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

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.