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Adventures in comments, part 2

Prior to developing the Qwidget, we at Chat Ventures produced and distributed the triple-Webby Award winning web series, Hometown Baghdad.  The problems with trying to have an intelligent, rewarding online dialogue became really apparent a few times during the process of encouraging a community of viewers to dialogue.  We had a group of great people writing back and forth, arguing and making jokes with our Iraqi cast members and crew in the comments of our blog.  But we also had our share of problems with trolls, inside jokes that turned newbies off, etc.  I also had to give up entirely when it came to encouraging rewarding exchanges in the comments of our videos on YouTube.  We eventually took our series off of YouTube due to the pending television distribution of our project.  However, I wanted to share a small sampling of some of the comments on one of our episodes, “Songs of Pain.”  The video was featured on the front page of YouTube and was seen by about 800,000 people.  So it was obviously something that resonated with people.  They were interested in the content.  Some were moved to write me letters expressing sympathy and concern.  But less than a half of one percent of all views resulted in a comment.  A pretty sad rate.  But totally understandable when comments like those below are the norm. Some are random, some are inane, some are scary and some are just totally off topic.  With so much good content out there, why isn’t there a better way to get people talking about it in a fulfilling way?

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    I understand that comment threads can lead to lots of craziness but there are too many examples too cite of fantastic conversations and dialogues that happen on blogs. are you suggesting that commenting should be replaced with something else?
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    hey steve... i totally agree with what you said....my point is that there are different ways that different people interact. Some people blog. That's their communication method. Some twitter. Some just email. Some don't even do that. But I believe that there are a lot of people who are primed to join the conversation so to speak but the free for all of web commenting (as brilliant as it can occasionally be) puts them off. I think and hope that the Qwidget will always live happily next to regular comments. Bud lite was not created because budweiser wasn't working. It's because there was a whole group of people who wanted beer but not the calories. Hmm. Did i just suggest that the qwidget was the bud lite of web dialogue tools? Oops. :)
 
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