Time To Rebrand Comments by Andrew Losowsky.
From the post:
It’s time to stop using the c-word. “The comment section” has moved in people’s minds from being an empty box on a website into a viper-filled pit of hell. We need to start again. We need to do better.
This change is necessary because most publishers haven’t understood the value of their communities and so have starved them of resources. We all know what happened next: Trolls and abusers delighted in placing the worst of their words beneath the mastheads of respectable journalism, and overwhelmed the conversation. “Don’t read the comments” became a mantra.
Little surprise that some publishers have chosen to close down, or highly restrict, their comment spaces.
In 2016, publishers are going to make a mental shift away from “comments” and towards “contributions.” They’re going to do this because engaging their communities towards contributions is the best way to surface exclusive content, to get closer to the audience and their needs, to make people feel more connected to the brand, to correct errors, to add new voices, and to get ahead of stories. The business, the journalism, and the ethics of the newsroom all depend on it.
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Andrew has several questions that will confront publishers in the transition from comments to contributions.
In addition to those, I would pose this one:
Will editors arise to extract and shape contributions from users?
The inability of comments, much like email discussion lists, to organize themselves into useful threads is well known. Whatever name is given to user submissions, I don’t know of any evidence that will change in the future.
We have all seen “me too” comments, along with comments that repeat content found earlier in the thread, not to mention asides between readers that have little if any relevancy to the original story.
Imagine an editor that dedupes facts submitted in comments, eliminates “me too” and “me against” comments, asides in threads, and who creates annotations to the original story, crediting readers as appropriate.
Andrew is the project lead at The Coral Project, which:
We are creating open-source tools and resources for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism.
We also collect, support, and share practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web.
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Editors can play a critical role in cultivating and building communities around journalistic content. Contributors will be distinguished by their analysis and/or content being incorporated and credited to them as sources.
Anticipating push back from the “I want to say whatever I want” crowd, be mindful that:
The right to speak does not imply an obligation to listen.
Communities, just like individuals, can choose what is worthy of their attention and what is not.