Robert Scoble caused a stir yesterday with a post on how tech bloggers are failing our readers. We all chase the same stories, get spun like a top by the PR machine, and can’t sustain a conversation about a single topic for more than a few days before we all rush to the next shiny object.
I caught him on video at the (surprisingly snoozy) Fortune Brainstorm conference. He pines for the old days of blogging, before comments were taken over by trolls. He seems to think the trolls all came from Digg and should go back there. More likely, it is just a sign that blogging is attracting a bigger audience
The problem is, as he put it in his post:
Our commenting systems really suck. . . . Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.
It’s not only that. There was a time when a good idea (like a cheap Web tablet) would be chewed on for a month by the blogosphere, going back and forth between different bloggers, and getting refined along the way. We’re all slaves to the news cycle now, talking about the same thing for a day or two, and then moving on. But does it have to be this way?
I’d be happy just to HAVE comments on my blog. LOL… feel free to troll away on my blog:
http://www.MyAwesomeBlog.com
I think part of what Scoble says is non-sense. It’s entirely up to you to keep the discussion going on the subjects you deem important. There are so many different ways to do that. If you make an 2 pages essay and then you just swallow it in a the sea of twitters, friendfeeds and whatever, what do you expect? You are the cause, you choose how to communicate, nobody else.
We’ll have new standards for comments using Open Social or some other industry standard for user identification and user management. Cause commenters need to be held accountable of the comments they post especially if/when people are trolling.
I don’t think the big supported blogs have become a slave to the news cycle so much as they’ve become a slave to traffic and advertisers.
Here’s how you solve it. Moderate your comments. Just that simple.
Works at my Blog.
No trolls.
I completely agree. I’m a dedicated believer in using heavy-handed comment/forum moderation to build better communities. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve seen the results.
Down with trolls!
A lot of the things you are talking about Robert we are trying to solve at fav.or.it - come check out the latest version - we are really focusing on the community feel around comments now - 12k+ comments per day we aggregate and growing!
sent from: fav.or.it [FID784688]
I want to add a couple of thoughts, which might or might not have been already mentioned by previous commenters (which would ironically illustrate one of my points):
You forgot to mention the one big thing that has changed over time: VOLUME, both volume of comments as well as volume of blog postings. Let me explain:
- I remember the days when I was posting a comment on TC or CG and was one of a few commenters. The comments were usually short and to the point, often funny, and you saw the same names coming up a lot. It felt intimate, like a small community of commenters.
- Nowadays I rarely post comments on either TC or CG, mostly because I don’t think you can get through the other hundreds of comments anymore. Five minutes after a blog post has been publicized at least 75 people whose fulltime job it seems to be to post comments on blogs have already replied to it by the time I open it, some with essay-long replies (and yes I know I’m not doing any better here).
- The sheer volume of comments being written makes it impossible to get involved in a conversation. At the time of writing this comment the text of the comments is about 17 times as long as the original posting, which means instead of spending 2 minutes to read the post and comment on it you would have to spend over half an hour to get through it. That’s more than the average person wants to spend on a post.
- And this is not even one of the blog posts with a lot of comments. Especially on TC the number of comments goes quickly into the hundreds in a matter of hours, it’s simply too much and overwhelming.
- Last but not least the number of blog postings itself has increased so much that even though I am only subscribed to around 20 blogs and I read blogs every day I am still 7 days behind by now. By the time I get to a post and comment on it, the story is already “cold” and nobody is going to read my comment on it anyway. And even if, I’m definitely not coming back to check for replies on my comment, since I’m still trying to catch up with the other 337 unread blog posts from the last days.