Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs

http://estenhurtle.com/blog/2012/3/24/unbreaking-comments-tiny-sites-and-tech-blogs/

by estenh • 14 years ago

15 10 14 years ago

mcav2• 14 years ago

In a small community where people collectively want to foster good discussion, comments can succeed for a while. I think it's impossible to sustain that if the community grows or if they lose their focus.

No community I've ever seen, apart from MetaFilter, has kept the noise level low enough that participating in the community is enjoyable. Hacker News was great a few years back, but it's painful to watch now. Same for every other site I've known: As the community grows, discussions degrade, and people get hostile.

People don't have a lot of insight. So when sites open up to comments, the typical comment — which may be perfectly average for humanity — is trash. People have agendas and biases. Most people don't see it, or don't care, so they don't correct for them.

Commenting systems and algorithms can hold back the tide for a while. They can force out people with a net negative impact on the community. But in the end, attempting to sustain good discussion is a losing battle. It's so easy for good discussions to turn bad, for intelligent arguments to become baseless, for disagreements to become personal attacks. Humanity as a whole isn't capable of rational, reasoned discussion at scale.

pagekalisedown• 14 years ago

Do you think HN should charge like MetaFilter?

mcav2• 14 years ago

Yes. Or require someone to verify a github account with original work or something.

estenh3• 14 years ago

I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.

On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.

You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.

werg• 14 years ago

What I already told Esten on twitter: He outlines some aspects of a method to keep the 'good contributors' engaged, even if the community grows, by highlighting their contributions. What interests me is how to scale these good comments without excessive moderation. And also, even on sites that have moderation available over time there's again and again this boom-bust cycle, where comments start out being really insightful when the community is small, which attracts more people which brings down the quality of comments, making people less interested in high quality commentary (and also the general audience less interested in the comments at all).

I think limiting the number of contributors is interesting, but I wouldn't limit the ability to reach a big audience per se. Precisely the possibility to reach an audience entices high-quality comments. Possibly part of the real challenge is actually to keep the non-commenting audience interested in the comments.

So maybe it's about limiting the number of contributor-slots available in any given situation, and then of course think of a non karma-whoric way of assigning those slots... hmm :) Maybe even make it random, so anybody can get one of those slots, so create a sense of urgency not to blow that chance. Might work in some situations.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Moderation is just a target for trolls. Meta-moderation-threads can generate huge angry threads of hate. Meta is death, but meta-moderation is evil slow death.

Highlighting comments from established contributors is a problem if some of them are dicks, or some of them occasionally make awful comments. You also have a problem with "vested contributors" - 'I broke the rules, but I've been here so long and do so much good that it's okay because you know that really I'm alright' whereas the newbie just gets banned.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Firstly make sure that some concept of respect, or politeness, is built in and applies to every person making comments.

Encourage use of cites; some way of rewarding useful citations might be interesting. (EG, this post is lousy and only gets two upvotes, but the citation is great and gets ten.)

Ban out-right some topics; or have very narrow constraints around how they are discussed. Some topics will instantly explode into heated bitter flamewars with no possibility of sharing useful information and no chance of changing people's opinions. They're toxic. Which is a shame, because they are usually the things where people actually need more and better information, and where a carefully arranged discussion could shed some light. Obvious examples of these topics are Palestine/Israel[1], Abortion, Circumcision, etc. (Yes, I know you posted two examples. I guess you have great users, long may that continue.)

Your idea about collectively owning a site is perhaps useful, but you'll be in for a rough ride if you need to make changes that your users don't like. Because you've made them co-owners now, and they have a say, and they are entitled, and etc.

You do need to find a way to split deterrents for posts that "do not belong here" and posts that "I disagree with". There's some suggestion that, on HN, acceptable posts are being downvoted because they're unpopular.

In general, moderation is often awful. You need someone to kill the spam but after that lots of stuff becomes subjective and thus open to arguments.

estenh3• 14 years ago

Interesting about ownership affecting how users perceive changes to the site itself. You're 100% right on that, hadn't thought about it.

angry-hacker• 14 years ago

Completely off topic, but the site you mention in the post (storitell.com) - its font rendering is horrible, it almost impossible to read anything. (Windows 7, Chrome)

estenh3• 14 years ago

Hmmm, interesting. Looks great on my Windows/Chrome setup. Mind emailing me a screenshot at esten.hurtle@gmail.com? Thanks so much!

Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs

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