Why Online Comments Need Community

A month ago I wrote some thoughts on how everything is a comment. In that I mentioned something on which I’d like to expand:

You know why comments suck? Because people suck. You know why comments are great? Because people are great. But these problems only are expressed when there’s no oversight. Comments need such an ingredient to thrive: community.

Why do comments work on some sites and not others? The most common reason I’ve seen is because the site is not aiming to foster a community.

Look at the Disqus blog for example. Comments work there for two reasons:

1. We put down some ground rules.
2. We get into the conversation.

Literally. That’s it.

But if you were to go off and apply those two rules to any site, that still wouldn’t guarantee engaging, interesting discussions would ensue. That’s because one key point is still missing, the assumption on which all of this is built: we wantconversation on our blog.

And because we want conversation on our blog, we think through the type of conversation we want on our blog, the type of community we want to build. We’re a group of people who make products for the Internet so we want to foster a community around that. This thinking in turn helps us write our ground rules I mentioned above.

That means we don’t allow every comment. And as a result we’ve found that the conversations we foster often offer just as much if not more value than the article on which it takes place. Yes, sometimes totally open free speech on an article offers value. Sometimes, not always. That decision is up to each publisher on their own.

And our blog is not the only example of a community with consistently good discussions. Communities with consistently interesting, active conversations abound from every vertical, for example:

• Life in Korea: Eat Your Kimchi
• Fun Facts: Mental Floss
• Science: Wired Science
• Venture capital: A VC
• the list goes on…

Comments need community because thinking through the type of community you want forces you to think through whether or not you want a community in the first place, which in turn helps you decide whether or not you truly want to host discussions on your content. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. The choice is up to you, and any choice is okay.