Toward a comprehensive set of expectations for commenters

I made a joke on Twitter earlier about how a lot of Internet commenters might fail a Turing test.

Ha ha, but there’s a a sad truth in the joke. I’ve written about comments before, but one thing I’ve been trying to figure out is what expectations we should have for our commenters. I’m not talking rules here: most sites already have plenty of rules about what we will and won’t allow. Rather, I’m talking about the kind of behavior we WANT our commenters to engage in, rather than the behavior we DON’T WANT them to engage in.

Clay Shirky talks about this at length in his essay: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.

And we do need to empower members of the community to create their own standards; this isn’t just our community. But it is useful to set a baseline. How about:

• Be civil. Don’t say things to someone or about someone that you wouldn’t say in their presence.
• Be honest. That means more than just not lying, it also covers half-truths and evasions.
• Be yourself. If you post as an anonymous coward then we won’t take you nearly as seriously as if you’re clearly a real person.
• Add value to the comment threads you take part in. Look at blogs like Gizmodo and Jalopnik. They have well-informed, generally useful comments. There’s some level of idiocy, and that’s OK. Sometimes it’s even entertaining. But it’s not nearly as bad as it would be on, say, Digg. One of the reason the commenters behave is the judicious use of the ban hammer and that might not be the model we want to use, but it does work.
• When you’re being provocative, do it for reason. Rather than writing things for shock value, try to enlighten and inform your fellow commentariat.
• Tread lightly. Some threads feel like a barroom, while others feel like a church. Be mindful of those tones, and don’t disrupt them needlessly.
• Lastly, another don’t: Don’t be a troll. Nuff said.

So what would you add to these expectations? Am I being overzealous on some of these?

Don’t forget, comments work both ways

An interesting post on the Online Journalism Blog about the dangers of ignoring comments.

The lesson: You do so at your peril.

I’m not sure if this is a British thing or a newspaper thing. I don’t know many places that wouldn’t even bother to post such comments, though I do know many that would simply ignore it. Or, worse yet, not even bother to read it.

The commenters aren’t just addressing each other; sometimes they’re addressing us, as well. And maybe they’re wrong or biased. But maybe they’re right. It’s our responsibility to make sure we figure out which is the case, and if we’re wrong, we need to fix it quickly.

Otherwise, we could find ourselves making enemies.

Commenting on comments

There was some flap a couple of weeks ago when news/gossip site Gawker suggested that newspapers stop allowing comments.

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.