Taking Down Disqus Comments

I am finding that Disqus style comments are increasingly out of step on Tumblr. The overwhelming majority of interaction here is native Tumblr reposting, likes, and replies.

If you are a Tumblr non-user, I suggest you get an account and try it. Here’s a post where I describe how rich the ‘inside view’ is at Tumblr.

If you’d like to chat with me about something posted here you can try @stoweboyd on Twitter, click on the ‘contact me’ or ‘ask me anything’ in the right hand margin. 

15 May 2013 11 Permalink

Trolls do more than spoil our reading enjoyment

Researchers have found that trolls not only make reading posts and articles less fun, the psychological backlash leads people to increase their sense of the negative implications in the writing, as well.

Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele, This Story Stinks

We asked 1,183 participants to carefully read a news post on a fictitious blog, explaining the potential risks and benefits of a new technology product called nanosilver. These infinitesimal silver particles, tinier than 100-billionths of a meter in any dimension, have several potential benefits (like antibacterial properties) and risks (like water contamination), the online article reported.

Then we had participants read comments on the post, supposedly from other readers, and respond to questions regarding the content of the article itself.

Half of our sample was exposed to civil reader comments and the other half to rude ones — though the actual content, length and intensity of the comments, which varied from being supportive of the new technology to being wary of the risks, were consistent across both groups. The only difference was that the rude ones contained epithets or curse words, as in: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” and “You’re stupid if you’re not thinking of the risks for the fish and other plants and animals in water tainted with silver.”

The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

While it’s hard to quantify the distortional effects of such online nastiness, it’s bound to be quite substantial, particularly — and perhaps ironically — in the area of science news.

An estimated 60 percent of the Americans seeking information about specific scientific matters say the Internet is their primary source of information —  ranking it higher than any other news source.

Our emerging online media landscape has created a new public forum without the traditional social norms and self-regulation that typically govern our in-person exchanges — and that medium, increasingly, shapes both what we know and what we think we know.

Another great reason to move commentary from blogs to other venues, like Twitter. 

I’m considering dropping comments from this blog altogether.

3 March 2013 23 Permalink

A Speculative Design: How Tumblr Notes Should Work

In the hopes of getting someone to fix Tumblr’s notes — either inside Tumblr or an outside developer — I am offering the following proposal for a how I’d like Tumblr notes to work. (By the way, anyone who is interested in implementing, give me a call.)

Today’s notes work like this:

1. A user, say gbattle, reads something of mine, let’s say in his Tumblr stream. He takes an action, let’s say he replies to it (which I have enabled), and that gesture is reflected in the list of notes associated with the post.
2. Later on, others looking at the post — either in the stream or on the post’s page — can see his reply along with all the other social gestures left behind by others, including other likes, rebloggings, and replies.

The problem is that I can’t reply back.

Solution:

Imagine a product called Notr, that replaces the notes section of Tumblr themes. It would interact with Tumblr’s API to fetch notes, but it would also keep track of the relationship between notes implied by nesting. Where Tumblr’s notes system is inadequate, or blocks the creation and management of notes, Notr would conserve the notes in its own database.

Note the little talk balloon next to gbattle’s reply, which is provided by Notr here. I could re-reply to gbattle by clicking the balloon, and typing in some text:

And then others could also reply to that thread:

The implementation would be something like Disqus, but integrated with the Tumblr notes system, to the extent that it is possible.

Obviously, it would be simpler if Tumblr would implement notes this way, and we could all drop the amazingly annoying use of unintegrated Disqus. Alternatively, Disqus could implement this as a version of the product.

(This post is related to this gripe, from earlier today.)

28 July 2012 19 Permalink

New Disqus

I noticed that Disqus has revamped the look and functionality of their commenting system.

Note the prominent capability to share a comment on Twitter, as well as the ability to subscribe to a comment thread by email or RSS, and a trackback URL. The last is interesting since Tumblr doesn’t support the trackback protocol.

The tweet that Disques generates is fairly standard, and it did pull Jevon’s Twitter handle out of his profile, which is quite helpful:

I wonder if Disqus is planning to do something like their own social network? It may seeema bit disjoint, but it might be interesting to see the stream of comments from someone you admire, so long as Disqus set context in some way. It would certainly be interesting to see what Flipboard might do with information like that.

I learned that Disqus is rolling out a new Use Ranks functionality, too. I’ll have to look into that more deeply.

19 December 2011 11 Permalink

Facebook, Discourse, And Identity

The question of Facebook comments disguises a number of deeper issues, but is also in and of itself interesting. Many have reported that the number of blog comments has gone down with the introduction of Facebook comments on various well-trafficked blogs. This may be a good thing, reintroducing social scale to forums that had grown too large, and as a consequence had seen a decrease in civility.

Mathew Ingram notes that involvement trumps numbers in comments:

Mathew Ingram, Why Facebook Is Not the Cure For Bad Comments

[…] the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines the quality of comments is whether the authors of a blog take part in them.

Working at a pioneering blog network in 2004, I coined the term ‘the Conversational Index’ which we discovered as a means of predicting the future success of blogs. It was defined as

Conversational Index = (comments + trackbacks) / posts

I guess nowadays we’d have to include references from Twitter and Facebook, but you get the idea. Successful blogs generated a lot of commentary, and they did so from almost the very start.

And it wasn’t a function of publicy: there was no effort involved to have people use their legal names. It was a function of involvement on the part of the authors.

Regarding the deeper issues underlying comments, Robert Scoble went apeshit yesterday, after reading Steve Cheny’s piece, How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity, that I also commented on (see The Facebooking Of Identity). Here’s some of what Robert wrote:

Robert Scoble, The Real Authenticity Killer

These “authenticity is dead” people are cowards.

See, where I ONLY post opinions I’m willing to sign my name to, lots of people are actually cowards and just not willing to sign their names to their mealy-mouthed attacks.

Don’t give me that horseshit that you won’t be able to whistle blow at work.

It is hard to summarize Scoble’s rant, but in essence he is making the case that the web’s natural structure channels each of us toward using a single identity — for example in comments, or blog posts — and we should embrace that, and not attempt to subvert it.

I think this is a bit simplistic, at the least; principally because it leads to overtly conservative strictures on discourse, and not just for whistle blowers.

How many people have been fired in recent years for blogging, for example? And how many untold thousands have held their tongue or suppressed their own potentially unpopular opinions for fear of various sorts of retribution, or just being left out of the discussion?

Lastly, we are moving into a new era, principally opened by the rise of web culture, where a post-modern identity is a possibility. We can potentially involve ourselves with very different social scenes, with different ground rules, different purposes, and starkly different values, all at the same time.

Through involvement with such diverse groups we grow and learn very different perspectives. In a sense, we can  shift from a unitary identity to a network of identities, where the various nodes connect with each other in asymmetric and uneven ways: we may even have elements in a multiphrenic personality that are in conflict with each other.

This infuriates a lot of people, and whenever I present this concept there are fireworks. Some argue that such an identity is immature, illegitimate, and possibly immoral. I have been accused of inciting others to have false identities, when in fact I am really just observing a shift in societal mores.

Just as our society, politics, and business benefit from increased diversity — different views that possibly conflict — I think the same is true for post-modern identity.

Who among us is certain about everything? Who has no doubts? Who never wonders about choices made, or paths not taken? Who never sees multiple sides to an argument?

Scoble obviously has no doubts about identity: you are the you that the most open social context says you are, and that’s that. You should accept it, and if you don’t you are a coward, or so Scoble says.

But I have a different perspective, one that is more accepting of our search for self and the relativity of identity, and less demanding of certainty in an uncertain and rapidly evolving world.

related

• Editorial: Facebook, single identities, and the right to be anonymous (engadget.com)
• Facebook Comments Expose a Flaw in Zuckerberg’s Vision (technologizer.com)

Source: gigaom.com

8 March 2011 1 Permalink

Reuters New Approach To Comments

I think the Reuters’ approach is very smart:

Dean Wright, Toward a more thoughtful conversation on stories

Until recently, our [comment] moderation process involved editors going through a basket of all incoming comments, publishing the ones that met our standards and blocking the others. (It’s a binary decision: we don’t have the resources to edit comments.)

This was unsatisfactory because it delayed the publication of good comments, especially overnight and at weekends when our staffing is lighter.

Our new process grants a kind of VIP status on people who have had comments approved previously. When you register to comment on Reuters.com, our moderation software tags you as a new user. Your comments go through the same moderation process as before, but every time we approve a comment, you score a point.

Once you’ve reached a certain number of points, you become a recognized user. Congratulations: your comments will be published instantly from now on. Our editors will still review your comments after they’ve been published and will remove them if they don’t meet our standards. When that happens, you’ll lose points. Lose enough points and you’ll revert to new user status.

The highest scoring commentators will be classified as expert users, earning additional privileges that we’ll implement in future. You can see approval statistics for each reader on public profile pages like this, accessed by clicking on the name next to a comment.

It’s not a perfect system, but we believe it’s a foundation for facilitating a civil and rewarding discussion that’s open to the widest range of people. Let me know what you think.

So, newbies get moderated, gaining points until they cross a threshold into being regulars who are not moderated. But regulars can lose points by breaking the groundrules, and can fall back into always being moderated. And lastly, regulars who make a real contribution can gain enough points to be considered experts, which will lead to more rights.

Basically a meritocratic system, and one that should be widely emulated.

Can’t this logic be built into systems like Disqus, for example?

Source: blogs.reuters.com

9 October 2010 4 Permalink

Giving Up On Disqus Comments

I keep expecting that Tumblr will announce their own take on comments (ministreams? A better version of Notes?) but they haven’t as of yet.

But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with Tumblr, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world. And the Disqus ‘Reactions’ — an implementation of BackType’s Twitter monitoring technology — seemed to stop working this week. So I have modified this template to drop the Disqus comments, and I have included a Tweetmeme button on each post, instead.

Here you see two posts, one with no Tweets referring to it, and the other with one. In either case, clicking on ‘tweet’ will allow you to create a tweet with a URL pointing to the post.

In the case of posts with existing tweets pointing at them, clicking on the number — ‘12 tweets’ — will open a Tweetmeme window displaying those tweets.

So, I am adopting this mechanism in lieu of external comments. At least the Twitter stream is a living breathing place, while the comment threads on blogs feel like an old cobwebby library.

—-

Update: Saturday 11 September 2010

I was tweeted by @golda from BackType who suggested that a BackType button might be simpler that the sort of noisy and ad-busy Tweetmeme result.

Another reason to switch to Backtype from Tweetmeme is that BackType will show results going back as far as the post was original created. Although there seems to be an issue in my case, perhaps due to the domain name change I went through at the start of the summer. So I will try this for a while and see.

10 September 2010 Permalink