Comment on Conversation on Comment
The recent conversation on comments grew last week, weighed in on (in the order I read them) by Joel Spolsky, Dave Winer, and Clay Shirky.
Next I came upon Brad Feld’s The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. (It led me to Fred Wilson’s post, where all the friendly comments put a smile on my face.) Brad’s post also linked to various ongoing projects working to bring comments up into the light of day. I went from this, serendipitously, to Read/Write Web post, where SezWho, a feature for comment rating, reputation, and filtering, has just been installed.
Richard MacManus’s post, and the comments thereon, left me focused on the primary issue that remains foremost in my thinking on this in terms of my own online community experience and planning. Anonymity.
As long as people post comments anonymously, they will continue saying things that Joel described as “a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words” (bolding is mine). The assertion made by Clay that “the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale” is undoubtedly true, but I believe that it is also true that smaller traffic blogs published by anonymous writers suffer from the same problem. We just don’t view it as often, possibly because the smaller traffic individual has more time to immediately delete a smaller amount of rubbish.
SezWho, the new comment rating app on Read/Write Web, actually makes me even more reluctant to comment, since any reader can now ‘rate’ my comment. As it says on their FAQ page, a reader benefit is “Ability to influence content without directly creating it.” I’m not so sure this is a good thing.
The rating process itself might be a deterrent as well, since it is a simple Yes or No response the question, “Was this comment useful?”. Most blogs with great commentary will include the occasional simple statement of encouragement or support. I wouldn’t think that such statements would qualify as ‘useful’ to other readers. Further, a related musing, which can be interesting and spark more creative thought, wouldn’t always qualify as ‘useful’.
It also says that SezWho’s “scoring algorithm, …mimics the way reputations are transacted in the real world.” In the real world that I’ve been living in for a long time, reputation is not primarily made, or broken, by strangers, and especially not by anonymous ones. In fact, reputations are sometimes damaged, intentionally and maliciously in the real world by people when they believe that they can get away with it without consequences, but that is not the primary method of building or erosion of reputation.
Using a ’scoring process which mimics the real world’ is logical, but the core absence of responsibility and accountability matters. A lot.
It isn’t my primary intention to pick on SezWho here. I think that creating a way to make comments more relevant and findable is a very positive thing, and will be interested to see how well it works and evolves. I also applaud Read/Write Web for taking an initiative toward improving comment quality and integration.
Blog comments are a very different form of communication from blog posts themselves. The best seem to be engendered by both the type of content and the tone the authors set. Like forums and all other conversational formats, they can work well or poorly.
Many to Many is an example of a group weblog where the comments often add to the content. Many to Many occasionally has an academic bent, yet the content is very accessible as well as substantive. The percentage of anonymous posters is small. The posters read, and often respond directly to, the commentary. That is part of what makes a conversation and also raises the quality of comments in general.
My opinion is that indexing comments, tied to a user profile that can be coordinated across many platforms, is a great idea. Voting on and rating comments without context or accountability? Not so much.
What is Your opinion?
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added July 24th, 2007
In an excellent post today on Web 2.0.com (trackback below) which is titled “Socrates on books and blogs… and the way forward”, Nick Smith says,
“And what about comments? At the moment a comment is a cul-de-sac. There’s no way to get to know a commenter a little better, to see what other things they’ve commented on, or find interesting on other sites. It’s hard to extend the conversation.”
Some of that is being achieved by not allowing anonymous comments. Now I do understand that anonymity is important and even essential to a very few individuals who might otherwise risk their livlihood or even their life by speaking out. Even for most of those, however, requiring a verifiable link to their blog or website works.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Vera,
Interesting and well written post…
I do have to disagree with you on one point though…In the real world, a person’s reputation in a community is essentially a sum of what other people think of that person. As such a person can do what they want or engage in discussions or make a speech, but they don’t really control what other people think of them.
So I think rating by a peer group is intricately tied to reputation and is very much a prevalent mechanism in every community.
By enabling the same rating mechanism SezWho is trying to derive the same reputation based benefits in online communities. The idea is that high reputation users in any community are really no longer anonymous as they have invested time in building their online participation profile. This content specific identity (who needs a SS number of the commenter anyways) and high reputation empowers these users to have more weight for their ratings compared to a not so highly reputed user. Also since the reputation carries across multiple sites in the community, it makes it easy for users to identify such high reputation users and thereby the best content…
Let’s take an example…Suppose, a user makes a comment on your blog, and suppose some anonymous person rates this person. Now because the rate has chosen to be anonymous (use a fake/wrong address), the signal that is sent to the community is that the rater is not willing to disclose his/her identity and as such the rating is going to carry very little weight. Now a high reputation person can come in and rate the same comment, and the new rating will easily have more impact (in some cases order of magnitude difference)…So SezWho is incentivizing users to have high reputation and to participate well…Over time all the lower reputation commenter will be filtered out using the filter mechanism for viewing the comments and this will help the conversation…
What do you think?
July 24th, 2007 at 1:13 am
Hi jitendra,
I agree that others judge you and that their opinion combines to form your reputation. The difference in a real community is that most people form their judgements based on direct interaction with you. A stranger’s judgement does not take place or apply, and people take great care when revealing their judgement of another, because it reflects back on them in terms of its accuracy, with potential positive or negative consequences.
The various reputation ratings I’ve seen on the web so far, are, to a great extent, a rating of popularity, influence, a high level of activity, and marketing skills. Certainly all these things are real, yet they do not, by themselves, represent the full meaning of reputation.
You refer to rating by a peer group, which is an excellent distinction. How does SezWho define peers with relatively little or no information about the users of the system?
I did not see or take in fully that you refer to the voting system being weighted against anonymity and in favor of reputation. That sounds to me a very positive step in the right direction. It does seem that you’ve put a great deal of thought into the issues involved, which are not easy ones to address.
Vera
July 24th, 2007 at 4:13 am
Vera,
I think what you are saying is that virtual communities are not as good as physical face-to-face interactions based communities…I tend to agree with you but I am not sure that is a fair comparison.
When you remove the geographical limitations and face to face interactions and replace them with global, inter-temporal and virtutal interactions you are going to lose some richness …But on the flip side that is the price of ease of forming and joining communities…
Now when you remove the geographical proximity and possibility of repeat interactions, you are also removing incentives for everybody to behave…This is kinda what happens on the internet today…We are looking to restore some of these incentives for users to participate well both by cross connections and by enabling ratings.
-Jitendra
July 24th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Jitendra,
“virtual communities are not as good as physical face-to-face interactions based communities”
True, but my view is based not on measuring them equally, since that can be like comparing apples and oranges in some ways. My main point is that we, the citizens of virtual communities, can make them better. Yes, I regularly use rl analogies, because for all the differences between the apples and oranges, the fundamentals of what makes us human, what allows us to live together in peace, respectfully, remain the same.
I see SezWho as a leading edge social media app, and as I said in my earlier comment, a positive step in the right direction.
you said, “We are looking to restore some of these incentives for users to participate well both by cross connections and by enabling ratings.”
You’re part of the forefront of what I hope will be one chapter of a healthy evolution, and certainly positioned at the heart of what is sometimes being called Web 2.1 where the myriad of social applications start getting linked together. Good on you.
Vera