Newsless.org

^ Just in case anyone accuses me of not alliterating enough.

Today, approx. 40 years after the rest of the Web figured out how to do good discussions, general-interest news site comment threads mostly remain abysmal. On their best days. They are also the biggest thorn in the side of many an editor.

Many have enumerated where news site discussions often go the way of the suck (including, most helpfully, Derek Powazek):

• Anonymous posting.
• Non-threaded discussions.
• No newsroom participation.
• Forum ghettos.
• Hot-button issues.
• No reputation/ranking/filtering.

Folks are having thoughtful conversations about whether general-interest news can even support communities. I think they can. I’d argue that most of the problems identified above are symptoms of a single underlying affliction: News sites lack persistent, manageable points of focus around which communities can coalesce.

The best communities online all have the feeling of a semi-exclusive club. They cohere around distinctive goals, topics or personalities; they acquire in-jokes, shorthand, traditions; they’re open to newcomers, but oldtimers command respect. They sometimes sprout, like sidewalk grass, in the unlikeliest places, but often grow to resemble each other.

Most online editors have a fond story to tell about a close-knit community that sprung up improbably in a poorly-tended ’90s-era bulletin board in some abandoned crevice of their site. Or a popular blog with a good crowd of commenters.

But ask about the discussions in the news sections and their features will darken, their voices will coarsen, and you’ll be treated to a spittle-flecked recounting of racist rants, libelous tirades, comments mocking murder victims, and the like. The Internet’s id is not a pretty thing, and news story comments are its cavern.

News comments resemble graffiti more than discourse. Largely anonymous taggers come by and leave their marks. Sometimes their work is in response to another tagger, but most often, it’s a subtle variation on “I was here.” Like graffiti, comments are sometimes brilliant, but more frequently are garish and crude.

Unlike Gawker, I think we can fix comments. It is possible to have phenomenal discussions online. Even on general-interest news sites. In the course of my research, I’m considering some of the problems and mulling how my model might offer potential solutions. Derek Powazek’s contribution on this front was fantastic. I’d like to extend his thinking in a couple directions. Here’s what I got so far.

The ephemera problem

Issue: News articles and audiences are too short-lived to generate real conversation/community. You might come to the site, see an article that hits a nerve, and post a comment, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll encounter any of your fellow commenters again. This presents 1) no incentive for commenters to treat each other nicely, and 2) no time for comments to get beyond the superficial and obvious.

Solutions? A shift towards treating stories as persistent topics rather than ephemeral articles should help foster better opportunities for real conversation, in theory. Really, we’ll be moving from “story comments” to “story forums.” But the forum experience has to be well-designed to maximize its potential.

As with any niche forum, there’s a danger these could easily turn into ghettos, unless we put some thought into how we can regularly promote them to audiences interested in the topic. One of the lessons I learned from vita.mn¹ was that you should create thoughtful mechanisms to allow conversations in obscure corners of your site to bubble up to areas that draw a larger audience. For example, all posts on stories in a given category could appear on the main page for that category.²

Also, building more sophisticated reputation systems should help deal with the ephemeral-audience problem. Profiles, avatars, and comment histories should be the default commenting experience. And we should do more experimenting with point systems, award systems and the like.

The vacuum-of-leadership problem

Issue: News editors tend to approach story comments with a deeply laissez-faire attitude. They’ll wander in to ward off trolls, but otherwise, they’re hands off. Commenters quickly discover that as long as they don’t employ threats or profanity, they can be as rude and destructive as they want.

Solutions? Every successful online community I can think of has leaders — engaged, empowered individuals who can guide conversation and set the tone. A switch to “story forums” should make it easier for reporters to participate in conversations that involve their beats, and it should be incumbent on them to perform that role. Communities form around personalities.

This is a matter where an investment of time and attention up front can reap huge benefits later. Over time, online communities tend to develop emergent voices who reinforce the tone set by the initial leader. That’s how self-policing works.

The filtering problem

Issue: A “robust conversation” on a news site often just means 763 YouTube-caliber comments. Without good filters, 763 comments isn’t a conversation, it’s a landfill.

Solutions? Threading comments is one good starting point for bringing order to chaos. Allowing users to rate comments is another. (As long as you then also allow comments to be sorted by rating. I’m talking to you, Pluck.) MetaFilter allows users to mark comments as favorites, which is all kinds of useful. I constantly find myself scrolling through long MeFi discussions looking out for comments with high numbers of favorites.

If it isn’t clear, I think nurturing community is the silver bullet for improving the discourse on news sites. This may be obvi, but every time I mention this to one of the poor PTSD-ravaged online editors, they treat it as a revelation. As an industry, we seem to think the only way we’re ever going to create online communities is to make moms sites. I think if we alter the structures that contain our journalism, we can form communities around the news. At least it’s something to try.

For more reading:

• Derek Powazek – 10 ways newspapers can improve comments (in case you still haven’t read it)
• BBC – DNA Knowledge Base (the BBC’s ancient-but-accurate rulebook for building online community)

1. The arts-and-entertainment community site I launched in Minneapolis. [↩]

2. Let me stress thoughtful. We took a slightly nuanced, but common-sensical approach to recent comments on vita.mn.

   We knew that in most instances, when a new comment was posted, what would pique the attention of a visitor to the front page was not the specific comment, but the thread it was a part of. So our list of discussions on the front page is sorted by most recent comments.

   That means if a visitor wanders into an old conversation and posts a thought, that conversation pops up immediately on the front page, often reviving the discussion. And if a lame new topic is posted, it tends to exit the front page fairly quickly. [↩]

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