Haphazard Rhapsody

Connecticut’s own New Haven Independent recently underwent some major revisions in how it manages the comments sections on its website, which sparked a larger discussion about comments in general on the Internet (WNPR’s story on it went over some of the new rules).

After a two-week hiatus to re-evaluate their approach, the Independent‘s staff decided to allow comments again with some restrictions:

We have come to understand that the comments section is no Hyde Park, no open forum for free-speech spouting. Our comment stream will be curated by experienced editors. Some comments – we expect far fewer than previously – will be posted; some will be forwarded to our writers to consider the input for follow-up reporting; some will be trashed for violating the rules; and some will be regretfully deleted with second guessing about whether we have made the right decision.

Because we freely admit that deciding which comment to publish and which comment to zap is a judgment call (much like the judgment call editors make when assigning or working on a story). We’re pretty sure we’ll miss a few in the months ahead. Nobody’s perfect.

Their conclusion is that comments sections need editing. Allowing it to be free-for-all is in no way conducive to facilitating a discussion.

The basic problem that the Independent grapples with is this: comments sections are terrible. And I don’t just mean that people who comment on them can be misinformed or obnoxious, though they can be. I mean the structure of any comments section is inherently flawed.

Consider what would happen if you had a dozen friends over for a party. You gather in your living room and pose a topic of discussion. As the discussion unfolds, with different people interjecting their various points-of-view, the discussion breaks down into smaller sub-discussions with three or four people, diverging from the original topic widely. It may come back to the original point or it may not. Some people leave the party early. Others arrive late. Topics change course accordingly depending on who is present to argue a certain viewpoint or who is absent.

Conversations are dynamic.

Comments sections are not. They’re entirely linear, one comment after another, top to bottom. Which means conversations have no way of breaking up into smaller sub-topics without having the formatting equivalent of talking over one another (nesting comments has its own limitations). Discussion boards help alleviate this problem by categorizing topics from the outset of the conversation, although finding an off-topic discussion board on the Internet is about as hard as finding a needle in a stack of needles.

Comments sections have no way of integrating people who are new to the topic at hand. Their thoughts are thrown right into the mix regardless of how relevant to what the discussion is about or where it is going. This is another problem comments sections have–they’re organized by the time of posting, which in terms of relevancy tends to be about as useful as picking them randomly out of a hat.

Then there is the biggest problem that comments sections have: many are just noise. Random, unintelligent, sometimes nonsensical babble. I’m not just talking about people who live to troll on other people’s parades. I’m talking about bits and pieces that don’t contribute and are not interested in contributing to what people are talking about. You’ve seen this if you’ve ever read a blog post that makes some big exciting announcement that’s followed by five hundred people saying some version of “Congrats!” and little else. There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment. But it does add clutter.

All that noise is more than just dead weight at the bottom of an article. It’s detrimental to the very purpose of having a comments section in the first place. Even if there are people offering smart and nuanced observations in your comments section, they’ll be drowned out by sheer volume of other comments. No one wants to wade through thousands of comments just to find a few thoughtful remarks. And unless they’re tremendously egotistical and are in the love with the sound of their own typing, people won’t want to contribute to a conversation if it has no impact.

Given what boondoggles comments sections tend to be, I’m amazed at their ubiquity on websites across the Internet. My guess is that it’s become a kind of perfunctory Internet custom, the equivalent of ornate door knockers for websites.

The Independent has at least honed in on part of the problem. You have to cut the noise to make a comments section work. You need to cut out the clutter so that what can make an impact on readers shines through. How you do that is an inherently flawed process. Editing always is. It’s also time-intensive work to comb through all those comments, pulling out weeds.

That’s why it’s so valuable. The Internet already has infinite noise. It needs editors to shape it into something useful.

Alexis Madrigal opines on how kids who grew up with the Internet view the world differently than those who didn’t. I just want to touch on a couple points he makes:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it… Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

This core concept is why there was such swift and powerful public push-back against SOPA and PIPA, two Internet regulation bills recently considered by the United States House and Senate, respectively. To someone my age, those bills looked like an effort to muck around with an integral part of our everyday lives, largely for the benefit of media conglomerates. This fact was lost on its supporters. To people like former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who went so far as to call the Reddit and Wikipedia blackouts an “abuse of power,” they might as well have thought they were tinkering with the equivalent of a super high-tech toaster oven. That is, they still think of the Web as abstract gadgetry, as opposed to something personal.

A second point:

Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)

If calling the notion of a permanent address “absurd” sounds like a stretch to you, consider this: people my age who are all over the place (not least of all because of the current economic environment) often don’t bother with the paperwork of a change of address. If you never know where you’re going to be or how long you’ll be there, it’s too much of a hassle. Better to have one registered permanent address and leave it alone. While I was working with FEMA, one of my co-workers told me she had lived in half a dozen different places over the course of her life but only had her permanent address changed once. Which means, most of the time, that permanent address that was on some file somewhere was meaningless.

If having a permanent address is going to quickly become meaningless for more and more of us, then having any kind of governance based on it is not smart.