{"id":258698,"date":"2014-12-15T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T22:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258698"},"modified":"2024-01-25T18:07:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T23:07:16","slug":"instead-of-killing-reader-comments-we-should-be-trying-to-fix-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/12\/15\/instead-of-killing-reader-comments-we-should-be-trying-to-fix-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Instead of killing reader comments, we should be trying to fix them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Every month or so, it seems, a media outlet decides to get rid of their comments. The\u00a0latest is The Week<\/a>, which follows Reuters and Re\/code, both of whom shut down their comments recently. Every outlet that does this says the same thing: conversation has moved to social media, etc. But as\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0staffer Mat Yurow argues in a post at Medium,\u00a0this argument is essentially a cop-out<\/a>. Comments need to be fixed, not killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its post about shutting down<\/a> comments, The Week says that \u201cin the age of social media, the smartest and most vibrant reader conversations have moved off of news sites and onto Facebook and Twitter.\u201d But even if this is the case \u2014 which I\u2019m not disputing \u2014 whose fault is that? Most sites have done virtually nothing to try and make their comment sections a more hospitable place for smart and vibrant discussion, so why wouldn\u2019t it go elsewhere?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Week piece also says that<\/a> the site has \u201ca deep respect for the intelligence and opinions of our readers.\u201d But not enough respect, apparently, to allow those readers to post their thoughts about its articles on the same page where those articles appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, readers are forced to try and track down the writers and editors of the magazine on various social networks and then do their best to find the conversation<\/a> about whatever article they are interested in, and then convince someone on the staff to engage with them. What many news outlets seem to mean by the discussion \u201cmoving to Twitter and Facebook\u201d is that it\u2019s much easier to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement equals value<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Yurow, by contrast \u2014 who works on the audience development team at the New York Times<\/em>, and before that worked for Huffington Post and Bloomberg \u2014 believes as I do that handing over<\/a> a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake. Not only does it give up something valuable, but it suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren\u2019t worth the trouble:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cTo simply give up, and hand our most engaged users over to Facebook and Twitter is a major loss to a industry that is in dire need of loyalty. We need to come up with real, sustainable solutions?\u2014?solutions that view community through the lens of modern culture, technology and business. It is imperative that we save comments. We owe it to our readers, we owe it to our writers, and we owe it to ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Comments are broken, Yurow argues<\/a>, because most publications have not put the time or resources into trying to make them work, and so they have become troll and spam-filled backwaters that everyone tries to avoid. But that\u2019s not the fault of readers \u2014 it\u2019s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of value. So how can this perception of comments be turned around? Yurow outlines several ways in his post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one thing, media sites could look at the actual return on investment that they get from engaging with readers \u2014 which is real, and can be measured<\/a>. It\u2019s easier for sites with subscriptions to do this, since they can track how many commenters eventually \u201cconvert\u201d into being subscribers. But it\u2019s not that hard to tie reader time spent with things that matter to your business, whether it\u2019s advertising or something else. As Yurow points out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cCommenters do (at least) two things most site visitors do not: they explicitly demonstrate interest in your product, and they willingly hand over their email address. In any other business, we\u2019d call these people \u2018warm leads.\u2019 In media, we call them trolls.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Readers deserve our time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The other key point I agree with Yurow on is that many sites are to blame for their own troll-filled comments, because their writers and editors fail to engage even with the intelligent commenters, and so the predictable happens \u2014 flame-wars and offensive behavior take over. As blogger Anil Dash pointed out in a post in 2011, if there is bad behavior in your comments then you as the site owner are partially<\/a> to blame. Yurow notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt is important that some action is taken to remind readers that their voice is being heard. This can come in the form of a featured comment, a short response, or even a strategic email or tweet. Will this completely stop belligerence at the bottom of the page? Absolutely not. But it will help set the expectation of civil discourse and conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Among other things, Yurow also suggests that publishers try to figure out some way to make comments more relevant for more readers \u2014 whether it\u2019s by having editors and writers highlight or point out interesting comments (something Forbes<\/em> and other sites such as Gigaom already do), or by using algorithms and other tools such as reader votes to surface the best, something the New York Times<\/em> itself has experimented with<\/a> in the past.<\/p>\n

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Every month or so, it seems, a media outlet decides to get rid of their comments. The\u00a0latest is The Week, which follows Reuters and Re\/code, both of whom shut down their comments recently. Every outlet that does this says the same thing: conversation has moved to social media, etc. But as\u00a0New York Times\u00a0staffer Mat Yurow … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Instead of killing reader comments, we should be trying to fix them”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258698"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258721,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258698\/revisions\/258721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}