A few days ago, Carlos Sanchez of the Waco Tribune Herald wrote a column entitled, “Anonymous online venom needs to stop.” The piece was a response to an onslaught of offensive comments left on articles about a recent criminal trial in Waco. Sanchez does a great job of listing the exact issues we at Chat Ventures faced with our web documentary series Hometown Baghdad:

• Interactivity is essential to the growth of a site.
• Interactivity can drive revenue by increasing traffic and engagement.
• News sites, in particular, can use interactivity to further their goal to be a venue for public discourse.
• Comment sections often bring out the worst in people.

Toward the end of his column, Sanchez promises, “We at the Trib will explore how technology can help us police our sites.” You can probably guess the response. One commenter, Fred, says, “Pure political censorship. Carlos Sanchez has been “bought and paid for” by the City of Waco.”

The problem is this: large web publishers can’t expect anonymous, unstructured comment sections to stay positive and constructive.  Maintaining a consistent presence in the community, posting clear community guidelines and enforcing those guidelines can go a long way but that requires an enormous investment of time.  Furthermore, those tactics don’t always work.  Some suggest enforcing registration and confirmation processes.  However, comment sections are already too chaotic and time consuming for the majority of users and those extra hurdles can dissuade an already weary user base.

The solution has to be a different way to encourage engagement that’s more inclusive of casual users and less fraught with hostility than comment sections.  The Qwidget is our best shot at solving this problem.  Find out how it does so at www.qwidget.com.