I have been thinking a lot about the commentosphere recently.  I’ve delved into the world a bit as well, leaving a handful of comments on my favorite blogs.  But I keep running into the same problems.  I would consider myself a fairly fanatical blog reader, twitter user, and a social media addict in general.  But I’m a user at heart.  A reader.  I have a lot of opinions and I love talking about them.  But I often feel left out of conversations on blogs - even when I know as much about what everyone is talking about as anyone else.  Why don’t I participate more?  Here are three reasons:

1. Comment conversations are totally disorganized with no clear format or structure. There is no clear entry point for casual users like me.  What should my comment be about?  The post?  A related article I read?  A response to a previous comment?  Do I need to read all the previous comments before leaving mine?  Or can I just comment away despite the fact that someone else might have said/asked the same exact thing?
2. Comment sections tend to be dominated either by trolls or power users who comment a LOT.  The presence of trolls tells me: “don’t bother.”  And the power user dominance says: “Do you really belong in this conversation?” Sometimes I don’t know.
3. There is no mechanism to connect conversations across articles. As a result each article or blog post is an island unto itself with dialogues that have a short shelf life.  Which again makes the investment of time not worth it when I’m not sure if I really want to come back to that post to comment again.

To be clear, people that do leave comments often get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of it.  But it seems to me that you need to make a certain minimum level of commitment before you start seeing benefits like fulfilling conversations, new friends, etc.  And that minimum level of commitment is simply way too high for an enormous majority of web users.

That’s why we are building the qwidget: to unleash the vast human desire to communicate among casual users that has been stifled by the problems unique to commenting.

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.

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?

Yesterday, Loic Le Meur announced a new feature for Seesmic’s video commenting toolset.  Now video comments on blogs can be threaded in the same way that numerous services and plugins allow for text comments.  Immediately, Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch accused Seesmic of hijacking comments.  Video responses will get lost in the Seesmic player, he reasoned, effectively hiding them from all but the most curious readers.  Loic immediately responded saying that Seesmic was simply presenting users with more options and that they will release new versions of the Seesmic video comment systems based on user response.

However, Erick’s fear that only people who put in a lot of effort will follow the conversation in full is dead on.  But that fact of the blogosphere certainly didn’t just arise with Seesmic’s new features.  It’s true for all comments.  Every blogger on the web will attest to the fact that only a tiny percentage of their readers bother leaving comments.  Some will explain this away as an indication that most people just aren’t interested in participating.  Most are too lazy, shy, or private.  When asked why they don’t participate in more online conversations, most people may even give one or all of these excuses.

Call me crazy, but this kind of person doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve ever met.  Far from being reluctant to tell you what they think, most people LOVE it.  No matter where you go in the world, if you ask people questions about their opinions in the right way, they will answer with relish.  It doesn’t just apply to the web’s power users who make the most use of today’s comment features.  I have seen it with everyone from corporate executives in New York to motorcycle taxi drivers in Cambodia.

Furthermore, people enjoy talking so much that if you listen, they will often lather you with attention, respect and occasionally physical attraction.  Remember that scene in High Fidelity when John Cusack’s character confesses that his secret to picking up women is asking questions and acting interested?  Millions of people pay therapists handsomely to ask them questions and listen.  Dale Carnegie’s ridiculously brilliant yet horribly misnamed classic on interpersonal relationships “How to Win Friends and Influence People” lists six ways to make people like you.  In a way, each is about making people feel comfortable expressing themselves:

• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Smile.
• Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other man’s interest.
• Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

People are even more primed to talk about about an issue when they have just consumed some kind of relevant content.  It’s one of the reasons why we teach literature in school.  After reading the Scarlet Letter, we’re more willing to talk about societal rules, desire, judgment and punishment.  And whether you like Michael Moore or not, you can not watch one of his films without wanting to talk about it afterwards.  This dovetails nicely with the fact that just about anyone who creates content, bloggers especially, wants their work to inspire people to think and to talk.

So the question remains: why do such a minority of blog readers interact through the comments?  Why is the blogosphere with all its promise, power and scope limited to a conversation of the few?

Perhaps it’s because the right circumstances for dialogue are not being met.  While they do fill a necessary role for a type of discourse, comment sections are noisy.  They are disorganized.  Like a loud cafeteria, they can be intimidating for the more shy, rushed and passive of us.  To really benefit from conversation in a cafeteria, you need to do a bit of work to find the most interesting table with friendly, inviting people.  And you need to invest in listening to everyone and asking the right questions.  It’s a lot of work for the average person with not a lot of time to spare.

However, those average people are still human and deep down would like to express themselves if given the right opportunity.  With the Qwidget, we are trying to identify and replicate the scenario in which a normally passive blog reader goes the extra mile and engages with the blog’s content and their fellow readers on a deeper level.  In pursuit of this goal, here are some of the things we’re thinking about:

• There is something about being asked the right question at the right time that gets people to open up, no matter how shy they are.
• Most people won’t talk if no one is paying attention.
• Most people see commenting as more laborious than it’s worth.
• It’s annoying that on any issue there are usually several separate places where people are commenting.  Take yesterday’s Seesmic and Techcrunch squabble for example.  There are concurrent conversations on Friendfeed (in several places), Twitter (ditto), Techcrunch, Loic Le Meur’s blog, Duncan Riley’s blog and no doubt countless others.  That is annoying and inefficient.

The ability to leave comments on blogs is one of the hallmarks of the blogosphere.  Indeed, it is one of the best features of blogs.  However, isn’t there a better way to encourage engagement with more than just a fraction of a blog’s readers?  How many of us have time to join a conversation in which most of the comments are nonsense or in jokes that we don’t get?

Do you have the time to catch up with these comments and make a meaningful contribution?

What if there was a better way to quickly jump into a meaningful conversations about content and issues you cared about?