#Do Read The Comments
A collection of resources, thoughts, essays and papers in response to Don't Read The Comments.
This is a working, unfinished document. Do you want to add to this repository? Here's a beginner's guide. Just substitute this repository for the one used as an example in the tutorial. If that feels like too much, you can comment here (you'll need a free Github account) and if that still feels like too much you can find me on The Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams.
- Don't Read The Comments' twitter account, @AvoidComments. It's notable that the account shut down in December of 2014
Support for the sentiment behind Don't Read The Comments was so strong that it inspired downloadable apps and plugins that let users hide comments; you could even buy Don't Read The Comments t-shirts, prints, and accessories:
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Don't Read The Comments, a Chrome app that removes the comments from web pages.
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Don't Read The Comments t-shirt, featuring a pink princess. Related: Never Read The Comments necklaces, needlepoint samplers, and other products on Etsy. Here's a letterpressed version of the sentiment for interior decorating purposes. "Don't read the comments" has become a dharma burger for online communities.
There are a number of interesting projects out there in the world, or underway, that attempt to make sense of and provide better tools for online community and discussion.
- Coral "Right now, most sites struggle with finding meaningful engagement and controlling abuse. We’re going to build open source tools to empower both readers and publishers to reshape the conversation." Project announcement
- Geiger Francis Tseng describes this as: "Get a sense of the comments from a safe distance: Here I propose an automated system for grouping similar comments and then identifying the best representative from each group. These selections can be used to identify the popular themes being discussed and construct a high-level summary of the discussion in the comments. Proposal/Repository on Github
- Discourse Jeff Atwood describes his motivations for starting the Discourse project: One of the reasons I launched the Discourse project was due to the utter lack of understanding of how you build software to help online discussion communities moderate themselves. Their survival depends on it. Blog post: Do Read The Comments Jeff has VC funding to create what he hopes will be "the Wordpress of forums," a project called Discourse/Civilized Discourse Kit The source code is here on Github. You can see Discourse forums at BoingBoing. Here's a Discourse forum for Discourse users on Discourse.
- Diffbot From a TechCrunch article on the product: [Founder Mike]Tung said there are a couple of specific challenges when it comes to analyzing these kinds of discussions. For one thing, comments are often presented in a JavaScript widget, so it’s not as straightforward as pulling the text — it requires “a bunch of visual analysis,” he said. For another, discussions often use more casual, colloquial, and emoji-heavy English, so Diffbot needed to develop “a more specialized language model.” Don't Read The Comments: Let Diffbot Analyze Them
- side-comments.js An interface component that allows developers to build in Medium-style side comments into an app or a site. Github /Demo
- isso Bills itself as an alternative to Disqus. Github
- Epoch "Epoch - 100% realtime chat and commenting in a tiny little package that is fully CDN and cache compatible." Github
- Guess That Subreddit Odd, but funny, and an example of how commenters can form distinct communities: "Web app where you try to guess the subreddit based on pulled comments" Github
NewsU Course: "Don't Turn Them Off! How To Improve Online Comment Sections
"And sometimes it gets too intense. What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place."
-- "Verge Turns Off Comments 'For A Super-Chill Summer'", Nilay Patel as quoted in Poynter
It has become the way of the Internet. We have come to understand that the comments section is not unlike the Internet’s own septic system: it sits below every post and video and article, collecting all the trash and shit and evil clowns that have been cast down from above. It’s positively dystopian. Up above are the elites, zipping about on their information superhighway, while below, the underpass has some kind of violent hobo fight club playing out again and again.
-- "Don't Read The Comments: Comment Sections Are Our Own Fault," Chuck Wendig, Terrible Minds
Fix your communities. Stop allowing and excusing destructive and pointless conversations to be the fuel for your business. Advertisers, hold sites accountable if your advertising appears next to this hateful stuff. Take accountability for this medium so we can save it from the vilification that it still faces in our culture.
Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them.
-- "If Your Website Is Full of Assholes, It's Your Fault," Anil Dash
I admit it’s depressing for one who’s invested almost her entire career in online community to throw in the towel on it in this way. I want it to be better. But it’s just not. As a colleague once observed, “I just can’t take another letter from Angry Bad Divorce Guy.” And my reading the comments – even participating in the conversation – won’t change that.
-- "I'm Never Reading the Comments Again," -- Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
There is also an increasingly accepted fallacy, a cousin to “don’t read the comments”, if you will, that it’s just “how the Internet is.” That abuse against historically marginalized groups should be accepted, because, hey, everybody is abused equally here (a categorically untrue assessment, but there are many who genuinely believe it.) That in order to earn the right to use the internet one must first bathe in the fires of sexism, racism, or misogyny and come out unscathed, because “that’s how the Internet is” and to brave the Internet is to implicitly accept this agreement. To challenge it is to deny the Internet’s Internet-ness, its infallible status quo.
-- "Don't Read The Comments and Taxes," Lauren Ellis, The Mary Sue
...comment sections shouldn’t be the rule, but they should be a carefully managed gift to readers on an article-by-article basis. That means readers should be thankful they’re allowed to comment directly on the site – not feel infringed when it’s not there.
-- "Comment sections are poison: handle with care or remove them," Tauriq Moosa, The Guardian
Respondents who saw comments evaluated the article as being of lower quality—an 8 percent difference. In other words, authors are judged not just by what they write, but by how people respond.
--"How Comments Shape Perceptions of Sites' Quality—and Affect Traffic," Adam Felder, The Atlantic
NPR Plays April Fools' Joke On People Who Don't Read Gawker's note on NPR's April Fools' prank demonstrating that many people don't read the article before they comment. Notable: NPR uses Facebook comments. Many people feel that "real identities" will solve the problem of venom in online commenting.
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.
-- "Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments," Suzanne Brossard, Popular Science
I had expected to see comments about some of the kids being too young. That would be a natural reaction. An honest one. I’m sure each parent had thought long and hard about letting their child participate. I know my husband and I did. But what I didn’t expect to see was such intolerance. Such ignorance. And such vicious racism. Even now, in 2015, seeing the “N” word infuriates me but directed at my child and me? In all caps? Only to be followed by how other races are superior to my own. With the final insult reading something like, “Why are the dark kids the only ones without fathers? Anyone else noticing a trend?” It was too much.
-- "Don't Read The Comments," Sharisse Tracy, writing in Ebony Magazine about the hateful comments left on an educational video featuring her tween daughter.
Marginalized groups—in this case, undocumented immigrant minors—can be placed into categories that devalue and dehumanize them. Such dehumanization can justify or encourage anything from the restriction of life-saving resources to the outright killing of those no longer seen as valuable to human society. The great danger in these comments, then, is not only that they homogenize undocumented minors and undocumented immigrants, but that they dehumanize them as well. As a rhetoric of uprooting “pests” becomes more acceptable, the lives of undocumented immigrants are devalued—be it for race, ethnicity, immigration status, or socioeconomic status—and militarized “solutions” to both their migration and existence become more palatable and “logical.”
"Don't Read the Comments? As Immigration Advocates, We Must," Patrick Mullen, William Lopez and Alana LeBron writing in RH Reality Check
It’s strange to be watching some of the most groundbreaking, innovative technology in the world, while your peripheral vision is populated by racist, misogynist garbage-speak...The presenters—at least the male presenters—were mocked and ridiculed for their stupid, stupid ideas.
But something different happened every time a woman took the stage.
The mean comments got a little meaner, the dark ones a little darker, and everything became entirely unfocused on the subject at hand. Suddenly, people were talking about the presenter’s body and clothing. Or worse. The women who spoke at length at Google I/O—namely, VP of Engineering for Maps Jen Fitzpatrick and Google Play Product Manager Ellie Powers—were ridiculed for their appearances, or “praised” to lengths that definitely equate to harassment.
"Women Should Keep Reading the Comments," Molly McHugh in Wired, writing on the experience of watching a webcast of Google I/O in May of 2015.
Many people do not realize that blogs existed for years before comments became a commonly available feature of such sites.
"At the beginning of 1999, there were only about two dozen blogs...but as the number exploded, it became hard for bloggers to follow the fragmenting conversations. In 2000, the blog service Blogger introduced permalinks, which allowed each blog entry to have its own URL, and in 2002, Moveable Type implemented the TrackBack, which automatically alerted an author that a permalink from his blog had been posted elsewhere. The TrackBack was meant, at least in part, to blur the lines between commenters and writers; the conversation surrounding one blog post no longer needed to be relegated to the comments section, but could be sprinkled across disparate blogs with the TrackBack as its link. That was great, in theory. But while conversations were the model for interactions, the technology couldn’t sustain what real conversations required...What killed the promise of the culture of openness in early blog culture was the blizzard of link spam that hit in the mid-2000s."
From Michael Erard's excellent essay, "No Comments," NYT, 9/2013. Link spam and the death of the Trackback forced us back into using search engines, primarily Google, as our way to find and identify conversations; the links to conversations across sites were largely gone. (When it comes to content, including comment, all features are, at one level, alternatives to search; features that survive provide us something that a list of search results do not).
On Tuesday morning, Imgur’s community manager Sarah Schaaf says she woke up to discover the revolt, and posted an explanation to the site’s community. Schaaf explained: “the rules have always been around and have never permitted NSFW content, but in the past they lived offsite, they were infrequently enforced, and reports were only made as attacks on other users”. Previously, she explained, community enforcement involved the complete removal of a comment, with no evidence left that it had ever been there, and even a “shadow ban” of the user, hiding their posts from others without informing them that action has been taken.
IMGUR faces backlash as it begins to cull NSFW comments from site, June 2015 Guardian
"I have been monitoring the community since we introduced badging, which Reddit calls flair, approximately four months ago. Anecdotally, the conversations have been at a higher quality and more people have been participating in the comment sections."
Submitted by Melody Kramer (thank you, Melody!)
What Happens When You Allow Badging in Comments:
1. create affiliate communities within the larger comment section.
2. improve the commenting experience. Though people would still be anonymous, they would be revealing something about themselves through an affiliation, which would lead to better comments.
3. lead to communities that might head off line (to events, etc.)
4. lessen the hostility seen in most comment sections.
5. connect stations with members and potential members
What happens when you allow badging in comment sections? Melody Kramer, NPR Social Media Desk
Twitter now allows sharing block lists. Now messaging/social platforms get their own RBLs, just like email has had for many years.
Porter Haney, creator of polling tool "Wedgies," at IRE 2015, Friday, June 5, 2015
Haney sees polling as a "more structured" way to collect user feedback on stories -- more structured (and, in his opinion, higher quality) than typical comment sections. "To get the highest response, you should solicit that response where your readers are, in particular on social media."
Haney: "Not every reader has a comment, but every reader has an opinion. Polls give you a way to express themselves back to your organization, but they can often stay anonymous, and you end up with structured data you can read later."
I do think of clicking as a 'gateway drug' to commenting; and I agree with Haney's assessment that there are a lot of readers who don't feel entitled or motivated to comment, and engaging these audience members may do much to balance online communities that have gravitated toward extreme places.
Haney gave a few use examples:
Las Vegas Review Journal used it to ask two questions: "Who would you rather drive with, a taxi, or Uber?" and "Should lawmakers pass bills to allow Uber and other ride-sharing services to operate in Nevada?" 1 in 5 of their readers voted. 1 in 6 shared their vote out to their own social media presence, boosting readership.
Wall Street Journal wanted to know if their telephone polling results would correspond with their online channel votes. They asked, "Do you agree with the Supreme Court's ruling on the Hobby Lobby case?" Response was 10X the telephone polls, but the online poll did align with the telephone poll results (only two points difference)
Haney: "We work with a lot of publications that just have trolls in their comments, people who don't add anything. So to make comments look good, they have to strictly moderate them, and they don't have the resources. So the default has been to not moderate them or take them off. We have a lot of customers who end up using the product just so they don't have to have comments on every article."
What if you could choose between different styles of interaction for each topic or story?
- What about a system where conversation IS navigation?
- Comments throughout, the way Medium does it?
- Some conversations and stories do not end. What about forum/group-like forms of engagement?
- What about specific asks, rather than a general, blank comment box?
- Standard comments (responsive, below, general)
- One comment per user, character-limited
- No Comments
- No comments unless moderated
- Comments of all sorts automatically close
- Moderation is often thought of as an effort to get rid of "bad" comments and "bad" commenters.
- Hostile and aggressive commenters are likely to "come in hot," that is, they sign up specifically to post an angry comment. A great deal of "bad" commenting happens in a user's first ten comments. What if we had a way to shape early commenting?
- There are a million forms of centralized and distributed moderation. At some point, a list.
Let's collect example policies.
- Crooked Timber's policy on sockpuppets.
- Comments policy for NPR's StateImpact project.
- Why We're Changing Our Comments Policy," National Journal, November, 2014. They closed comments on most public stories and left comments open only to National Journal "members" (subscribers?): "We're going to start by leaving the comment sections open and visible to National Journal's members, a group that's highly unlikely to live by Godwin's Law."
- The Verge's Community Guidelines "We love comments" (!)
- Scriblio "We LOVE to hear from you, and we think of this blog as a big dinner party. Y’all are our invited guests, but if you’re being rude and obnoxious we’ll let the bouncer toss you."
- NPR's Discussion Rules
"How I Try To Work With Journalists," Dave Winer
"Working with Developers in the Newsroom," Noah Veltman
"Great lies of our time: journalists and coders should sit together to create amazing stuff," Charles Arthur
"Enhancing clustering blog documents by using reader comments," Li, et al. PDF of paper (what if conversation WAS navigation? All great content features are alternatives to search.)
"Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments," Ali-Hassan, et al. PDF of paper Explores another "forgotten" feature: Blogrolls. The more I look the more I realize that it is the community between sites that has collapsed the most dramatically.
"Exploiting Conversational Features to Detect High-Quality Blog Comments," FitzGerald, et al. PDF of paper This looks promising.
"Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog Comments," Mishne, et al. PDF of paper Old, from 2006, but mines a large corpus of comments, and has the intriguing idea of "comments as 'missing' content."
Opinion/thoughts in progress
- Comments are an engine of relevancy. You cannot have engagement without relevance. Comments, good, bad, and indifferent, reveal what's relevant to the people viewing that page. Notably, people comment even when they haven't read a story. Why? Because they want to express themselves about something relevant and important to them.
- A community is not "people come to talk to us about stuff we produce." A community is when people come to your site to talk to each other.
- (Personal belief, LW: We cannot have a better world without a better journalism. And we cannot have a better journalism without better engagement. Disconnected journalism, marked by mutual contempt between journalists and the public, is journalism headed for the scrap-heap).