t mustered the will to transform quickly enough to serve the digital generation, and they would have paid the price for that mistake, recession or not. The severity of this economic crisis just speeded up the process — by a lot.

If political bias in media meant anything and was a financial negative, Fox News would be but a (pleasant) memory instead of a major success story.

(Correction: I originally misspelled Mike Littwin’s name; it’s been fixed above.)