Web comment meeting

Someone just reminded me about this College Humor video that imagines a business meeting attended by internet commenters.  I have to warn you, the language can be pretty offensive.  But it’s dead on.  And the problem that it brings up is exactly what we’re trying to solve with the Qwidget.  Normally, I’d just embed it, but since it’s so NSFW, I’m just going to link to it here.

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.

Update: The Qwidget is back up and running smoothly.

On March 26th of this year, I gave a presentation at a luncheon entitled “The Future of the Internet.” (Not to be confused with the great book by Jonathan Zittrain of the same name.) The event, which was hosted by the Center for Policy on Emerging Technology in DC, was fascinating and I was glad to have the opportunity to participate. The title of my talk was “Hometown Baghdad and Beyond: A Case Study in Global Conversations.” I used my time to review some of the lessons we learned about fostering meaningful online conversations while distributing Hometown Baghdad on the web.   It then moved on to touch on how we used those lessons to create the Qwidget.  Check out my slides below:

As you can see, the line from creating and distributing Hometown Baghdad to the creation of the Qwidget is a direct one.  Our mission has always been to create meaningful conversations.  The Qwidget is simply the most recent, and most effective, incarnation of this drive.

[Update: Slideshare seems to have some formatting problems with the slides.  I'll try to get that fixed.]

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.

Is it just me or does anyone else desperately hope that the tiny hobbit-like fossils found in Indonesia do not belong to our human ancestors? I love the idea of a species of three feet tall creatures running around that hunted, used tools, and spoke in their own languages. Some scientists have argued that the fossils belong to humans with a growth disorder.  Bah humbug on those guys.  I’m siding with archaeologist and Associate Professor Mike Morwood of the University of New England who said this:

It is a new species of human who actually lived alongside us, yet were half our size. They were the height of a three-year-old child, weighed around 24 kg and had a brain smaller than most chimpanzees. Even so, they used fire, made sophisticated stone tools, and hunted Stegodon (a primitive type of elephant) and giant rats. We also believe that their ancestors may have reached the island using bamboo rafts. The clear implication is that, despite tiny brains, these little humans were intelligent and almost certainly had language.

AdamThinks.com just added the Qwidget to his latest post and this one is pretty funny.  It’s a riff on that immortal subway prank in which someone takes a wet paint sign, tears it up and tapes them all back together. I agree with Adam when he says, “Whoever first thought to tear off the P and rearrange the words is a genius. So perfect in both form and function, it’s hard to believe the idea ever did not exist.”

Adam has been on a mission to bring a little poetry to the prank and has been creating little bits of absurdist wet paint humor in subways all over New York City.  Here’s my favorite:

He’s now used a Qwidget to pull readers in to give their ideas on new ideas for Wet Paint anagrams.  I went for a reference to the famous SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skit in which Sean Connery keeps mistaking “A petit” for “Ape Tit.”