Tag Archives: Community

Day 5 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 5 is about community building through reader interaction. Darren suggests emailing readers or responding to comments in the comment field of an article.

I do chat up my readers, but increasingly it is through Facebook or Reddit. The number of readers leaving comments on my blog post comment box is about 1 out of every 1000 visits (roughly 1 out of 10 if I’m giving something away). But on Facebook those same articles are discussed almost daily. I also wind up emailing or getting emails from readers through Facebook several times per month.

While a rough industry standard for comment to reader ratio is 1 to 100 I believe my lower comment ratio is a reflection of my market segment. Fisherman are loathe to give up any info and indeed it is the reason i started roundvalleyfishing.com to begin with – to spread good information.

Non-newspaper site dealing with inappropriate comments

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The tech blog Engadget has temporarily turned off commenting for a bit “until things cool down”.  Apparently the tone in the comments section has been completely out of control the last few days, it  “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable”.

The comments section dust up started when certain Engadget regulars became offended over this spoof article (Do you Hate Apple News?) which pretty much mocks readers for whining about reading too much Apple news.

Engadget is doing some cleaning during their down time right now banning trolls and spammers. But will it be enough?  What’s to prevent those people from coming back again? Remember when Kurt Greenbaum took it upon himself to police a vulgar post at the St. Louis Post Dispatch?  The internet can get ugly real quick.

Is it all the readers’ fault?  Maybe Engadet didn’t have to provoke their readers.  And how the heck can a baker’s dozen or so readers shut down the entire Engadget comments section.  Yikes!  I’m trying to think of what PRINT newspapers do and if there is one takeaway from how they handle input from the public it is that they attempt to tune it out and work above it.   Having said that, I really like metafilter’s solution ($5 lifetime membership), which, through the “broken window theory” builds a sense of community and increases self policing.

Personally I let akismet catch everything it thinks is spam / junk and I read through the posted comments to ensure they are legit. Then again Engadget gets 1.5million visitors per month and metaprinter is lucky to get 1.5thousand :(

Beat the Press Panel Discussion – Comments on News Sites

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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: Continue reading →

MetaFilter Founder Matt Haughey Q&A – Including a Few Newspaper Answers

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Q&A with MetaFilter.com founder Matt Haughey. As Wikipedia defines it, MetaFilter is a community weblog whose purpose is to share links and discuss interesting content that users have discovered on the web. From personal use I know that Ask.MetaFilter.com is one of the most useful sites anywhere for “querying the hive mind”. Enjoy!

RI -“MetaFilter is one of the oldest (1999) online social sites. What keeps it going where others fail? (Author’s note, I think of mefi a as social site but only in the broadest of terms. Or rather, it’s become more social over the years (the first few years, there wasn’t all that much discussion on the posts, now the most popular posts have hundreds of comments)…”

MH -It has consistently grown ever since early 2000, when I think it hit enough of a critical mass to be interesting. As to why it keeps going – it probably has something to do with it being what it is first and foremost. When I think of other online social sites that come and go, they’re largely offshoots of some other service that didn’t fit quite right. MetaFilter has always kind of been its own thing and has stayed interesting enough to attract interesting people that continue to contribute to it everyday. Continue reading →