Topix.net just posted some fascinating learning from taking down registration for comments on their site. The number of posts exploded but the proportion of bad posts shrunk. Counterintuitive? What isn’t about the web? They point to this post with explanations:
# Registration keeps out good posters. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.
# Registration lets in bad posters. Children and Internet addicts tend to have free time to go register an account and check their e-mail for the confirmation message. They will generally make your forum a waste of bandwidth.
# Registration attracts trolls. If someone is interested in destroying a forum, a registration process only adds to the excitement of a challenge. Trolls are not out to protect their own reputation. They seek to destroy other peoples’ “reputationâ€.
# Anonymity counters vanity. On a forum where registration is required, or even where people give themselves names, a clique is developed of the elite users, and posts deal as much with who you are as what you are posting. On an anonymous forum, if you can’t tell who posts what, logic will overrule vanity.
I don’t 100 percent agree, based on my experience at Advance.net and comparing the comments here and at HuffingtonPost with those at Comment is Free. There are a lot of other variables at work — including the content that attracts people, the size of the community, the means and speed with which you react to bad posts, and the personalities involved. But in general, yes, I agree: more conversation is better than less.
Anonymity, pro and con
Anonymity, pro and con: John Grohol makes the case at A List Apart for requiring some reputation before allowing others to put content on your site… that anonymity can be destructive to a social group. That’s generally been my experience too, across…
You’re right to point out that there are many factors that influence the quantity and quality of comments.
Another post called blogs “the wisdom of crowds.” But to me you first have to sift through the craziness of crowds, the craveness of crowds, and the crudeness of crowds. Sometimes as a reader it is like panning for gold in an open sewer. Sure you can find a diamond in the dreck… but ick.
Brilliant, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
On a more boring, nitpicky level, I wonder what different anti-spam methods (Gawker Media’s invites, Weblogs Inc’s e-mail confirmation) do to comment value.
At Gawker, especially Gawker.com proper, the limited comment access seems to build a “who can be wittiest” club — and if you’re like me, that’s what you read Gawker comments for.
To me, registration is - pure and simple - for marketing and advertising. And that’s how I get paid. I need to know information so I can sell targeted ads. I don’t want to annoy people with stupid, irrelevant ads - but I don’t charge for my original content and, well, baby needs diapers. (And journalist needs beer.) As much as I know (and even relate to) the mindset of ad-hating online, I think people have to deal with that.
HOWEVER… if registration is strictly to keep out the weasels, I’m willing to buy the argument. Somewhat. I still believe people speak best when they are willing to stand behind their words. The only exception are those, like your NYT contacts, who need to speak freely but can’t because of fear of losing their jobs or endangering the livelihood of others. And I really wonder how much of The Conversation benefits from all the digging one does through the mire to find the diamonds.
I’m all for The Conversation. But a million people shouting isn’t a conversation. It’s just noise.
Posters above hit the nail on the head…anonymity may bring more (and arguably livlier) content, but where’s the accountability?
The WaPo had a bad experience with no-reg boards, they often become the battlefield for flame wars…
Those of us who have sites that don’t really identify who they are have no problem with registration. It may be that those who only blog from work are the ones chary of registering. Those of us who can and do want to play a bit without being too obviously identifiable usually have the foresight to make it possible.
The thing about registration is that you have to make the time and commitment to a site, and when you’re just trying sites out, you don’t really want to do that. And it does take away time, initially.
With my RSS reader, I quickly flip through the posts - not sites - that I’d like to get in on and talk about. That doesn’t mean I lack loyalty to a site: I really enjoy being here, for example. But registering means that I can get bogged down to a site with a bunch of posts I don’t really care to skim or read deeply, and what excites me about the internet is the conversation and the learning.
In sum, registration attacks the concept of time two ways: it takes away my time when I’m filling out the form, and it takes away opportunity that might be spend at one or more sites.
I don’t like the site which want you to register and login to see the article.
So do I. It takes time to register.
If a troll leaves a dumb troll on a smart blog about a smart subject, and all the other commentors are smart enough to ignore it, the troll will go away.
OTOH, if a troll leaves a dumb troll on a throw-out-the-red-meat blog filled with childish commentors who reply, welcome home!
Factors affecting the quality of comments include the tenor of the posts, the number of other troll-like commentors, and whether the site deletes on-topic comments with which it disagrees.
For an example of the latter, see Media Matters. Many of my on-topic, informative comments have been deleted. Meanwhile, the me-too comments have been left in place. Their comments are not a place for debate, they’re just an echo chamber.
A similar effect can be seen at the HuffPost, which risks losing whatever tiny reputation it might have had as a place for debate.
The cute way they’re hurting themselves is by not posting on-topic, non-abusive comments. Or, even better: only posting those comments after the post in question has scrolled off the frontpage.
So, Andy Stern posts something incredibly idiotic, and comments showing exactly where he’s wrong only get posted after everyone stops reading what he wrote.
Click my name to see some of the comments I’ve left at HuffPost. For the first three currently there, all my comments were eventually posted. But, only after the post was off the front page.
bigmediablog is onto something: I’m playing around with social bookmarking sites that are nothing but experiments in group think. Granted, my comments haven’t been perfect there, and I’ve been nasty, but I came under heavy, heavy fire for merely being a conservative.
There’s something dangerous about the Internet: it is possible that visiting sites that are nothing but variations on the same theme over and over again will destroy our ability to have discourse.
Those of us who want to have a real conversation about issues must demonstrate that the “learning” & “listening” aspects are vital parts of making the New Media work, and that means we might have to stake a claim to authority.
And I’m talking to myself. No one is going to read this post.
Well… there are blogs that appear to invite trollish behavior. Just like bars that look sleazy, I refuse to enter those, whether they require registration or not.
Then there are other blogs that appear to generate ideas, wit, and phenonmenal exchanges of information. It’s human to enjoy a good hangout; hence, the success of many blogs.
I’m not convinced that requiring registration for commenters is a critical factor. Probably like most people, I come to specific blogs for quality of information. I’ve learned an invaluable amount from blogs — particularly related to software.
The more important questions about “volume” are probably focused around quality of content, information relevance, and how the posts set up expectations for commenters (much like a good instructor runs a solid q&a in a classroom).
I subscribe to TimesSelect, and am registered at WaPo. However, because it takes that extra half-minute to enter my name + pwd, I seldom enter. It’s simply easier to follow RSS topics in Safari, or cycle through my “fave blogs” bookmark folder.
I have so many passwords that I honestly don’t always recall them all — I don’t need the added cognitive load of remembering yet another pwd and running through the “let me in!” keystroke sequence. My browser’s been there before — don’t tell me they can’t figure out that I’m ‘familiar’ and let me in. (I don’t like passwords sitting in my browser memory, so I have to use at least 24 keystrokes every time that I want to enter a site. Bleh!)
In short: some blogs attract good commenters — I vastly prefer sites that allow me to easily read comments, over sites that make it tough to view comments. I agree with an earlier poster that this often requires one to sift through a lot of dross, but I am nevertheless generally heartened at the vast, impressive knowledge out on the Net.
I suspect that elements including narrative structure, quality of information in the posts, and credibility of posters, are more critical in determining the volume, the quality of comments, and group-monitoring.
As long as blogs and commenting systems are there, conversations and opinions about how to keep comments decent, spam-free would come to no end. We have to figure out completely new techniques for such purpose, based on masterly AI or something, as comment with attached fingerprints maybe