Comments Aren’t Dead. They’re Just Broken.
Publishers deserve much of the blame for the sad state of online comments. Here’s how we fix them.
There’s been a lot of commentary on comments lately.
Last month, Reuters announced that it would be removing comments from its news stories. The publisher stated that the decision was in response to the “realities of behavior in the marketplace,” as news dialogue has increasingly shifted to social media.
Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news, as well as criticism or praise for stories, has moved to social media and online forums.
A few weeks later, tech blog Re/code followed suit, sharing a similar explanation.
[…] as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.
These announcements set off an interesting debate between media insiders about the role of comments in the modern era, and the value they provide to publishers.
The current state of commenting is a mess — there’s no doubt about it. At their worst, comment threads can be hostile and abusive. At their best they are often fragmented and unfocused. The media is often quick to blame the community that inhabits these message boards, frequently using terms like “uncivil,” “obnoxious,” and “grotesque” in their explanations for why comments don’t work. However, to simply point a finger outward ignores the larger problem: that the sad state of comments is a direct result of a negligent culture and dated technologies levied by the publishers.
In my mind, there are three major factors that have led to the decline of comments: revenue, reward and relevance. The following passages will explain these factors in more depth, and more importantly, suggest a few solutions to address them.
Revenue
One of the biggest arguments against investing in commenting is that the ROI of community is not clearly defined. There’s no doubt commenters are more engaged than the average user — but engagement hardly pays the bills. More so, fostering deep user engagement isn’t cheap. As traffic and content output scale, the costs of human resources and moderation infrastructure quickly add up.
But to simply write off community as a negative ROI is just bad business. Commenters do (at least) two things most site visitors do not: they explicitly demonstrate interest in your product, and they willingly hand over their email address. In any other business, we’d call these people “warm leads.” In media, we call them trolls.
The problem with most publishers is that they don’t know how to turn explicit interest into revenue. Engagement is only a means to action. Action is what keeps the lights on. Before we attempt to measure ROI, we — the publishers — must decide what our end goal is (my friend Annemarie Dooling wrote a great piece on this in June).
The next step is to figure out how to drive people toward the decided action. There are several ways to do this: email marketing, on-site retargeting, or even starting a dialogue in the comment threads can go a long way to eliciting response. But by neglecting to push these users toward an end goal (engagement is not an end goal), publishers are letting their best prospects slip right through the cracks.
Reward
Another major criticism of comment sections is that they have become a petri dish of angry, and occasionally abusive, shouting. I think a lot of this can be attributed to design. Comment boards have long been relegated to the bottom of the article. From top to bottom, most news pieces look something like this: ad, headline, image/video, article, recirculation module, comments. This hierarchy gives commenters the impression that no one is listening (and for the most part, they aren’t). This placement may help explain the aggressive, caps-locked “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW, ASSHOLE?” behavior that we’ve come to expect when scouring the message board.
But simply moving comments from the bottom of an article is not enough. In this fast-paced media landscape, it’s easy to get swept up in the next project once an article is published. Writers rarely have any incentive to dive into the comments. That mindset may be preventing us from closing the feedback loop with the very people who have taken the time to engage.
This isn’t to say journalists or community teams should respond to every comment (or even most of them). But it is important that some action is taken to remind readers that their voice is being heard. This can come in the form of a featured comment, a short response, or even a strategic email or tweet. Will this completely stop belligerence at the bottom of the page? Absolutely not. But it will help set the expectation of civil discourse and conversation. If we expect value from our commenters, then we need to deliver value in return.
Relevance
The last fix may be the most challenging, but it is also the most important piece. Currently, comment threads do a lousy job of surfacing the best content — paving the way for vitriol to rise to the top. Again, much of this can be attributed to design.
As previously stated, comments about an article are typically aggregated in a single module at the bottom of the page. But what exactly is someone supposed to comment on at the bottom of the article? A specific passage, the article as a whole, the weather? Without any sort of direction, it’s easy to image how things can spiral out of control.
Conversation requires context. Context provides the connectivity and relevance that users have come to expect on the internet. In an era of algorithms, we are conditioned to expect a personalized and finely-curated experience across the web. Facebook achieves this in two ways: filtering (explicitly) based on who and what you follow and ranking (implicitly) based on your previous actions with those accounts. Google does the same through your searches (explicit) and the sites you’ve previously clicked on (implicit). The result is a stream of content that these sites deem “most relevant” to you.
News sites, for better or worse, have only a fraction of the user data that Google and Facebook do. This makes replicating that level of personalization a lofty challenge. I do believe, however, that we can do better than simply filtering all comments by “most recent,” “editor’s choice,” and “most popular.”
Sites like SoundCloud, Genius, Quartz and — yes — Medium have experimented with replacing comments with inline annotations (try it here). This design offers a number of major benefits. For one, it brings commenters to the same level as the author (there’s our reward). Another benefit is that it attempts to focus conversation around a unified subject, limiting the potential for off-topic noise. Perhaps most importantly, contextual comments and annotations offer publishers the opportunity to feature more of the best comments. Now, two comments of equal value, that reference different topics, no longer need to compete for eyeballs.
This would likely solve many of the problems with comment threads, however there are ways to further refine it. If additional ranking was required to surface the best comments, publishers could leverage one of several personalized signals. One thought would be to surface comments by users with similar reading habits. Let’s say you landed on a politics article, but you also tend to read technology and business. A publisher could choose to surface comments from other readers who frequent the same sections. Another tactic could be to surface comments from readers who consume the most content about a particular topic. If you’re reading about a story about Uber, surface comments from users who have read a lot of articles with related tags.
Comments may not be dead yet, but they’re on life support. To simply give up, and hand our most engaged users over to Facebook and Twitter is a major loss to an industry that is in dire need of loyalty. We need to come up with real, sustainable solutions — solutions that view community through the lens of modern culture, technology and business. It is imperative that we save comments. We owe it to our readers, we owe it to our writers, and we owe it to ourselves.
