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 by the IndieWeb.

• http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/tag/webmention
• http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/tag/indieweb

What is "news?" I access content that's interesting to me, and what's interesting can vary from day to day, time of year, or my current hot hobby.

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 soccer 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.

Excerpts from comments to Dave's post:

Particularly with Bezos behind the scenes, one suspects this is stealth social (and the big data and advertising stuff that implies) rather than "another comment system", precisely. The reason he'd want to do something like this is so he doesn't have to go hat in hand to the other vendors (or facebook, or twitter, or disqus) to get his hands on the underlying data, and/or so they can bake in ways to sift the data as they want. And of course -- hook it into your amazon account and he'd have something crazy powerful (to advertisers, publishers, and manufacturers).

Take a look around at the major sites who use facebook or disqus (or livefyre, etc) as a reply system. Every one of them would jump at the chance to ditch those setups and have sophisticated ways to drill down on that data.

---

I wish the editors of Times and Post would create Twitter lists and share them with me. Twitter is full of garbage but it is also how I ended up on this post. Some good things do find me!

---

I would be happy if someone would figure out how to aggregate @replies and facebook comments from a single permalink into my blog comment feed, and make it so I can reply from my blog and it would post to the respective social outposts. [IndieWeb princile] I don't mind cross posting content to the different social outposts but managing independent comment threads is a pain in the ass.

---

You can use Known and Brid.gy to achieve some of that.

Excerpts from the Times story:

The New York Times and The Washington Post announced on Thursday that they had teamed up with Mozilla to develop a new platform to better manage their readers’ online comments and contributions.

The platform will be supported by a grant of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes innovation in journalism.

It does sound like a grand experiment or endeavor.

Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and a nonprofit that works for open standards on the web, will help The Times and The Post build the technology for a platform tailored to news organizations.

I'm definitely curious to know what "tailored to news organizations" implies. How is a commenting system built for a "news" organization different from any other site or organization? And what is the definition of "news"?

The platform, which will take approximately two years to complete, will eventually be available for other news organization to download free.

Holy crap!! $3.9 million, plus associated with the NY Times and WaPo, and it will take approximately two years?? How is it possible to generate a rough timeline?

Two years and $3.9 million for "just" a commenting system. I think lean startups can build an entire content management system from scratch with less time and money.

This sounds like it could be something that never gets created, or it gets rolled out because it must, and then it gets dropped by the news orgs, or nobody else has interest in the system.

“Everyone’s been talking for years about using the web in a better way without cheapening content, but simply adding a post by ‘anonymous’ is not a way to maintain the journalistic quality of any publication,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s chief executive. “There was a need to find a way to engage the audience in a way that enhances discussion.”

But as it has become clear that readers spend more time on websites where they can actively participate, more publications are embracing these types of [commenting] platforms.

More pageviews, more time on the site, more ad impressions, and more advertising dollars.

The Times, which will commit up to six employees to the project, said that it had considered buying available software but concluded along with The Post that it would be easier to customize a platform built in-house. Such a platform would also allow the publisher to retain valuable user data instead of handing it to a third party.

I never understood why media orgs, such as the Toledo Blade, would give their user-contributed content to Facebook. These media orgs bought that myth that Facebook comments led to more civil discussions.

Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a release, “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.”

Manage their contributions and online identities? At a news site? Users are already plagued with these activities on their many social media websites.

Whatever gets developed, it must be as dead-simple to use as the current crop of new web services, like the messaging apps or at least as simple as "managing" a Tumblr blog.

Users are willing to contribute content for free to for-profit orgs, but I doubt they want to manage anything. Snap, type, submit, and move on.

“The web offers all sorts of new and exciting ways of engaging with communities far beyond the ubiquitous — and often terrible — comments sections at the bottom of articles,” said Dan Sinker, head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews initiative, who will lead the project. “With this collaboration, we’re bringing together top talent to build new tools for newsrooms to engage.”

The urge will be to over-think this project, especially when they have already given themselves a rough timeline of two years. Why not say, "We have no idea how long this will take. Version .0001 will be demoed in three months."

I wonder if the collaborative development effort will release or showcase bits and pieces of the platform as it gets developed, or will they wait until the entire system is finished before making it public.