Make PressDemocrat.com Better, Pt 2: Improve Comments, Improve Conversations

By Andrew Meyer on September 17, 2008

If you read Pt 1, you'll know that I'm a lifelong Press Democrat reader and interested in making PressDemocrat.com better. In the post, I talked about four areas where PD.com could make their site more Internet friendly.

This post is going to look at a more defined area on PressDemocrat.com: Comments. I've heard plenty grumblings (here, here and here) about the conversations in the comments section on PD.com. If you improve the comments section, it should improve the conversations. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Location, location, location
2) Timely conversation
3) Community moderation, including voting and flagging
4) Etiquette, moderation rules up front and center
5) Reader profiles (i.e. accountability)

Now with more explanation:

1) Location, location, location

On all online PD articles, you'll find a comment section that shows the ten most recent comments the article has received. However, readers don't leave comments on the article's page, instead they have to click "Post a comment | View all comments" and transport over to a forum discussion page for the particular article. The forum discussion page let's readers add they're own comment or read all the comments beyond the ten most recent.

I think this is a huge no-no since it quickly sets a negative tone. When you put commenters in a dark, dirty section of town with no police patrol, road maintenance, etc, the dark, dirty section gets darker and dirtier.

Site comments Forum comments

2) Timely conversation

PressDemocrat.com pulls its articles from its print edition, The Press Democrat newspaper. Newspapers are timely. You have a whole bunch writers, reporters, editors, etc, working around deadlines to get content off to the press in an extremely timely manner.

Reader commenting should also be timely. What do I mean? Commenting on specific online article should be open for 1-2 weeks and than closed. This will help comments be on the same time wave-length as the news article, which, in turn, helps keep comments on-topic.

3) Community moderation (voting and flagging)

I don't see Press Democrat writers rolling up their sleeves and participating or moderating reader comments. I'm pretty sure most of them sneer at reader comments polluting their peerless journalism.

So, how do you moderate comments so that you get smarter, more on-topic comments? Easy. Let the community moderate. All you have to do is provide readers with an up arrow and down arrow (a la Disqus commenting system) and readers can click the down arrow for off-topic/inappropriate comments and the up arrow for conversation improving comments.

Ok, but how does clicking an arrow moderate comments? Let me explain. You can set a commenting system, like Disqus, to filter out all comments with -5 points or whatever negative number you choose. This means when five people click the down arrow the comment would be filtered out. Or, you can setup Disqus to show the highest rated comments at the top of the comment thread and the lowest rated comments at the bottow of the comment thread.

Also, some commenting systems allow you to simply "flag" a comment for an official moderator to review instead of letting the community readers vote comments up or down.

4) Etiquette, moderation rules up front and center

All the big sites have to deal with comment trolls leaving hateful, spammy, and/or inappropriate comments. This is why you need to put your site's commenting etiquette and moderation rules up front and center. It lets your community know the rules. This does two things: 1) Makes your future moderating clear and understood and 2) Empowers your reader community to self-moderate like Wikipedia (that is, if they have voting and flagging tools).

It makes it a whole lot easier to deal with angry trolls after their comment has been removed if all you have to do is point to up-front-and-center moderation rules. It's even easier if you let community readers moderate off the same up-front-and-center moderation rules. Think about it.

5) Reader profiles (i.e. accountability)

Reader profiles tie everything together. They provide accountability by showing all comments the reader has left on articles. They allow the user to build positive commenting reputation (especially if you're using Disqus' points-based user profiles).

Reader profiles can also tie other things the reader does on the Internet like their blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc, to their profile. I think this is extremely important as it adds an extra layer of accountability to a profile. So, instead of requiring info for advertising optimizing, PressDemocrat.com should ask new commenters if they want to add their Facebook or blog to their profile. Optional, of course.

This is the current required info when new commenters create a PD.com profile in all its advertising-optimizing glory:

I'm really trying to start a strong conversation here to "Make PressDemocrat.com Better" so feel free to use the Save/Share button below to share with friends, etc.

If you'd like to contact me, shoot me an email at andrew@buzzyeah.com. Or, feel free to leave a comment below (I'll be reblogging awesome comments).

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