Dealing with Comments: A Few Interesting Approaches

For some time, we’ve been allowing comments in two different forms online; in blogs, and in our forums. We approach these in different ways.

On the blogs (indexed here), readers are free to comment on any item they wish, without registration. We have put all of our blogs outside the subscription wall, and the discussions can get lively, depending on the topic (for instance, see here and here).

We also have set up forums, which are generally attached to questions of the day or columns that run print and online (indexed on this page; a few good examples can be found here and here). The forums, as contrasted to the blogs, require registration, which has a way of leading sometimes, but not always, to more thoughtful discussion.

We do troll both blog posts and forums for the nasty stuff — profanity, vicious ad hominem (or feminem) attacks, and so on. Sometimes, a discussion explodes with comments, and we can barely keep up. But in general, we tend to be fairly forgiving — we don’t edit for spelling or grammar, and we try to err on the side of allowing discussion rather than inhibiting it.

As to why we don’t allow discussions on all stories, I’d say simply that we’ve expanded our community efforts greatly in the past year and will continue to do so. At the same time, we have approached adding discussions to our core coverage more gingerly, given that many financial discussion boards have turned into places for people to tout or denigrate stocks so as to further their own positions in those stocks. That doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. It simply means we’re working on ways to make it valuable to our readers.

Overall, discussions are building a great audience. One of the most telling comments, I thought, came in this post from the Law Blog a few months ago, in response to someone questioning the item and the comments (although I suspect this reader’s prize declarations were tongue in cheek):

Dow Jones in [sic] doing an extremely valuable service with this single, ‘integrated’ (lawyers and non-lawyers, a.k.a., clients) blog and for doing this they should get a Pulitzer in my view — if not eventually a Nobel Peace Prize. Do those statements seem a bit too gushing or over the top? They’re not, and here’s why: Lawyers as an industry are extremely out of touch with their clients and ‘the people’ of this country. WSJ is enabling us to all get into the same digital room, with complete anonymity, and express our views. Lawyers who listen will learn lots that they need to know about how some large and (anonymously) vocal clients — like me — regard them and what their industry has come to and needs to do. Clients can learn lots too, especially if they have little background on contemporary legal perspectives, rules of law and civil procedure. So WSJ should be applauded. Their editorial wisdom in rendering this blog continues to shine through, and despite the sometimes painful sting which many comments here may bring to the eyes of lawyers who read same — and I’m certain mine are among the most stinging — this country will only be better off by lawyers being confronted with the unadulterated realities of client and public perception.

At NYTimes.com, we feel that publishing reader comments alongside blog posts, articles and reviews not only rounds out coverage but utilizes our greatest strength: our unique readership. Our readers are well-informed, passionate and more often than not highly articulate. As a service to those readers, we have made the decision to pre-screen and weed out the tenacious few who would try to derail the conversation. Every effort comes with costs, and we are still experimenting with different formats, but our standards and commitment to civility are unwavering.
 
Unlike traditional Letters to the Editor, reader comments at The Times are not edited and the great majority of them are published. Moderating, like editing, is an art and every moderator’s touch is slightly different. But the guidelines we provide are clear: no personal attacks and no vulgarity or profanity of any kind. Offensiveness can sometimes be a matter of interpretation. We aim to lean on the side of good taste and respectfulness. While our moderators move quickly, it’s not fast enough for some used to instant gratification. We hope the majority of folks who choose us for their news agree that protecting the conversation is worth it.

The
main issues we’ve had with comments are the same ones other news
organizations have experienced: monitoring and tone. That said, I view
commenting as an essential part of where online journalism is headed,
and news organizations need to heal the existing wounds and not
amputate the limb. For us, engaging readers — through blogs, comments
on articles, live discussions, hyperlinked bylines, social networking
functions — is absolutely essential: it builds immense loyalty with
readers, it allows communities to form around common interests, it
makes readers feel like they’re participating and not watching from the
outside. Most of that is lost on folks who don’t understand the
difficulties all Web sites face in attracting and retaining readers.
Community is a differentiator.

We’re still working to make our
tools better and deal with the very serious and real issues created by
bad actors in our commenting areas. I’m confident we will fix those
issues, but this is new for most media sites, and it will take some
time. But we need to be involving our readers in as many ways as
possible.

By the way, we post-moderate. We have a profanity
filter that catches basic stuff, but besides that, we deal with issues
after publication. Every comment has a “report abuse” link to allow
readers to help us identify problems, and we have staff that helps deal
with problematic subjects such as local crime, politics, etc. We also
keep a close eye on all stories played off the home page.

A technology news aggregator, Slashdot enables users to submit articles. Those articles are then organized by a handful of editors. The comments users post about those articles are moderated by other users.

“Slashdot gets a lot of comments,” Slashdot founder Rob Malda explains in the site’s moderation FAQ. “Thousands a day. Tens of thousands a month. At any given time, the database holds 40,000+ comments. A single story might have a thousand replies — and lets be realistic: Not all of the comments are that great. In fact, some are down right terrible — but others are truly gems.”

Without this user moderation system it would be nearly impossible to regulate the site. Moderators are selected at random. New users cannot moderate. Also, users cannot moderate and post in the same discussion.

Every post is born with a predetermined rating between zero and two — determined based on the ratings assigned to the user’s previous posts. Moderators can then raise or lower the score of a post — each moderator can dole out five points. No post can have a score higher than five or lower than negative five.

Individual users specify their tolerance for viewing posts with low scores.

Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio
and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the
traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a
public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that
produces a daily hour of radio.

And we’re watching the rest of the Internet, too. We look at every
blogger as a “fixer,” a journalist’s term for someone with local
knowledge, someone who speaks the language and can tell us who to talk
to. We try to get a blogger on every show, whether we’re talking about knitting or Belarus. Almost every picture on the site comes from the photo-sharing site Flickr, and we try to get the story behind the pictures, like the one taken from the 10th floor of the Fariyas Hotel in Mumbai. We found an IBM forum for our show on pensions. We spent an hour in the online world Second Life.