Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)

In group discussions with American and German newspaper editors last week, I noticed a trend among the Americans: None of them were happy with the comments on their stories and editorials, but practically all of them reported having tried my suggested responses without success.

Which left me wondering: If none of the practices I suggested worked for these newspapers, then why do they seem to work so well at other sites? And rather than just accepting that comments on news stories are America's No. 1 troll breeding ground, what can be done about this nationwide disappointment?

WHY COMMENTS SUCK

1. Because you don't value them. Let's face it: Newspapers were slow to add comments and many if not most people in the newsroom thought they were a bad idea to begin with. The winning argument for comments was often page-loads, not engagement with readers, and it shows. If you don't have policies that encourage your editors and writers to read and participate in comments, and user agreements that speak about positive values of civil behavior, then your comments ghetto is really just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2. Because you think you can't touch them. Why are newspaper people so convinced they can't "moderate" comments? In part it's because they don't understand the legal principle behind the "prior approval" policy, but it's also because two-way community involvement is a job few journalists actually want. Listen: If you want good comments, you simply have to think of them as a dinner party at your house. You wouldn't let one guest's bad behavior ruin everyone else's time, and you wouldn't invite people to your house and then spend the evening in another room. If you're going to have comments, you must set the tone or live with the consequences.
3. Because you don't have time. Because of staff cuts. Because of new initiatives. Because of work loads. You could do all these things for comments, "but right now we need to focus on the core product." And by core product you mean the print edition. 
4. Because you're afraid. Not because you're a chickenshit, but because comment threads between professional journalists and anonymous trolls are intimidating. It reverses the asymmetrical relationship and puts you in the hot seat. And how can you deal with trolls in a way that's effective, doesn't demean your own value, and supports the good commenters? And can you be human without calling down the wrath of some senior editor who insists you adhere to some outdated inhuman standard? Those are good reasons to be afraid.
5. Because you're not a community. Have you ever noticed that online communities tend to have great comments -- even if there's a great deal of disagreement? But most newspapers aren't communities, and for all our talk about loving our geographic communities, we're not actually a PART of those communities. You can't be a one-way communicator and be part of a community. You must be reachable --and vulnerable.

HOW TO UN-SUCK THEM

1. If they're bad, reboot the system. As my brilliant wife, Janet Edens Conover, suggested recently, if a newspaper's comments have gone horribly, horribly wrong, the best solution may be a fresh start. Do some research, talk to people with some experience, come up with a plan and then shut down your old system. Wipe it clean. And when you launch the new system and invite your readers back, do so with full transparency. Tell them what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what they can expect from here on out. 
2. Invest staff time. Should editors read every comment that gets posted? No. But as the people at LJWorld learned, you really don't have to read every comment to monitor the most likely trouble spots. Get smart about your comments, learn to use your time wisely, and make comment review and involvement part of your newsroom workflow. And by all means, get your writers involved in their comment threads.
3. Get better tools and learn how to use them. Waiting for users to flag an offensive comment and then summarily deleting it and banning the user isn't comment moderation. It's a tool box with only a sledge hammer in it. Learn about ideas like ghosting, disemvowellment, comment editing, etc. And if you're allowing anything that resembles anonymous commenting, stop that right now.
4. Use pictures. Sure that sounds simplistic and childish, but if you provide an opportunity for users to create or select an avatar, you've already taken a big step toward improving the level of discourse in your comments. Trolls tend to be people who think the Web is an anonymous, nasty place where they are free to act out pathologies they hide in the real world. Anything you can do to personalize the identities of your commenters reduces that sense of anonymous hostility. And if you REALLY want to improve things, program a feature that lets comments users build reputation points. Gamers could teach us a thing or two.
5. Learn how to talk with people. When I'm speaking in public, I stand behind a lectern and I use a particular set of skills. The more I hone those skills, the better I get at public speaking. But if I'm talking with people at a cookout and I use those same skills in that setting, I'm just an asshole. The problem print journalists face in the online world is that newswriting for print is a lot like public speaking, but writing online is more like talking with the other patrons at a neighborhood bar. Your tone has to be different. You have to engage people directly. You have to let them talk. And if you act like a stuck-up phony, you're likely to get your ass kicked.

One last thing: Stop making excuses. I know none of this is easy, but you really should have only one choice -- either have comments and do them properly, or don't offer comments at all. And if you're offering them solely to increase page traffic to boost revenues, give up. Just quit. You're hopeless.

I think you should choose quality and engagement, because that's where I think the future has to lie. Choosing shoddy is a bad idea these days.

Comments

[Dan]

One other thing, which occurred to me in the car just now: We ought to be thinking more about incentives to good behavior instead of punishments for bad behavior. That's touched on in the reputation-system suggestion, but I didn't go far enough.

[Coturnix]

These are the kinds of things I've been saying to people in person, but I am so glad you have written it down in such an organized fashion. I will bookmark this for future reference, for whenever someone asks me about the comments on newspapers, why they are so bad, and what to do about it. Thank you.

[Dan]

You're welcome. As usual, the good ideas are already out in the cloud, and the job is just noticing them.

[Daniel]

From the tech perspective, I think that the tools for facilitating conversation through comments on an article could use a lot of improvement. NewsMixer.us is a radical rethink that I wish more news organizations would experiment with, and the NY Times adds value by marking certain comments as "Editor's Pick"s.

[Ro]

Terrific points, Dan. I'm with a global, third party comment system, and I'd love to talk at some point. We think day and night about all of the above and have learned quite a bit about what's effective and what's not along the way. Clearly you're very well versed yourself, so would be great to share thoughts. ro at disqus dot com if you're interested. All the best..

[Dave Winer]

Dan, I did many of the things you say to do and I have an absolute rule, people aren't allowed to make statements about other people who are present, and I have low tolerance for personal statements about people who will never be there. You can say what you have to say without saying the other person is grumpy or angry.

I don't just see it as a living room, I see the comments as amplifying in some way what I have written. If you have a statement to make about me or someone else, you're free to do that, in your space. Blogs are incredibly easy to set up and free of charge. There has to be a reason for what you're saying to be attached to my writing, and I have the final say as to whether it belongs there.

[Rosemary]

This situation is exactly why my company (Groupee, Inc.) offers technology that allows integration between the commenting and a full-blown community (same profiles and registration). This gives the admin complete reward and punishment tools as well as response notifications via email, so that commenters can see when others respond and come back for more conversation. Comments can also be turned directly into threads on the forum.

Ultimately, though, the point is that you can't host a gathering and not be there. The blog is absolutely spot-on with that point. Great insights!

[emphryio]

I can't seem to reply about the manifesto so this seemed an ironic place to put my reply rather than just having wasted the time trying to be nice in replying.

---

Yes I was aware of when you wrote your manifesto. Do you not want to hear a different point of view anymore about it? If so, that's fine. Just found the rest so well written I thought you might look at the possibility of changing your mind about something as a positive thing much like I do.

Are you sure you read Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Chomsky? I ask because there's another book with the same name that's nothing in comparison.

This one is the correct one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media

You say you don't clash with Chomsky... yet you say: "Journalism is to politics as art is to culture.
Journalism cannot fix what is wrong within a culture. It simply chronicles and catalogs the pathology as it winds down to death. To heal and correct requires art, and if art is unavailable to regular people, any healing will be incomplete."

While the very name of the book Chomsky is most famous for is called Manufacturing Consent. The title itself is quite a clash with the above quoted.

You talk of advertising for example:

"Advertising creates more unhappiness in American than drug addiction does, but you never hear anybody talk about launching a "War on Advertising."

I think you just mean how annoying it is? The reality of advertising is far worse than that.

"Major news organizations are for-profit ventures that naturally seek to give the customer what he or she wants."

And the primary customer, of course, is the advertiser. And these advertisers generally don't want to fund leftwing news.

As to your personal experience this is how it is at most companies. The employer doesn't want someone generally who thinks too much. They want someone who'll do as they're told and (especially in journalism) mirrors the views of the employer. And the employers and the advertisers generally aren't in favor of any socialistic economic policies because they feel such policies would hurt them personally. The result is an incredbile rightwing slant to the beliefs of the populace.

[emphryio]

I'm sorry to post it where it doesn't belong but it's incredible to me that someone who'd write a seemingly intelligent thing as your manifesto would then be that absurdly closeminded with respect to a conflicting view on it.

[Dan]

I don't get your response at all. I sure didn't feel combative or closed-minded when I wrote the comments you reference. I agreed that you were right, admitted I hadn't read the book when I wrote the manifesto. After I wrote that, I looked at what I wrote for the first time in a long time and thought, well, I wouldn't write it quite that way now, but it's not incompatible with what I took away from my Chomsky reading.

re: Advertising. No, it's not about annoying, but the way that advertising is designed to sell products by telling human beings that they are inadequate without a particular product. That's incredibly corrosive, and I think we need to prepare our children to understand how they're being manipulated by these messages.

I'm not a Chomsky scholar, but that book spine is staring at me from my shelf, so yes, that's the one. But I'm not trying to claim that I can channel Chomsky, or even that I understand Chomsky well enough to summarize him as well as you can.

As for the passage you cited, I do believe that -- because journalism is materialistic. It isn't cure for the soul of a culture. But that's probably neither here nor there.

Anyway, it's cool for you to comment here, or whereever. I'm glad you like my original thing in general, sorry my comment caused a communication break.

[Anna Haynes]

a couple things.

Don't wipe the old comments clean; yes it removes crap, but it also punishes the people who took the time to make thoughtful comments (and perhaps linked to them from their blogs...) before, which leads them to think twice about bothering to do so again.

Do allow recommendations, and do make it possible to see _who_ recommended a comment. This makes it possible for [someone to write a tool that allows] users to do their own moderation, by dividing the discussion space into tables of congeniality - which prevents robotic cockroach infestations from interrupting and drowning out constructive conversation.

[Dan]

Agreed.