.An Open Letter to Mike Arrington
Mike, we’ve known each other a long time. We met at the very first Slide launch party when it was still a photo sharing service. (He! Look at Tara’s picture I just found. Note the button ;) But I knew you well before then from your posts on TechCrunch. I alwasy respected that more then just reporting, you gave your opinion. And more significantly if you later realized your take was wrong you would state that. You really did and do want the actual information to be known and understood. You put that first above ego or industry.
For a long time the comment threads in TechCrunch were the Quora of start-up information. Everyone in the industry read the comments and many add information when they had it. People put their real names and their URLs. People met and learned from each other via the comments. Anyone who read it in 2005/6 knows what I’m talking about. It was a large vibrant Internet community. (Eric Marcullier reminds me that there was a lot of hating back then too, but it was worth ignoring because of the overall value)
With all due respect, the comments are downright toxic now and it has been for some time. The addition of threading, avatars, liking, flagging, etc. have not brought the community benefits back. Most anyone with accomplishments or knowledge is not commenting, and why would they? From my peer survey over the last couple weeks, no one reads them. They’re literally just a step above YouTube comments. (Sorry, but it’s true). Your writers get attacked by anonymous cowards. Every single company covered gets lambasted by haters, griefers, and outsiders. And there’s very little to be learned by reading them.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t at all. Here are a list of strategies I would consider employing.
* Slashdot style commenting: Readers can rate comments and viewers can decide which quality of comments they want to see. Set the system to only show above average comments by default.
* Use Amazon payments, PayPal Micropayments for a one-time commenter fee. If someone have to pay $1 to be a commenter, the quality will go up. You could also pre-approve anyone, through soical graph or an intern.
* Get a credit card payment for $0.01 and use the name to verify who they are. They can comment with their own nickname or Internet handle if that’s important, but it’s tied to their real name.
* Block a user that has posted blather 5 times in a row. Or start with 10 or 20. Just don’t let them comment anymore. Boo hoo for them.
* Don’t allow people to post without FB Connect or another OAuth/OpenId service. Or if they do post, show them in a second thread.
* Or just have two comment threads. Those that are validated and those that aren’t.
These are suggestions are not the solution for TechCrunch. (Of course there will still be haters, griefers and flamers, but they could go down to be less then 25%) The real solution will be a significant variation that is highly customized to meet the desires and usage habits of the current TC readership, the goals of the publisher and authors and the owning company.
Let me help you find that blend. You don’t have to give up on have quality comment threads. You just need to revise the engagement for 2010.
There are some great comments on TechCrunch’s articles — way more than most sites. But the fact that there are bad ones distracts from this.
One thing I’d recommend is going into the Disqus settings and switching off completely anonymous commenting. Let people sign in or use their social networks to comment. This solves a lot of the driveby hating.
Real hating from actual identifies are so much more fun anyway.
I’ve never read TC regularly, just popping in every few weeks when some big story garners news on other sites and I want to see what the fuss is about.
That said, even from the early days until now, the thing I can’t stand is the crass commercialism in the comments by fly-by-night “netrepreneurs” that basically leave a comment like “X service described in this post sucks. Y service is much better, and offers more” and you can easily tell the writer of the comment is the creator of a competing service.
I use a one-time cover charge at MetaFilter to filter jerks out and we keep paypal details of a real name in the admin backend as well, and spend hours a day removing fake testimonials by people connected to the sites they are pimping (while acting like an innocent bystander that just happened to find it on the web and use it). It’s poison to any usable site to let junk like that stick around.
” the comment threads in TechCrunch were the Quora of start-up information.”
Really? When?
Also why the introduction to Mike. He knows who you are, you seem to forget he is (or was) an investor in Dogster. I’d note that he invested in Dogster before that photo was taken as well :)
the only idea which makes sense is to force folks to use facebook connect or similar. the rest is a bit weird.
@Matt
Yes! In fact I propose that fee-to-participate disucssions should be called the MetaFilterFilter. It’s the best on the ‘net!
@Duncan
That’s weird, but you’re right. Tara’s photo show’s the date as 10/2006, a month after our Angel round closed. Here’s a photo from my Flickr stream showing the date as 10/2005. No conspiracy here. Nor anything to hide.
I’m not trying to reintroduce myself to Mike, but I could see why you could read that. I’m just taking the time to roll back the mind to 5 years ago.
@Daniel
There’s a huge opportunity in the realm of ‘verified identity’ (I have a blog post I’ve been meaning to write on this)
Disqus is actually quite well placed to be such a provider. Many many benefits to the Internet are available if you can validate a person, to a profile/history/ to a credit card.
Switching off anonymous commenters would silence 98% of the trolls. You’re right Ted, the environment is now so toxic that it isn’t worth the time and/or effort to comment and engage. It invariably results in something akin to arguing with drunks.
Two items.
1) I love that Daniel Ha from Disqus is the #1 commenter on a blog post regarding TechCrunch comments – and Dogster doesn’t even use Disqus. That’s all kinds of awesome for Ted and Daniel. Duo kudos.
2) There are many interesting self-policing algorithms to explore for threaded comment moderation. The SlashDot and Gawker style of offering frequent commenters more policing abilities that can be revoked if abused being just two methods (expressed differently). Yup, you can self-police the self-policers.
Ted
Agree. I wrote a post a month or so ago about live commenting dynamics on sites like TechCrunch. These dynamics are interesting but they don’t scale if the moderation issues you talk about aren’t addressed. The commenting issue are fixable – you Daniel, Greg list some good ideas and there is also prior art here. Look at that Huffington Post – they had the same toxic issues as TC multiple times over during the 08 elections. They did a lot of moderation and they applied some technology – including an interesting semantic filtering tool called Julia, which they later acquired. There are solutions that have been tried and tested here.
[...] don’t know if it was the community position you created after I wrote my last open letter to you, or TechCrunch’s deployment of Facebook comments, but comments in TechCrunch have [...]