{"id":641520,"date":"2013-02-06T12:55:53","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T17:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=224221"},"modified":"2013-02-06T12:55:53","modified_gmt":"2013-02-06T17:55:53","slug":"fixing-online-comments-how-do-you-automate-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/641520","title":{"rendered":"Fixing online comments \u2014 how do you automate trust?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The social web has been around for more than a decade now, but even after all that time, no one has quite figured out how to fix online comments. Some bloggers have given up trying<\/a> and don’t allow comments at all, while others have turned their communities over to Facebook, only to find that doing so makes things worse instead of better<\/a>. Jeff Atwood, one of the founders of the online geek community Stack Overflow, has launched a new commenting system he hopes will help solve<\/a> one of the crucial problems — namely, trust. But is it even possible to automate that process?<\/p>\n

Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow<\/a> and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade<\/a>. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.<\/p>\n

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail<\/h2>\n

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse<\/a>, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue. <\/p>\n

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round<\/a> of financing).<\/p>\n

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand<\/a> within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests<\/a> that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.<\/p>\n

\"Discourse<\/a><\/p>\n

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically<\/a> — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community<\/a>. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums<\/a> and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.<\/p>\n

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms<\/h2>\n

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses<\/a>), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,”<\/a> because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations<\/a>, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site<\/a>, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.<\/p>\n

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself<\/a> as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently<\/a>). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.<\/p>\n

Disclosure<\/strong>: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.<\/em><\/p>\n

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock \/ Sam72<\/a> and Yan Arief Purwanto<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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