Commenting schizophrenia, and what to do about it

This post is spurred by a post a month or so back by Jason Santa Maria that I was slow in getting to – it’s about the cultivation of online conversations, specifically comment threads against blog posts that have reached such a length and a nature that they could be called a conversation.  It’s a refreshing piece, recognising as it does not only the problematic nature of making web comments useful, but also that there’s much a blog author is able to do, and that any method for managing comments and keeping them useful has to be lightweight and not require too much active involvement – people lapse, and systems that require too much ongoing maintenance are doomed to fail.

There’s also an excellent suggestion for a piece of blog functionality that can help orient the reader of a comment thread that may have become unruly by dint of sheer length – with the deliciously idiomatic name of a “mile-marker”, this would be a kind of meta-comment that would sum up the comments so far with the intention of making it far easier for the would-be commenter to jump in.  The mile-marker would either be written by the author themselves, in which case it could include some implicit commentary (i.e. picking out an individual comment in the mile-marker would intimate appreciation), or crowdsourced out (though it was unclear whether this would work!).

This would all probably work pretty well on Mr Santa Maria’s blog (and I would encourage him to try it out – seems to me it sits well with his other idiosycratic touches such as artistic direction for individual posts) – he’s a well-known web designer who gets many well-thought-out comments per post.  Online commentary, though, exists in many places, in many fora, and it’s unruly almost everywhere.  Before we can really come to any answers that may be expected to work to corral them (and I think devices like mile-markers will have their part), it’s important to cast our eyes over why this might be.

Consider a newspaper article – say, on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section – where the body of the article is written by a staff journalist, yet the focus of the article would be deemed to be the comments (in this case using a platform provided by Pluck).  The journalist may or may not join in with the comments themselves – indeed, the piece may be a syndicated spiel by Noam Chomsky, say, a fellow who couldn’t be counted on to deign to give feedback to comments wherever his original piece may wind up.  Even if the journalists comment, it’s rare that they are speaking as authors, and the presentation of their comments doesn’t privilege them as such – much of the time they are sucked into chumming with the commenting contingent, backpedalling from the original article content (which they have no freedom to edit anyway).

There’s a tension here, which is that the commenting system on a site like Comment Is Free exists as a rootless, amorphous mess of pseudonymous commenters ready to latch onto any article that is published and bend it to its will, not because the commenters necessarily have anything to say, or are interested in anything so much as a conversation, but because the subtext of a site like Comment Is Free is that any article that falls in the forest without a comment makes no sound.  It’s there on the Guardian’s front page – an article’s importance is not to be determined by the content of the article itself, but by the Geiger counter read-out of the comment radiation that surrounds it.

There is the question: what is the motivation of a commenter on such a public webspace, where commentary is almost entirely pseudonymous, and where Pluck’s system (probably by omission) discourages any actual conversation?

There is the central tension: when someone writes a comment against any piece of web content with clear authorship, is the commenter speaking to the author directly, or merely performing a kind of existential venting?  Or is it the case that comments will all fall somewhere on that scale?

There is another tension: when someone writes a comment, are they writing that comment with sole reference to the original piece of content, or are they sensitive to the context of there being intervening comments?  Or is there another scale, and where on the scale is the correct/conscientious place for the commenter to be?  (Here’s why the mile-marker idea shines: it is both unreasonable to expect a commenter to read a preceding set of 384 comments, and reasonable for a blog author who is interesting in fostering something that be called a conversation to expect a commenter to at least be up to speed on where the conversation is at the point in time they come to comment as the understanding of the topic in hand will hopefully have moved on from that implicit in the original article – so the mile-marker allows the commenter to quickly go some way to reconciling these two states so as not to embarrass themself when they write the comment.)

Another tension: between whom is the conversation?  Is it between the blog author and the combined body of the readership, so more or less a Q&A?  Is it between a group of people who already self-identify as a group, with their own established shared discourse, their own means of naming themselves, etc?  If so, where does the author fit in – hapless supervisor?  Babysitter?  Careless troll-feeder?  What does this mean for the nature of the conversation?

Another possible source of tension: is the author of the piece of web content the controller of the entire forum for commentary, and are they clearly able to exercise this control?  Or is the editorial control for the commentary the responsibility of someone else (as in the case of a newspaper article)?

Why is commentary allowed?  Is it a pretence at democracy, or is the author actually interested in things commenters might say, as opposed to the weight of commenters who may say it?  (Democracy ain’t qualitative.)  Is the author really interested in furthering a discussion that is greater than themselves?

How do commenters identify themselves?  To what degree are they projecting their own egos in a given situation?  (This could, possibly, be measured by determining whether a commenter is saying anything factually new or ideologically different to anything else that had theretofore been expressed in a particular comment thread.)

How do comments end – some kind of realisation by someone that makes all other comments moot?  Or do they just fizzle out?  (Don’t they pretty much always just fizzle out?)

What about an article that’s a year old but still relevant – what does it mean when a commenter writes a comment then?  Does the consideration that the author probably won’t see any comment against such an old article mean anything?  What about the future, when it’ll be common to come upon blog posts that are fifty years old yet still with commentary open?  When does the notion of interactivity die?

It’s clear that in order to rein comments in, this stuff cannot be left open to chance.

Re: the mile-marker idea, I had thought of the concept of a comment chorus, whereby comments didn’t comprise consequential posts after the article, but instead comprised a wiki that subsequent commenters could edit (with, naturally, an undo admin function!), the sum-total of which would be a kind of meta-article that would show “what we’ve learnt”.  Commenters’ names would be listed, but would be separated from their individual contributions to the chorus.  Consensus, if one could be reached, would be left like a residue for all to see, and see quickly.

I think the matter of identity in online commentary is actually the elephant in the room of this discussion, and I’ll write about that in a subsequent post.

So, comments? (Or comments about comments?)