Editor’s note: Reader comments in the age of social media

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/11/07/editors-note-reader-comments-in-the-age-of-social-media/

by minimaxir • 12 years ago

60 39 12 years ago

blogs.reuters.com

minimaxir4• 12 years ago

There's a new design trend that has been popular on news websites such as The Verge and FiveThirtyEight: the comments section is hidden, and you explicitly have to click "open comments" for them to appear.

The motivation for this trend is to hide the comments, as blog comment sections tend to be of low value for controversial stories, despite algorithms that can correct for low value comments (e.g. upvoting/downvoting). The fact that Reuters is removing comments from news stories completely indicates that Reuters is lazy and doesn't want to deal with negative comments at all or find a more practical solution for user interaction. Note that the Reuters Facebook page has just as many if not more low-quality comments. (example: https://www.facebook.com/Reuters/posts/837804776239880)

The "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" rationale is a terrible excuse.

NB/Disclosure: I received most of my internet fame/infamy through my comments in the comments section on TechCrunch articles.

colmvp• 12 years ago

despite algorithms that can correct for low value comments (e.g. upvoting/downvoting)

I'm not sure that's universally true.

I often see comments lacking substance get highly upvoted largely because people who might have a different opinion would be participating and conversing on a different platform instead of the source website. And so, bias voting can skew what rises to the top.

minimaxir4• 12 years ago

That is a fair counterpoint, especially on sites with hyperlow-quality content such as BuzzFeed and Yahoo.

There isn't a perfect algorithm to combat the concept of the hive-mind, but there are still simple options (e.g. preventing anonymous comments on articles that may be politically charged) that doesn't excuse Reuters from just giving up.

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

The fact that Reuters is removing comments from news stories completely indicates that Reuters is lazy and doesn't want to deal with negative comments at all or find a more practical solution for user interaction.

I think you are right, but let's challenge 'lazy' -- you could instead say that they don't think they will get sufficient benefit -- either to their editorial mission or to their bottom line -- from expending further resources into trying to make comments not suck.

if so, it seems likely they are right. A comments section don't bring customers, doesn't make them look good, and probably won't be missed by most (paying or not) readers. There are other places on the net where discussions happen, more so than 10 years ago, and I'm not sure why you think taking account of that fact is a 'terrible excuse'.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Then it's an excellent opportunity for someone to pay to host a Reuters feed and find the better ways to extract all the notional added value lurking in comments.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Lazy? No way. They are right. Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

It provided a veneer of user engagement, but how often did reporters or editors participate in comments? How often did reporters change their reporting based on comments? How often did they credit comments in their reporting?

Newspaper comments have been a ghetto for years.

BTW, the same criticisms apply to the comments of most newspaper Facebook pages. Facebook for most publishers is simply a distribution channel--post your stories to your page, hope EdgeRank pushes them into enough user news feeds, and then wait for the traffic to land back on your site. The comments don't matter at all.

The real conversation happens on Facebook when users share the news content--either by re-sharing what Reuters posts, or by sharing it themselves from the website. Then they talk about it with their friends. That's what Reuters is referring to when they say that the best discussion is now in social media. And they are right.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

Many news sites do include comment sections on purpose, and from what I heard sometimes even seed them with controversial statements, because they're an excellent way to drive pageviews, and through them, ad money.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Yeah, I used to push for comments on newspaper stories back in the early days of the web because I thought it would expand the good things about online discussion forums to encompass a large segment of the public and yield a higher quality of public debate and thus a better quality of democracy.

I've gotten more pessimistic since.

msabalau• 12 years ago

What is "lazy" is the assumption that Reuters ought to have comments.

jerf• 12 years ago

The problem that Reuters faces is that its commenters are essentially trying to grab Reuters' carefully built and maintained megaphone and yell their own stuff. There's no way to reconcile the commenter's desires and Reuters desires to not share their megaphone (as such sharing degrades the utility of the megaphone precisely to the extent that the commenters are successful in shouting their own stuff).

There's no "laziness" here, because I'm yet to see even a hint that there is a solution to this problem, despite massive efforts. There's a fundamental conflict of interest. Consequently, commenting on "primary" news sites is uniformly atrocious.

Show me one news site with the reach of Reuters... no, that's hardly fair, show me one news site with a tenth the reach of Reuters that has anything resembling an edifying commentariat.

Commenttoyou• 12 years ago

NYT

mixmax• 12 years ago

show me one news site that has user profiles, a somewhat intelligent voting system and reasonable algorithmic sorting of comments.

Most of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

Hey, Max. Good to see you here. I disagree. I think removing comments is a perfectly reasonable and even forward-thinking thing to do. I actually wrote a thing on TC a while back that, amazingly, you didn't comment on:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/shouts-and-murmurations/

The truth as I see it is that comments are only there because they're expected, while communities and discussion are no longer limited to the comment section, and in fact better communities and discussion are had nearly everywhere else. I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service.

minimaxir4• 12 years ago

Apropos of this discussion, the reason I didn't comment on that article was because TechCrunch had switched to LiveFyre, which was barely functional.

I mention that because TechCrunch switched to LiveFyre, ironically, to help promote quality discussion. In fact, it made discussion on TechCrunch worse, as it encouraged anonymous troll comments instead of those under a Facebook identity: http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/

TechCrunch eventually switched back to Facebook comments. Again, there isn't a perfect solution to comment quality, but there are options.

lotharbot• 12 years ago

"I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service."

I think the salient point regarding people having those discussions on social media is that each of us controls our own social media connections. If I share an article on my FB page and someone makes an inane comment, I can delete it. If they make an outrageous comment, I can unfriend or block them (potentially after a warning.) I can get plenty of high-quality perspectives from my friends, but without the down side of the psychos shouting into a megaphone.

The only "advantage" to having comments directly on the main article is that I can potentially see perspectives none of my friends happen to hold -- but I can do that reading the comments on Reuter's FB page too, and then I have a persistent block function I can use on the most obnoxious of the obnoxious.

eli• 12 years ago

I've heard this called the "mullet" approach -- news up front, inane comments in the rear.

lomocotive• 12 years ago

There should be an aggregation of the best high quality public comments gathered across social media per article instead.

prawn• 12 years ago

Could, definitely. Like Letters to the Editor, but immediate and topical. But requires moderation and thus legal ownership.

danso• 12 years ago

Based on Reuters's past technological problems with the Web, I'd have to say this is more based on inability rather than principle.

Example: the Reuters Next project, a redesign that took several years before they abruptly killed it because of being unable "to meet delivery deadlines and stay within its budget":

http://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewzeitlin/why-reuters-ditched-i...

Among the revelations of that fiasco was that Reuters Next was necessitated out of a failure to iterate on their web platform, such that "even putting in a hyperlink, one Reuters source said, was “a very complex issue.” Reuters had to put its blogs and opinion columns on a Wordpress platform so they could easily link to outside sources and embed videos."

jsmthrowaway2• 12 years ago

The comments on the post really drive the point home, don't they?

codva• 12 years ago

I just have a dorky personal blog, but the comments moved from the blog to Facebook on their own. I didn't do anything different, but my friends sort of decided they preferred to discuss the blog posts on Facebook. I didn't see any reason to fight it. It's not like I have ad revenue on the line.

barbudorojo• 12 years ago

There are some useful discussion about online comments on http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/

Online comments a view from the trenches (Podcast, 30 min) Online comments a wicked problem (Podcast, 30 min)

Both podcast, try to frame the problems, suggest some possible solutions and estimate the costs associated with dealing with online comments. I think they give a useful perspective from a multitude of points of view (also I use it to learn English).

TheSpiceIsLife• 12 years ago

Off topic. Hey! Thanks for mentioning Radio National. I'm Australian (3rd generation) and feel an immense sense of pride that our tax-payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation produces what I consider some of the highest quality radio shows / podcasts I know of. Definitely worth a look.

imgabe• 12 years ago

Comments on major news sites are horrendous. They tend to be either astroturfers, trolls, or people trying in vain to talk sense to one of the above. Good riddance.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

Really depends on the community. Comments sections generally work if the readership has something uniting it: a common topical interest; socioeconomic demography; regularity; intra-group reputations (and cognizance thereof); etc. Commenters actually put in some effort when they feel they have skin in the game, and when they believe they're going to encounter the same peer-commenters on a regular basis.

This was a lot more possible years back, before the rise of social sharing and syndication. Your typical comments section on any given blog -- especially interest-based or topic-based blogs -- could be reasonably intelligent and informative. This is one of the big tradeoffs we've made, inadvertently, by making sharing and distribution so much easier.

In the present day, audiences are much more heterogeneous, having come across any given article through dozens of different channels. They have nothing in common. They probably have no particular affiliation with, or respect for, the publication or blog they've stumbled across. Likewise, they don't know, respect, or care about their fellow commenters. Many don't even see themselves as commenters on a particular site, so much as drive-by taggers. They don't expect to stick around, so much as to shout something out and hope people see it. (Or to astroturf a particular link).

Reuters probably made the right call here. I don't know anybody who regularly reads Reuters in and of itself. Most of its readership is distributed and ad hoc, as its articles are widely syndicated across print and the web. That's a perfect recipe for a terrible comments section.

Note: some people think real identities vs. anonymity plays a big role in comment quality. I haven't yet seen this to be the case. Some of the smartest boards, comments sections, etc., are full of users with anonymous handles. (Though it's key that the handles be permanent, and that the users behind them feel a sense of identity attached to them). Conversely, I've seen "real people" make some downright spammy, idiotic, racist, and generally useless comments on major sites and networks. Identity matters, but it's about more than the name.

6stringmerc• 12 years ago

With so many people out of work in the United States, it strikes me as selfishly ignorant to simply can the comments section instead of 1) using an industry standard platform, 2) moderating that platform, and 3) cultivating a culture of utility.

I don't call this move "smart" in the grand sense. I'd go with "lazy" and/or "cheap" in this context. I mean, ask me how I know Disqus has the ability to ban users from specific sites...

davis_m• 12 years ago

You really think Reuters should ignore the fact that their comment sections are essentially worthless just to create busy work for maybe one person?

programminggeek• 12 years ago

Discussions can be great, but I'm not sure that putting an article and a forum together (which is what most blogs tend to do) is a wise thing.

Think of it in the context of say someone giving a speech or presentation. In many cases the comments act like someone yelling "YOU SUCK!" in the middle or end of a speech. People tend not to do that in real life, but online the rules are different I guess.

There are so many places to leave comments, I just don't know that every article needs a comments section. The negative side of blog comments usually outweighs the positives. Leave commenting to more dedicated communities like HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.

gobengo• 12 years ago

IMO a question all blogs and media sites need to ask is kind of like: "Am I creating a community or a television channel?"

I grew up on the web, and the multi-directionality of it as a medium (including blog comments) has set my standards for the way I want to consume information (and interact with it). I don't trust information flowing to me that can't be annotated, corrected, and augmented by the wisdom of the crowd it's reaching.

It's Reuters' perogative to do this, but I think it just makes Reuters.com exactly like Reuters TV, it gives them a lot more control, but they're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. That's usually what I expect from $30b companies though.

I look forward to having plenty of interactive communities to learn the same stuff on for the rest of humanity, even if Reuters is no longer one of them.

GhostCursor• 12 years ago

Yahoo did this first. They weren't keen on the peanut gallery making inappropriate comments on serious articles.

I have a peanut gallery, I mean Comments button on my website for my mobile apps. It sends me an email and sits in a moderation bin. They are always support oriented so it works out great. This way spam is also directed to my email instead of the website.

TravelTechGuy• 12 years ago

I wonder if this will start a trend, where major sites will stop accepting/editing/suffering comments, and will just push their headache to Facebook. RIP comments 1994-2014.

mytochar• 12 years ago

This is probably a dumb question; but, does this mean they're going to facilitate some easy way to find where the comment stream will be for their articles? For example, will technology be written to find out if an article has been posted on Reddit and automatically have a link to the Reddit discussion around it?

I would find this useful, possibly.

acjohnson55• 12 years ago

I was one of the developers of Huffington Post's homegrown comment system before the decision was made to shut it down early this year. It was a decision that wasn't taken lightly, as "social news" was how the site began (rather presciently), and there was still a very real online community for whom our comments section was really meaningful.

We looked at many ways to preserve it, such as real names, interface innovations, better algorithms for surfacing the best comments, personalization features, and so forth. At the end of the day, it just didn't make business sense to keep it going. Along with all of the positive discussion that went on in the forums, there was also a lot of negativity that frankly didn't jive with the editorial voice of the site. And it's surprisingly expensive it is to run a homegrown comment system of that size.

It was sad to see the comments go, as an avid commenter myself and as someone who had put a lot of energy into developing the software. But I came to realize that there's no fundamental logical reason a company that specializes in content production should also provide a forum for commentary. This is especially so with the rise of social networks and news aggregators. Maybe one day, a content producer will find a way to make comments a part of their core business, but until then, a lot of firms are coming to the same conclusion.

Editor’s note: Reader comments in the age of social media

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