Comments sections on the web are dying left and right, especially from the largest publishers that attract huge audiences. The latest to go is Motherboard, but they definitely won’t be the last.
We’re Replacing Comments with Something Better
I do know that when I started reading everything online, comments sections felt empowering: I could share anything I wanted, and know that it’d pop up next to the story for all eyes to see. Then somewhere along the way, inundated by throwaway jokes and flip, empty commentary, it all seemed pointless. What’s the point of writing out a detailed thought when it’s sandwiched by cursory garbage?
We at Motherboard have decided to turn off our comments section, a decision we’ve debated for a year or more. What finally turned the tide was our belief that killing comments and focusing on other avenues of communication will foster smarter, more valuable discussion and criticism of our work.
This is a fascinating analysis of how comments have evolved over the years. When most comments are garbage, why would anybody take the time to post something worthwhile?
Comments have always been a problem for us. At the very beginning of this site, about 9 years ago, we frequently had great comments that helped shape the articles we wrote, gave us new ideas, and made sure that we didn’t have mistakes.
First came the spammers. Floods and floods of spam kept pouring in, and it took multiple spam-fighting solutions to keep them at bay. As we grew in popularity, the trolls arrived, especially whenever we got linked on the popular link sharing sites at the time. And then the self-promoters showed up, trying to push their own blog posts and their own products without contributing to the discussion at all.
It got so bad we decided that our official policy is that comments are a privilege and we will delete anything we don’t like. Constructive criticism is fine, but nasty responses and promotional garbage would be immediately trashed. After struggling to keep up, we started forcing all comments to go through an approval queue before being allowed on the site. But that quickly became a full time job, in fact we had to pay people to help out with it.
Over time we started noticing that the comments were almost never useful in any way, and that’s assuming they were even relevant to the article they were posted on — a surprising number of comments had nothing to do with the article at all. At one point we had done an analysis and found that only about 5% of the comments were relevant and helpful. Not something worth pouring our energy into.
Every single day I considered turning off comments entirely.
The Discourse Era
Rather than continue the insanity of allowing anonymous comments, we decided to switch all of our comments to the new Discourse forum that we were implementing to replace our old forum. This would require a login, a click through to see the full discussion, and we assumed it would help to consolidate all discussion into a single place. It definitely made a lot of sense.
Fast forward a few years, and the average quality of comments are definitely a little higher, since people need to be a lot more motivated to bother commenting. We also have one forum member, wilsontp, that posts extremely helpful, accurate, and well-researched replies every single day. And since Discourse has community moderation features, we have a small team of regular forum members that really help keep things on topic. The quantity is way down, but the quality is up.
We didn’t achieve all of our goals with the switch to Discourse — the actual community there is very small, and there’s a lot of work involved in keeping things friendly and spam-free even with all the community moderation tools. The fault is probably ours though, since we don’t have a large team and our writers are focused on writing articles rather than answering questions. We haven’t engaged the community as well as I’d like, but maybe that can change.
Get to the Point Already…
We’re not going to eliminate comments at this point, but we’re going to further decouple the comments from the site — right now, some of the comments “bubble up” to be displayed on the article page for the first week, but this doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, we’ll be creating new discussion topics for this daily column so you can give me feedback to make the column better. And I’ll make sure that I participate in those topics.
Discussion belongs on our forum, and that’s where you can discuss our articles, ask for tech help, or just talk about anything technology-related that you’d like to have a conversation about.
DISCUSS ON OUR FORUM (13 REPLIES)
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