Sometimes I Think About Reinstating the Comments System

<i>What follows is a pretty standard lament about online communities</i><p>In my personal experience, the comment sections I've found on any web site eventually fall into three painful and unsatisfying categories:<p>- Ghost towns: the blog or forum has so little audience, nothing gets said.<p>- Worthless hole: enough people have become involved that there is no way to have a discussion without trolls trying to derail the conversation.<p>- Benevolent (or not) dictatorship: moderation is strictly enforced to keep things civil.<p>There's often a period shortly after the Ghost Town attracts an audience, where an open forum may seem to be doing ok. But once it gets popular everything falls apart and moves into the Worthless Hole. I'm waiting nervously for this to finally happen to HN, as the community moderation doesn't seem strong enough to prevent it.<p>The strict moderation model seems to work in a lot of places (I particularly enjoy Scalzi's blog, and the Loving Mallet of Correction), but I'm not sure it accomplishes a real discussion of opposing views... It works better in settings where all conversations are one-sided or at least light-hearted.<p>I do occasionally find a mathematics blog or something which has a good stable of commenters and fun discussions, and persists for years. Maybe the secret is to confine your community to a small enough niche that the trolls are never attracted?

Sturgeons law: 90% of everything is crud.<p>At Internet scale, 99.9999% of everthing is crud. Hey! We're six-sigma compliant!<p>What's necessary is a comment moderation/surfacing system which can cope and scale. And yes, occasional gems <i>do</i> surface.

I don't think anything new or especially interesting has been said about comment quality, but the author displays such a wonderful command of swearing that I enjoyed the article immensely. It's refreshing to see such eloquent profanity on the web!

I think the invitation into the home analogy Warren Ellis uses works pretty well here so I'll extend it slightly and stay away from the piss aspects. What you do with a comment system is try to host a salon on a topic, which may or may not go well. But then you leave, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days. When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.<p>Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.

And that's why you make the comments threaded, collapsible, voteable, and sorted via the Wilson interval method.<p>Just cause you insist on flat comments doesn't mean commenting systems are hopeless.

I've often wondered how big the impact is of the text "comment" or "post comment" we see on the button below or next to a textbox. I think it's part of the problem, acting like a red cloth on a bull. English isn't my mother's tongue and "comment" has a negative connotation.<p>Anybody know of another implementation that funnels intent differently? E.g. buttons with "contribute", "refute" or "criticize". Could make an interesting A/B test.