In my personal experience, the comment sections I've found on any web site eventually fall into three painful and unsatisfying categories:
- Ghost towns: the blog or forum has so little audience, nothing gets said.
- Worthless hole: enough people have become involved that there is no way to have a discussion without trolls trying to derail the conversation.
- Benevolent (or not) dictatorship: moderation is strictly enforced to keep things civil.
There's often a period shortly after the Ghost Town attracts an audience, where an open forum may seem to be doing ok. But once it gets popular everything falls apart and moves into the Worthless Hole. I'm waiting nervously for this to finally happen to HN, as the community moderation doesn't seem strong enough to prevent it.
The strict moderation model seems to work in a lot of places (I particularly enjoy Scalzi's blog, and the Loving Mallet of Correction), but I'm not sure it accomplishes a real discussion of opposing views... It works better in settings where all conversations are one-sided or at least light-hearted.
I do occasionally find a mathematics blog or something which has a good stable of commenters and fun discussions, and persists for years. Maybe the secret is to confine your community to a small enough niche that the trolls are never attracted?
Maybe the early adopters have some contact and relationship with the bar/site owner, so they treat the place with a reasonable amount of respect. As that contact diminishes, hordes with no interest in preserving the community dominate. In bars, they damage things or start fights. Online, they troll and abuse, pushing the more reasonable types away.
As far as your three categories go: the first two are really bad, but I'm also very put off by the last. Most places I've seen with a single "dictator" have the same problem: posts are moderated not only based on tone and presentation but also on content. I'm happy if a troll or overtly offensive comment gets removed, but seeing reasonable comments that may not follow the "dictator's" ideologies removed or ridiculed annoys me more than an inundation of poor comments, even if I agree with the "dictator"! I stay away from most "dictatorship" style boards just as much as from the "worthless holes".
The best solutions outside of narrows niches are either truly impartial moderation (usually by people apathetic to the issues at hand) or some sort of process-oriented moderation based on voting or a set of clear guidelines. The former requires having the right sort of people run the site while the other requires having a reasonable audience amenable to moderating themselves. Neither is a silver bullet, but both are much better than the three alternatives you listed.
Coincidentally, I still think the best moderation system I've seen was on Slashdot. I don't go there very often any more, but the highly rated posts were always good. If anything, it went too far the other way--too many good posts got buried. However, even with that misgiving, the end effect was still basically the best I've seen. Also, classifying posts into categories like "insightful" or "funny" also really helped especially for skimming through longer threads.
EDIT: Also: I think having very simple rules for moderation is the best approach. The best rule I saw was simple: "no personal attacks".
This is trivial to enforce fairly (that is, both removing bad posts and not removing good posts) and manages to get rid of most "bad" comments without stifling minority opinions. It also keeps the discussion much more civil and pertinent, which is very nice. And, ignoring everything else, personal attacks never contribute to the discussion anyhow and should not be condoned.
Seems so. Most of the best subreddits (imo of course) are niche communities.
I would very much appreciate feedback.
No, seriously, google it. I'm not just giving you the name, unless I'm looking at an overpersonalized search results page, the result page is a fair gateway into both sides of the controversy around the practice as well.
A thought; in a large enough site, new users need a way to find quality users they vouch for (imagine going to reddit's homepage and trying to vouch for users).
I think one thing people often forget, is that you don't always get to choose what "the community" does with your comments/forum/website(/cafe/bar/restaurant/social club/sporting team/whatever).
There's clearly some "worth" to the people trolling and derailing the conversations _you_ would rather turned out differently.
(I'm on the cusp of "giving up" on a web community I've been involved with for ~14 years, partly because they've changed - but truthfully at least as much because _I've_ changed…)
At Internet scale, 99.9999% of everthing is crud. Hey! We're six-sigma compliant!
What's necessary is a comment moderation/surfacing system which can cope and scale. And yes, occasional gems do surface.
Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.
Interesting. I wonder if a comments section could be more resistant to going to hell, if the author always closed comments as soon as they were done with it?
Just cause you insist on flat comments doesn't mean commenting systems are hopeless.
But I know a lot of people in humanities, arts, or social sciences who hate threaded comments because they view a complex, interleaved conversation as the best result. I'm not sure they're wrong, either... I certainly have more trouble following those discussions, but they also seem much more broadly connected. And back-and-forth flame wars between individuals are (slightly) rarer.
Have you?
Anybody know of another implementation that funnels intent differently? E.g. buttons with "contribute", "refute" or "criticize". Could make an interesting A/B test.
