On comments on news sites -from Nieman Lab
Joshua Benton, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sciacca, and Callie Crossley discuss comments on blogs and news sites.
Moderation of comments is by no means a site killer. Heck, it helps build communities, communities which then police themselves. In my recent interview with Metafilter founder Matt Haughey, Matt explains:
MH- Newspapers are starting to have comment sections, but they have no community. There’s a huge difference and it’s up to them to figure it out and figure out why that is so important.
RI -Has your barrier to entry (payment) been effective in reducing noise and promoting quality?
MH -Oh yeah, most definitely. The $5 one-time fee to participate (beyond reading for free) isn’t really part of any business model. It doesn’t bring in enough revenue to even cover hosting costs, but it lessens the load on myself and the other moderators, it virtually rids the site of drive-by fly-by-night spammers, and it helps make sure people really, really want to be there. It’s an extremely high barrier to entry and I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it unless they already have a large vibrant community that would even make the fee worth paying. I tried a lot of different ways of throttling signups to keep them at a manageable level. I tried only 10 new users a day starting at a specific time, I tried turning off the new user signup page randomly, but the most fair and best way to keep signups as a manageable level so far has been the fee. -read entire interview
Matt is not advocating everyone do what Metafilter does to moderate comments, but it’s pretty clear by looking at the success of his site that comment moderation has made the community stronger.
Newspapers need to ask themselves, what is the purpose of our comment feature? Should it appear everywhere, at the end of every article?
In 2006 Jason Kottke attempted to answer the question of “what is the record for the most amount of comments left on a blog“. A lot has changed since then. What is the record now? How are the top contenders moderating their sites? A completely different but related question, Is there a rate of diminishing return when deciding to comment or read long threads?
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