TechCrunch's teachable moment: media sites must own the conversation

AOL's TechCrunch has reversed its decision to outsource user comments to Facebook. But online community takes cultivation
TechCrunch appeal to commenters
TechCrunch's appeal to its 'lost community' of commenters, after outsourcing user interaction to Facebook

For years, comments on news organizations' websites were the online equivalent of toxic sludge. Even a visit, much less participation, all but guaranteed that you'd emerge from the "conversation" threads feeling unclean, or worse.

The reason was simple: the news people either didn't care, or didn't have the resources to civilize the comments.

Several years ago, a number of short-sighted news organizations – oops, that's redundant – took a step that they considered a fix for their tumultuous-to-toxic comments: they let Facebook take over. If you wanted to comment on their pages, you had to sign onto your Facebook account before you could participate.

The advantages for the news sites were, in theory: a) Facebook's semi-enforced "real names" requirement would encourage more polite behavior and make commenters somewhat more accountable; and b) letting Facebook handle the comments would save money.

The short-sighted part, of course, was handing over such valuable content – the comments themselves, plus all kinds of usage data – to Facebook. The billion-user social network has emerged as the news business' most potent competitor, capturing attention and advertising on the path to monopoly status. Ceding such a crucial part of one's online operation to a competitor has always seemed insane to me.

This week, one organization that had opted for Facebook comments changed its mind in a public way. AOL's TechCrunch pleaded, "Commenters, We Want You Back", and said it was adopting a commenting platform called Livefyre, one of several Facebook competitors that offers rich and deep community interactions, along with ways to thwart spam and trolls.

There's a lot to like about alternatives like Livefyre and Disqus, though they also carve out a chunk of a host site's autonomy. I wouldn't be surprised to see these services acquired by the giants that want to own this space (namely, Facebook and Google). If that happens, the news sites will have to think again.

Modern blog platforms like WordPress offer solid commenting systems that minimize spamming. They don't stop trolls. That's not their purpose.

No internal or third-party service can fix the fundamental issue: to what extent a site owner values real community, where audiences aren't just "eyeballs to be harvested and monetized", to use the parlance that's become common in internet commerce circles. Comments are the antithesis of community in most cases … unless one's idea of community is, say, Lord of the Flies.

Creating and nurturing community is hard. It takes moderation in at least two senses of the word: "moderation" the noun, as in being civil; and the verb "to moderate", as in taking a firm but fair hand to police the threads – that is, to actively insist on civility. When it works, and when the right tools are available, the best online communities tend to police themselves.

I consider the BlogHer network among the best in this regard, and often point to its community guidelines as an ideal, especially this:

"We embrace the spirit of civil disagreement."

The question of anonymity often dominates any discussion of commenting. I strongly prefer that people use their real names online, but would never try to stop anonymous speech: occasionally, we need it – for instance, to protect whistleblowers and people whose safety may be compromised by publicity.

If I could design a comment system, it would put all anonymous comments at the thread's end, and give the site owner an easy way to move good comments higher. I'd also give users a way to make anonymous comments invisible. Most sites, at this point, require a working email address and let users post under pseudonyms. This, too, can be abused by a troll, but it injects an element of accountability.

In the end, accountability is up to the site owner. Whether you are a lone blogger or a big news organization, comment threads are a platform you make available to others. The thread is your living room, where you're hosting a conversation. You invite people into your home, and you make the rules on how they should behave.

If my blog is my online living room, I don't invite visitors to spit on the floor. If they do, they leave. When civility is required, the conversation has vastly more value. This takes work, but it's worth it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/techcrunch-teachable-moment-media-comment
www.theguardian.com
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