The problem with comments on the web…

When I have a spare moment, I make quick passes over the web and journals to see if I can find any research on who actually reads comments below blog posts and other web pieces, and how readers learn from these discussions. I haven’t found much, although I think it must be out there – there is so much interest now in engaging and organising people online, like Neighbourhood 2.0, Talk About Local, and that kind of thing.

Asynchronous text discussion, in which I am a silent participant or sometimes just a reader of a conversational fossil, has given me some of my most profound learning experiences. For subjects which interest me, to observe an argument unfold, see the misunderstandings, areas of tension, different styles, different priorities, moderating approaches, is absolutely engrossing. On an active site with an informed and diverse readership you get a real sense of the scope of a debate. So these days I bookmark entire discussion threads and annotate them using Diigo.

But according to this TechCrunch piece by Nicholas Holzapfel, I’m in the minority. Or maybe it’s that I read blogs which attract considerate and thoughtful commenters, who refer back to each others’ work and help the potentially formless and inappropriately linear threads to cohere.

There’s one blog I administrate which attracts quite a lot of sometimes contentious comments. I’ve enabled threading of comments (the blogging platform is WordPress). This indents replies and helps to provide a visual representation of the discussion. But the indentations only go 7 deep, which is frequently insufficient. This is one reason I think Nicholas Holzapfel is right to call for development of the technology which underpins commenting.

He ends on an empowering note:

“Some people believe that comments on popular articles will always be like this because many-to-many conversations are impossible. They believe that if we want coherence we must content ourselves with either conversations in small groups (few-to-few) or one-way conversations whereby a throng of admirers hang on the words of an admired expert (one-to-many).

I disagree.

I believe that the Internet offers the potential for coherent many-to-many conversations for the first time in the history of humanity. As MG Siegler points out, today’s “commenting structure [has] been in place basically since blogging began”. What is needed is an evolutionary shift which is suitably adapted to the Internet’s unique potential and pitfalls. We need something that allows massive numbers of comments to be navigated quickly and easily so that coherent mass conversations can emerge.”

Update: in the comments below, Nicholas directs us to yoomoot, a new direction in commenting which is launching in the near future. Meanwhile here’s the pre-launch blog.

Update 2: Andy Newman has a hunch that a high proportion of page views to visitors may be attributable to readers opening up the pages to view the comments (rather than viewing the posts as they appear on the front page). But if you were arriving via a feed reader, you’d also open the page. Not sure how his logs are presented, and I’m not a very sophisticated analyst of log files, but it might be worth looking. Then again, if you look at the character of the blog, it’s probably that the readers would be interested in the comments.