Tag Archive for: comments

Killing News Comments Only Solidified Google, Facebook Dominance

/in

We’ve talked a lot about how the trend du jour in online media circles is to ditch the news comment section, then condescendingly pretend this is because the website just really values user relationships. ReCode, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, Popular Science and more have all proclaimed that they just love their on-site communities so much, they’ll no longer allow them to speak. Of course what these sites often can’t admit is that they were too lazy or cheap to cultivate their communities, can’t seem to monetize quality discourse, and don’t really like people pointing out story errors in such a conspicuous location.

Many of these same editors and outlets will (justly) complain how Google and Facebook have hoovered up online ad revenue to the point where operating an independent media outlet is a financial minefield. Only occasionally will you see somebody realize that the process of outsourcing all on-site discourse to social media by killing news comments contributed to the overall problem. Sure, outsourcing the hassles of moderation may have saved you a little time and money, but driving the on-site community away from your website to giant social media platforms contributed to the very dominance you’re now railing against.

That’s something Simon Owens recently did a good job of pointing out in a piece about how killing on-site news comments is a “colossal mistake” that has directly contributed to the social media domination many editors now lament:

Did comments sections invite trollish behavior? Yes. Did moderating that behavior require both editorial and technical resources? Also yes. But deploying these resources was worth the cost, as it would have resulted in publishers maintaining a stronger relationship with their readerships. Instead, much of the news media became commoditized, with news outlets placing more emphasis on drive-by Facebook traffic than serving loyal readers. In pursuing this strategy, publishers placed more distance between themselves and their users, and so they were ill-equipped when digital advertising models collapsed and platforms like Facebook siphoned off their traffic.

While you’d be hard-pressed to find many editors admit it, much of the assault on ye olde news comments was driven by a desire to return to the bygone era of “letters to the editor,” when outlets were able to carefully curate reader response and mute particularly pointed criticism. But if these editors cared even an iota as much about “conversation” and “community” as they claimed, they’d realize that deleting your on-site communities sends a very clear message to these users that they really don’t actually matter. At least not outside obvious, easily-documented advertising metrics.

While many of these same editors were quick to claim that low comment engagement made the hassles of moderation not worth it, Owens does a good job deconstructing that claim and pointing out the benefits of a small but loyal cadre of on-site fans:

Let’s be clear: even the publishers with the best comment moderation still only see a small percentage of their readers convert into on-site commenters. But let’s say only 5 percent of your readers choose to register and comment; those readers will punch far above their weight in terms of driving traffic and revenue to your site. Those are your chief evangelists, your repeat customers, your paying subscribers.

To understand how a small percentage of a publisher’s most loyal users can drive revenue growth, consider The New York Times. Currently, its digital subscribers only account for 3.6 percent of the newspaper’s monthly online audience, and yet that 3.6 percent drove over $ 400 million in subscription revenue in 2018. When you’re dealing with the scale of the internet, catering to your most engaged readers is worth the investment.

Unfortunately this was a lesson lost by many outlets as they shoveled their on-site fans into the maws of social media giants, only to turn around shortly thereafter to complain about Google and Facebook’s insurmountable domination.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt.

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Year At Techdirt

/in

It’s that time again: for our final comments post of 2018, we’re looking back on the comments you voted the funniest and most insightful throughout the year. As usual, we’ve got the top three winners from each category, plus a special outlier that racked up a lot of votes across the two categories combined. For those of you who want to see this week’s winners, here’s first place for insightful, first place for funny, and the double-winner that took second place in both. Now, on to the yearly round-up…

The Most Insightful Comments Of 2018

Back in July, we covered the story of a restaurant that was accused by the local police union of serenading some officers with N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police, only for CCTV footage to reveal that the incident never happened — one employee just mouthed the words from across the restaurant, and the police department itself had to call out the union for lying. This garnered our 2018 first place winner for insightful from an anonymous commenter:

Personal Comment

The other night, my family and I were eating at a hamburger place-type family restaurant. Four cops came in to get their dinner. I was shocked to realize that I suddenly felt LESS safe, not more.

Restaurants aren’t the only reputations cops have ruined.

Our second place winner comes in response to another far more heinous incident of police insanity. In March, after a cop hit a woman’s car at 94mph (on a 50mph road) and killed her infant child, the mother was arrested for negligent homicide on the basis that she didn’t secure the child’s car seat properly. While there’s obviously no way to confirm the expertise claimed by commenter Alexander in responding to the incident, the information was convincing enough to win 2018’s second place spot for insightful:

As an Automotive Engineer who has engineered seats in cars I can tell you for certain that none of them in ordinary vehicles are designed to deal with a 94mph collision. Cars disintegrate at that speed.

Those videos you see for car safety, the super slow motion ones, they occur at ~20mph. Yes, that is how much the seats move at 20mph. At 94mph they disintegrate.

Fastening the straps correctly or not would likely not have changed the outcome at those speeds. The officer is clearly grossly negligent and the mother did not contribute in any significant way to the death of her infant. I say that with confidence of someone who’s signature is still on the approvals for seats still carrying children in cars today.

That cop should have his drivers license cancelled for reckless driving for a decade. If he loses his job, then stiff shit. Then talk about trying him for negligent homicide.

For third place, we head to our post in May about some copyright insanity: a director suing an actor for using a short clip of a movie in her demo reel, calling it an “unauthorized derivative work”. Killercool racked up quite a few funny votes with a quick response, but not as many as the votes that made it 2018’s third place winner for insightful:

I hate to tell you…

If a clip, or even several clips, from your movie is equivalent to seeing your movie, then your movie is bad and you should feel bad.

And now, on to the funny…

The Funniest Comments Of 2018

With all the often-uninformed nonsense flying around on the subject of regulating internet platforms this year, we’ve had plenty of comment-section dust-ups about moderation and free speech. In July, after Senator Mark Warner laid out some detailed ideas about platform regulation — in one of the few incidents of a lawmaker actually giving the issue some real thought and not getting hysterical — one regular commenter’s angry rant about Section 230 led Mike to point out that, without those safe harbors, we wouldn’t be able to let him comment here at all. Regular fixture Thad (and this was back before he created an account) responded to Mike’s point with 2018’s funniest comment of the year:

But there’d also be a downside.

Most of you probably recall in August when voting machines took another lump after an exercise at Defcon where an 11-year-old successfully hacked an ES&S machine and changed vote tallies. An anonymous commenter anticipated their response, offering up 2018’s second place winner for funny:

Voting machine company: “This was a useless test of the machine’s vulnerabilities. Eleven-year-olds can’t vote. So your machines are safe from them getting into and changing any records. “

And if voting machine problems are a perennial story, so too are freakouts about video game violence. In February, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin decided to blame Florida’s recent school shooting on… violent video games. This garnered many responses both flippant and substantive, but one anonymous commenter rose to the top and became 2018’s third place winner for funny:

Minecraft is pretty popular yet I haven’t notice an uptick in preteens applying for construction jobs.

And now, one more…

2018’s Outlier Winner

As per usual, the combined leaderboard — based on the total votes for both insightful and funny — is primarily dominated by high-ranking comments from the individual categories. This year the third place insightful winner topped the combined board thanks to its surfeit of funny votes, while the first place insightful winner came in third by sheer force of insight. But the second place winner for combined votes got there with a pretty equal share of each, despite not having enough of either to even crack the top ten for insightful or funny alone. That’s our outlier this year.

Back in July, following the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, some comments from AT&T executive John Stankey suggested the company might try to wantonly mess with success by changing the HBO formula. His most memorable statement was an odd comparison to child birth, suggesting it would be painful now but rewarding later — leading our anonymous outlier this year to sum up how he could find himself saying such dumb stuff:

The reason Stankey likes to compare childbirth to innovation is because he has zero experience with either.

And with that, we wrap up the 2018 comment season! It’s been fun rounding the winners up every week, and I look forward to what’s to come in 2019 (in our comments moreso than, like, the world in general…)

That’s all for this year, folks!

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt.

ESPN Latest To Nix User Comments, Abdicate Its Responsibility For Fostering A Good Community

/in

Readers of this site will be aware of the trend over the past several years for news and media sites across the internet deciding to nix their respective comments sections. This wave of muzzles on the communities that previously participated in these sites has come with a variety of reasons or excuses, depending on your perspective. Some sites have noted that comments sections devolve into the worst humanity has to offer, with vile speech and spam-bots sucking up all of the digital oxygen. Other sites have suggested that some sort of liability comes along with any proper moderation of their comments sections. Still others have pointed towards social media platforms that can better take over the duties as some sort of 3rd party community gathering place, be it on Facebook or Twitter. All of these reasons are silly and false, or they simply abdicate the site’s responsibility for fostering a well-functioning community of commenters. Here at Techdirt, we love our own community and value the ever-living hell out of our comments, be they supporters of our positions or well-meaning dissenters. Trolls come along for the ride, of course, but we trust our own community to act as a moderating force against them.

And, yet, the trend continues. The latest site to shutter its comment section is ESPN, to much unfortunate fanfare at Deadspin.

No longer will you be able to read an ESPN.com article and then underneath receive the dumbest possible reactions to it. The Worldwide Leader has phased out its Facebook-hybrid comment sections, as confirmed by a company spokesperson this week. None of the keyboard mashing will be archived—they will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Here’s the official statement:

“Fans currently have more touchpoints than ever to voice their comments. We value their opinions, and feel that we are better able to serve them through our customer care team and our social platforms. In fact, we have and are continuing to create content for social that embraces these conversations and interacts with fans.”

This is an abomination. Chintzy Instagram memes are no substitute for jokes that were plagiarized from somewhere else, or completely indecipherable opinions on Colin Kaepernick.

Readers at Deadspin will recognize this as classic Deadspin snark. The site’s writers, despite having its own vibrant commenting community, have always taken a dim view of user contributions to the discussion. Somewhat amazingly, Deadspin in particular has a fairly good commenting community of its own, only deepening the mystery for the stance it takes here.

Well, perhaps not so mysterious. Simplistic might be the better word. Deadspin’s objections, and likely ESPN’s reasoning as well, is that ESPN comment sections tend to be the very kind of vile, idiotic contributions that we discussed in the intro. Deadspin, and likely ESPN, seem to stop the thought process right after making that determination and use it as its reason to muzzle the ESPN community entirely. What’s lost in that kind of thinking is that the onus for fostering a good commenting community at ESPN is on… ESPN.

It’s always been this way. There is so much benefit to be derived from a vibrant comments section, from increased reader engagement, to diverse thoughts that can shape discussion and the future work of the writers of posts, to a treasure trove of useful information and tips that journalists and commentators ought to be salivating over. The real story here is that ESPN has decided to toss all of those benefits out the window because it doesn’t want to do any heavy-lifting to create a comments section that produces that kind of benefit.

It’s the easy way out and no amount of snark or accurate portrayal of the current comments section as a cesspool will change that. Sites, if your comment section sucks, it’s your fault. Taking your ball and going home, even if you’re ESPN, is not the best option. It’s not even a good option.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt.