Comments about commenting systems - June 2014

And it continues ... Attempting to correct, improve, and manage reply mechanisms, attached to media-created content.

Additional links and thoughts:
http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/tag/comments

I thought the Facebook commenting system was the Holy Grail for media sites. What about the Disqus commenting system?

What about removing comments? Big problem solved. But I assume web sites enjoy the extra traffic that comments can bring, so eliminating comments is probably not an option.

What about hosting a message board that's separate from the main content site? Links to stories get created as thread starters. Maybe the users don't get to start new threads. Maybe users can only comment on the story links. Small example of this at the following blog site:

• http://blog.codinghorror.com
• http://discourse.codinghorror.com

Anyway, on to the content that generated this post:

• Jun 19, 2014 - NY Times - Mozilla to Develop Comments Platform With New York Times and Washington Post
• Jun 19, 2014 - Scripting News - Fixing comments? That's not the problem

Excerpts from Dave's post at Scripting News, which I admit is over my head and hard to understand.

It's hard to imagine it would be better than Disqus or Stack Exchange. Why not go to a commercial vendor with experience to solve this problem? What expertise or developed software does Mozilla have?

Facebook and Twitter haven't managed to capture the flow of expertise yet.

I recommend: Get a list of the sites the editorial people at the Times and the Post read. I'd try to automate the process so the list is huge and inclusive. Aggregate them into a river. There's your community of bloggers. Publish the river on your home page. Read what they write, and share it with your readers. This will immediately have huge influence on the both the blogosphere that you include and the ones you don't. Include your competitors.

The method most people use to get news is broken (if it's important it will find me). What finds us via Twitter is mostly crap. We need to get good at find lots of great relevant writing by experts.

I have little to no interest in the comments to news stories. I read the work created by the reporter and the editor, and I move on.

But access to a river of blog postings, related to the news site but created by outsiders could be interesting, especially if the blog posters were a form of "reply" to the news story. Kind of like the Webmention idea created

What is "news?" I access content that's interesting to me, and what's interesting can vary from day to day or what time of the year it is. NFL content will interest me more when the preseason begins, but for now, I have no interest in sports news, except for the occasional World Cup score.

I access content mainly through one of my web pages of bookmarks. For additional info, including interesting comments, I access my message board at ToledoTalk.com.