Yesterday, Gawker announced that newspapers shouldn’t allow comments. It’s a familiar argument and has a grain of truth that makes the whole thing quite tempting:

Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper’s site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.

Gawker takes the easy bait, pointing out a few incendiary examples of comments that are almost poetic in their nonsensical offensiveness. (What was going through the mind of the commenter who left this little nugget of wisdom “W-H-O-R-E” is a question that is almost zen in its impenetrability.) Since there is no value in the newspaper-comment-o-sphere, Gawker says abolish it.

Though I have made similar points about the unfulfilling experience of commenting (here and here), newspapers can’t do away with all forms of reader interactivity for a number of reasons:

• Online dialogue drives pageviews and time spent on site. When people are actively involved in a site, they come back more. They refresh the page to see what others have said. This is an advertising game and the New York Times needs pageviews as badly as the Gawker editors do.
• Allowing the most active and vocal readers to express themselves lets the Times and other papers demonstrate to advertisers that their readers are engaged.
• Comments allow editors to get a near constant stream of feedback. This stream develops value in the aggregate over time. Editors can get a sense of the tastes of their audience and how they are developing over time.

Even Gawker acknowledges that comments are the “life blood” of blogs. However, most blogs have something that the Times does not: a community to curate the conversation. Communities are more likely to develop around blogs because bloggers are more approachable and responsive than newspaper reporters and editors. So readers feel a closer attachment to the content and conversation that ends up on blogs. Furthermore, many blogs with thriving comment sections are directed at particular niches with people that are amenable if not downright interested in conversing with readers with similar interests.

Major newspapers, on the other hand, must face the problem that the social tool of commenting is not well-suited for the type of interactions that happen among an extremely large heterogeneous audience. In this type of environment, it is simply too easy to disrupt intelligent dialogue. And so a small minority of people do exactly that with or without nefarious intent. One often adopted solution is hiring a community moderator that must approve every comment, which has the dubious distinction of solving one problem by creating another. With a moderator holding up comments, the user experience becomes less immediately satisfying for those readers who are adding constructive thoughts.  These users now face a bottleneck holding up the flow of their dialogue. Furthermore, as I’ve already discussed on this blog, commenting online is not well-suited to the average web user anyway.

So should the New York Times and other major newspapers abandon their comment sections? Perhaps. But should they abandon all efforts to have their audience participate in a dialogue around their content? Absolutely not. As the rest of the web becomes more social and users become more accustomed to dialoging online with strangers, this would be tantamount to admitting that they cannot adapt to the new media landscape. The Qwidget solves these problems by making it easier and more intuitive for web dialogue neophytes to get started and minimizing the power that trolls have to disrupt the flow of conversation for everyone else. Expect to see the Qwidget in alpha mode on this blog soon.