4 Votes
Utility of Web Comments
|
||
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton recently made a statement about on-line comment sections, “The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that’s a joke.” In his speech at SXSW, Denton discussed the failures of the Internet to achieve the Utopia of collective, constructive commenting to the point that most people simply ignore them altogether. While smaller sites are able to thematically maintain a semblance of comment quality, observation on blogs hosted by Gawker provided evidence that with growth comes riff-raff that requires attentive moderation to control. In the case of mainstream media, spam reduction and anti-trolling are too time consuming to be worth the effort considering the limited value add from the accepted comments.
OmniNerd has certainly seen crests and troughs within its commenting over time. Many of the features implemented over time reflect controls discussed by Denton – moderation, voting, etc. Is there still any value to open forum based comments on the Internet?
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- Google+ Less Active than MySpace, by VnutZ about 1 year ago
- Obtaining Freedom of Communication, by VnutZ over 1 year ago
- Iran Plans to Fork National Internet, by VnutZ almost 2 years ago
- Facebook Linked to 1 in 5 Divorces, by VnutZ about 2 years ago
Print Friendly
Write an Article
What's wrong with ON? by Occams
While smaller sites are able to thematically maintain a semblance of comment quality, observation on blogs hosted by Gawker provided evidence that with growth comes riff-raff that requires attentive moderation to control.
Omninerd seems to be having the opposite problem – lack of comments, even from trolls, and rif raff anonymii I think that the frequency (if not the quality) of commenting on Omninerd has fallen so low that the site is almost dead. That is sad because it was a really great site a few years ago. Perhaps those of us who are still here should do some brainstorming to try to find a solution.
I think we desperately need more diversity of interest and opinion. We need some way of introducing controversial topics that will challenge conventional thinking. Perhaps we could somehow automatically identify the most nerdy issues in the news each week and contrast opinions being expressed in the media.
We need to get back some our star commentators from the past: willy waddel, Lorddilly and many others. The loss of our conservative commentators has left us with nothing to rail against. Why did they go? If that represents some kind of victory for our liberal thinkers then it is a hollow one.
We should note that and move on. The best subjects have been the ones we try to avoid in polite society: religion, politics, and sex. Other subjects that drew some passionate debates included racism; quirky science and technological development;, military affairs; and even computer security.
The model of waiting for a member to contribute an interesting article which we can all then debate is not working. I think we need more permission to discuss anything without first having to write sensibly on the subject. The emphasis has been on having evidence before making claims, and perhaps this is too inhibiting. We should welcome half assed opinion rants, especially if they seem to represent views that are prolific in our society. If we go that way then we probably need some rules or conventions to prevent people who cannot defend their views from becoming too quickly humiliated.
I think we need more humour, satire, and good-natured criticism. Furthermore we need a better way of encouraging interesting contriobutions: The existing points system is not working and no one ever really understood the ranking system.
RE: What's wrong with ON? by VnutZ
On the flip side – despite the apparent lack of commenting, the site itself is definitely far from dead. It unfortunately has switched to a less interactive user base. Unfortunately, we do seem to have lost many of the most prominent interactive users to the throes of life. But our overall daily traffic is quite active with folks coming from all over reading older (and newer) content.
While the intent of the post regarded the utter uselessness of comments from the social masses, I somewhat took it that people with something to say have ceased saying it … because the other riff raff have reduced the merit of a comment to nothing. They’re still there … they just don’t speak anymore.
It’s also ironic how many of the ONs vanished because of the debate. I’ve heard over and over again from folks they don’t participate anymore because it’s just endless debate. To me, that was always the point. If we are all in agreement, once again, there’s no point in saying anything as we all simply nod our heads and move along.
User apathy is definitely a major factor in that regard – an inability to muster the effort to generate a thought worth saying in comments and the lack of will to engage the opposing opinion.
:-/
I’m not really sure what will bring interactivity back. Social media has really killed a lot of that off with “feed bites” and one sentence quips.
RE: What's wrong with ON? by Occams
Thanks Matt,
I guess you see more of the comings and goings than I do, but to the casual observer who just visits to see what’s up, the site seems to be almost completely stagnant.
I’m with you on the desirability of debate and disagreement. It is never better than when an educated and articulate person is defending irrational beliefs.
RE: What's wrong with ON? by Anonymous
Yeah – the casual observer can’t see the backend logs and statistics, but the content (the articles of yore) drive quite a bit of traffic regularly. It’s definitely a viable place to self publish research and have it found.
RE: What's wrong with ON? by Occams
Slashdot (/.) seems to have hundreds of commentators, many of whom are the nerdy kind that we try to cultivate on Omninerd. /. starts each day with a round-up of quirky news headlines which are opened for debate, and each one attracts dozens of comments. However, debate is usually quite superficial, and nobody seems to know anyone else.
I think we are at the opposite extreme of the activity scale to /. although ON is more intellectual at times. We could learn a lot from the way they are doing things over there.
I think we could benefit from becoming more like a social media site. The first step might be to add more multimedia capability. I know that there is a way of inserting photos into articles but I have never achieved it. When I try to follow the instructions I always finish up in an endless loop.
I would like to see Omninerd becoming a place to air controversial views on politics, religion, sex, race, war, feminism, science, history, sports, etc. so much that we become feared by those who are trying to manipulate public opinion. The former academic style articles were good for this, but they required so much work for the author that a considerable reward was required. Satire, and humour are the best form of criticism and the most readable. This is difficult, but we must encourage it. For most of us sufficient reward would be a good debate leading to some contributors changing their opinion, but a points and status rank recognition system could also help.
Omninerd nostalgia by Jackson
I always thought the point of inline comments was for the reader to feel superior to all of the crazy ideas that always appear in the comments sections of major sites. Omninerd rarely had that effect (with the exception of the periodic Scientology barrages and arguments about climate change). Can’t really decide why I stopped posting and commenting here.
Facebook has taken up a large part of my arguing til I’m blue in the face, but it is ultimately unsatisfying. People there don’t set a very high bar for argumentation.
I credit Omninerd, in large part, (particularly scottb and starm_ of old) for my transition from never-say-die orthodox Christian conservative to the skeptical and much more nuanced liberal I’ve become. The arguments I read here were frequently heavily supported and clearly stated and people, from time to time, even accepted the argument of their adversary. Not often, mind you. But it happened. {waves hand}