Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times has taken the internet to task for the state of the web commentosphere. The charge is a familiar one. Newspapers in particular often create good content but they fall short of maintaining a community of intelligent discourse. Heffernan makes a good point when she says: “Someone should be paying more attention, especially since online newspaper commenters as a whole seem to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism.”

To that, I’d add that we all, including non commenters, have something to give. We all can become part of online journalism to an extent. The first barrier to entry just needs to be lower. And mechanisms need to be in place that limit the ability of ranters to derail conversations without preventing new, casual users from participating. Heffernan hints at this: “Perhaps the comments have become so reader-unfriendly, in part, because of the conventions of the Web-comment form.” She’s right. And we built the Qwidget to change the conventions of web dialogue.

A few months ago, respected tech columnist John C. Dvorak wrote an interesting piece for PC Magazine entitled “What’s the Value of Online Comments?“  In it, he complains that most comment sections and forum threads end up getting so off topic and asinine, that they become “an unread mess of nothingness.”  What about the good?  Intersting comments, he writes, “are hard to find, though, since they are usually buried beneath an avalanche of shallow opinion, trivia, and epithets.”

What to do to control the onslaught?  Dvorak recommends heavy (read: time intensive) moderation that only allows comments that abide by the following rules:

1) Comments should highlight factual errors and ask that they be noted and corrected.
2) Comments should add additional information or links to enhance the value of a post.
3) Comments should offer a well-reasoned alternative perspective.

Part of me agrees completely.  A perfect world it would be if every comment was useful enough to be included in one of those three categories.  However these rules disregard important aspects of the pain that publishers and users feel about the current state of commenting.

The Paradox of Publisher Pain

What about the part of me that publishes content?  When I was writing the Hometown Baghdad blog and moderating the comments, I may have chafed at the tangential rants that some folks left every day but I would never have considered holding each comment to Dvorak’s high standards.   Every web publisher knows that people who participate in any way - through comments, submitting content, forums, etc. - spend more time on your site, return more often and tend to be more passionate about your content than other more passive users.  A publisher’s goal should be to convert casual users into active users, not restrict the enthusiastic.

A paradox emerges: publishers encourage participation but increased levels of commenting lead to the chaos that turns off casual users.  As a result, a small vocal minority dominates the commentosphere and publishers are back to where they started.

The Frustration of User Pain

How would Dvorak’s rules affect the part of me that likes to read an article or watch a video and talk about what I think about it?  I may not have “a well-reasoned alternative perspective” but I may want to say something anyway.  If I watch “Weeds” with my friends, I may want to ask them, “Could you ever picture yourself selling drugs?”  And they are more likely to give their thoughts on that than they are to come up with an on the spot analysis about the portrayal of drug dealers in mainstream media.  However, a comment section about such personal beliefs would likely degenerate into a mess of accusations, insults, and tangential rants.  In other words, it would eventually have the opposite effect of the one intended.   Yet another paradox.

A Proposed Solution

We built the Qwidget to resolve these issues.  Our mission was to create value for web publishers by encouraging casual users to participate without overwhelming others with the resulting deluge of sharing.  So you’ll notice a few things about the ways user’s participate with the Qwidget:

• The Qwidget starts with a question and yes, no and maybe radio buttons.  We want the first step to participation to be a baby step.  A quick dip of the toes into the pool of engagement.
• When an answer is clicked, the Qwidget opens and users are asked “Why?”  This gives users something to say.  I often find myself moved by a blog post or video but I lose interest before I can answer the question, “What exactly do I want to say about this?”
• Text answers to the Why? question are limited to 200 characters.  This keeps each answer short and sweet.  Two hundred is a bit of an arbitrary cutoff number but we’ve found that it is usually enough to express a simple opinion.  If Qwidget users and publishers disagree, we can always change the character limit.
• Whenever a text answer is given, other users can send a private message to the originator of the thought.  The private nature of replies limits the amount of noise that’s generated by each new conversation thread.  It will also decrease the temptation to flame people in public.
• These private messages can be read and replied to by users the next time they answer a Qwidget question wherever they find one.

Hopefully, if you have a blog, you’ll sign up to be a beta user for the Qwidget.  Go here to get started.

Read Write Web recently covered a new online commenting tool built by Jim Jeffers called Encouraged Commentary.  As RWW writes, “The new commenting features … [allows] users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.”  There are a few other great features that will make those of us predisposed to commenting more likely to do so. The potential for Jim’s idea is big because he is letting other developers freely tinker with the code. Serious kudos on that.

Encouraged commentary could work especially well with Jason Santa Maria’s idea for comment milemarkers, as Jim himself points out.  I have talked about milemarkers on this blog as well.  I hope that companies like Disqus and IntenseDebate begin to add features like these.

While commenting is only done by a small minority of web users, it needs to be improved. And RWW’s Rick Turoczy obviously agrees.  He begins the coverage of Encouraged Commentary with the following: “Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation.  Why? It’s not designed to facilitate conversations.”

Despite the room for improvement, there is obviously a need for a different mechanism for blog engagement.  Good content amasses wide audiences which creates potential for great conversations.  To really capitalize on these opportunities, both financial and social, we need to pull more people into rewarding dialogue with tools that focus conversation and eliminate excess noise.  The Qwidget is our best shot at doing just that.

A full 14% of internet comments are no more than cursing and threats.  That’s what Korean News Service Dong-A Ilbo reported today on the english language version of their website.  In a study that Dong-A undertook with National Internet Development Agency of Korea, they scoured through 320,000 comments left on articles on the three biggest web portals in Korea.

Among their amazing findings are these further indications of the failure of web comments to capture healthy online dialogue:

• “Among derogatory comments, cussing and threats accounted for 65.3 percent, while repeated postings of the same comments to prevent users from reading the posts of others took up 36.4 percent.”
• “Five percent of frequent posters accounted for as much as 30.5 percent of all Internet comments.”
• “Only 2.5 percent of readers among Web users post comments.”
• “Only 0.12 percent of users reading online news reports generated a third of all Internet comments”
• “The top five percent of those posting comments wrote 44.2 percent of the Internet comments considered derogatory.”

Even as someone who can be down on the online commenting, these stats still managed to surprise me.

Most of your visitors don’t leave comments on your site.  That goes without saying.  But one interesting related question is will they take some other sort of action.  Can you entice them to participate in a dialogue on your site by offering an easier way to initiate conversations than diving right away into the chaotic commentosphere?

A quick look at a two websites suggests that users are more willing to interact on publisher web sites than the usual absence of comments suggests.

On Download.com’s blog, The Download Blog, there is an article about Google taking Chrome out of beta. The article accumulated a whopping 100 comments in the few days since it was published.  However, in the same amount of time, over 10,000 people answered a Polldaddy poll that accompanied the article.  For every commenter, there were 100 people who clicked the poll.  These are people who were moved enough to take an action based on their opinion.  In that moment of motivation, Download.com lost an opportunity to engage them further by offering another simple way of increasing their participation.

In another example, the celebrity site Oceanup.com posts pictures of the sisters of famous actresses with the question: who is the cutest? While only 60 readers left comments with their thoughts, over 18,000 people weighed in on a poll that accompanied the post.  In this case, 300 times more readers answered the poll than left a comment.  Among these 18,000 people who took initiative to express themselves, how many more would have taken another simple step if one was offered?

The Qwidget was designed to capitalize on these missed opportunities.

Note: To all the bloggers signing up to test the Qwidget, I apologize for not being able to release it you sooner.  We are fixing a few stability/usability issues before opening up our doors.

Jason Santa Maria, a web designer for Happy Cog Studios and A List Apart, started a recent post with a thought that will ring true for many of us blog readers:

I go to a website and read an article. Man, that was really great. I’d like to comment and ask the author a question. I scroll down… 384 comments. Ugh. Screw this.

His post goes on to suggest a great way to help readers sort through the “comment wasteland” that inevitably follows posts on popular blogs: Milemarkers.  Jason’s concept involves bloggers or some type of community manager reading through the comments and entering a “milemarker” type comment that would highlight important questions raised up until that point.  These would be graphically distinguished from other comments and would link back to the original questions posed by readers with links to relevant responses and other blog posts.  Milemarkers would thereby help readers easily scan comments, picking out only the most valuable contributions.

Example of a Milemarker

Jason concludes with a thought that speaks to everything that went into building the Qwidget: “Good conversation can happen, but we need to give people the tools to make it a useful experience.”  I think Jason’s idea is a fantastic way to make the commenting experience better.  I would love to see Disqus, IntenseDebate, SezWho or JS-Kit incorporate it ASAP.

However, I think it, like those services, will mostly appeal to those of us who already leave the occasional blog comment.  In other words, it appeals to an infinitesimally small fraction of web users.  As Jason himself puts it, “I only have so much available cognitive time I want to invest before participating in a conversation.”

One good question to consider is: For the average user, how much of that limited cognitive time is spent on thinking of a way to begin participating?  Just as often as I see a glut of comments and click away, I read a great article that makes me think and, with lack of immediate inspiration to say something back, I move on.  In that quick instant, bloggers and web publishers in general squander an opportunity to capture greater and greater levels of reader participation.  I liken it to this common situation: You’re at a party.  You see someone that looks intriguing or you overhear an interesting comment.  And before you can think of some cool way to open up a conversation with that person, the window of opportunity closes and you move on.

With the Qwidget, our primary goal is to make the first move towards participation a baby step.

CNN reports that Barack Obama “has said he’ll have a five-day online comment period before signing any non emergency legislation.

This is as lofty a sentiment as they come.  Let the people have their say.  It sums up our mission as a company.   But let’s assume for a moment that Obama and his to-be-named national CTO will employ a comment system similar to the ones we see on blogs, YouTube, and web forums.  Now let’s imagine that President Obama is about to sign a piece of “non emergency” legislation into place regarding a hot button issue like abortion, gun control, or affirmative action.

You can only imagine where an unstructured conversation on one of those topics would go at a national level.  You would have so many soap box rants, insults, and other distractions that rational discourse would be absolutely drowned out.  To elicit positive conversation, you need to foster just the right sense of community and etiquette.  And what better tool to do that than the Qwidget? It could limit people’s ability to shout over others and its emphasis on private messaging will reduce the back and forth noise that discourages casual users from participating.

Most importantly, however, the Qwidget could allow the conversation about the legislation to span the entire web. Other publishers could take Obama’s question, presumably “Should I sign legislation X?”, and let their constituencies weigh in from their own sites. You could have people on big news websites, on the US government’s web site and on millions of blogs all talking about the same issue together through the qwidget. In this way, the administration could be certain that they were getting a truly representative sample of the public’s opinion on an issue.

Just a thought.

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.