Drinking Soundtrack

even if yor gramma chews her way out, we’re still going to eat her. | DS Radio

1. Matty H 01.02.08 / 9am

   I don’t see why you bother to scroll down/click to see reader’s comments. I don’t bother reading what readers submit to magazines for the same reasons, which are: 1) I don’t really care what strangers think 2) lots of people are inherently closed-minded and dumb 3) those who have enough time on their hands to write should probably learn how to write thoughtfully or at least form a rational opinion. Oh, and 4) anyone who disagrees with me can go to hell. Thank you, and oh crap…my entire post is entirely ironic and hypocritical. Hmmm…
2. tommyslax 01.02.08 / 4pm

   Clearly, the most logical thing to do is to ignore the comments sections entirely. Alas, my logic circuits are broken. Also, there is some part of me that genuinely wants to know what others are thinking. I guess what bothers me most is the fact that so many people either aren’t thinking or are thinking such stupid hateful shit. This creates a bunch of cognitive dissonance for me…most everyone I meet in the real world I try to find a way to like in spite of ideological and other differences, but I’m increasingly of the belief that this is impossible on the new comment-laden Internet.
3. tommyslax 01.02.08 / 4pm

   Also, a comments section about comments: holy shit.
4. Joe 01.03.08 / 12am

   Here’s my take on this: it’s easy to do comments, it’s hard to do comments right. I work on the techy side of this, so that’s where I get my perspective. Bad discussions are a combination of people and technology, and I believe it’s the technology that needs to change if online discussions are going to get better. In day-job land, I started building the Denver Post’s article-commenting system in April, finished the launch-draft in May, and added some other community features / functionality after that. To publish a comment on the Post’s web site you have to register, which seems to have raised the quality of the comments some.

   However, in the past four weeks the comments on the Post’s web site have gotten more rude and offensive than ever. I don’t know what happened in early December — somebody suggested it’s holiday stress. Who knows. But discussions that have nothing to do with immigration get turned to immigration, names get called, shit has turned nasty and the conversations that are going on aren’t particularly valuable or constructive.

   I don’t think the relatively unstructured conversation model most commenting systems use leads to quality. The more structure you add to the comments, the higher chance for quality discussions. “Structure” means things like making people register, so all comments are associated with a profile (the more information associated with that profile the more valuable a tool it is. The Denver Post requires a full name upon registration, which theoretically helps — but is kind of impossible to enforce, so it’s not as useful as it could be). Structure could mean things like comment rating — like on Digg, where comments rated too far down are hidden from view. Structure also includes reward systems for valuable and relevant comments and members.

   These are the main high-level challenges commenting systems face:

   One bucket fits all. Not all comments are the same. Some are personal anecdotes, some contain facts, some contain facts and have citations / links to the source of those facts. Some are purely conjecture. Some are personal attacks. Distinguishing between different types of comments will help the signal-to-noise ratio. Add a human moderator that can highlight quality comments creates another level of quality (I maintian the “quote of the moment” on the Denver Post’s web site, which is an idea ripped from the New York Times’ blogs).

   Repeating the same arguments. Figuring out how to fix the “hey, we had this same argument two months ago” problem will improve discussions exponentially. If there has already been a semi-constructive discussion about, say, immigration, and it comes up again, there’s not a decent way to integrate the constructive parts into the current discussion.

   If those tools did exist, we could “build” a body of relevant facts, contentious points, the major players and important events — it might look something like the NY Times’ topic pages ( example topic page ). One of the cool things about the internet is how a group of people can build a body of knowledge over time. Online newspaper operations, for the most part, don’t understand that — a particular shame considering the quality and quantity of information they publish.

   The issue of online identity also factors in — it’s a murky murky world now, but that won’t always be the case. As that changes and people start building bodies of work across multiple sites tied to them, the line between the world of trolls and non-trolls will grow clearer (if you don’t know what that is here’s Wikipedia’s page on internet trolls).

   This is the longest comment I’ve ever written.
5. Joe 01.03.08 / 5pm

   So, today on the Post’s site we had a “Ray of Sunshine” day, where all mean-spirited and personal-attacky comments would be deleted (i.e. we’re cracking down super-hard today).

   This is the poem a pissed-off Patriots fan, who had had two obnoxious comments deleted, wrote about Ray of Sunshine day: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?p=98429&highlight=#98429

   This is the thread announcing Ray of Sunshine day: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?t=12348298

   And, if you’re interested in the current sunshine action, here are the 50 most recent comments: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/comments.php
6. tommyslax 01.04.08 / 1pm

   I like the ray of sunshine idea. This way, the pissed off people get more pissed off, and the non-pissed off people stay serene. Win-win, because my theory about angry internet people is that they like being angry.
7. tommyslax 01.04.08 / 1pm

   Also, nice patience on the sunshine thread.