The interactive nature of the Internet has revolutionised the way readers and viewers engage with content creators, often in very positive ways. But the comments sections of many popular websites are well-known as some of the darker corners of the Internet, even inspiring the self-explanatory Twitter account @avoidcomments.
Scroll down on any given post and you can expect to encounter spam, nonsense, bickering, name-calling and general pettiness. At worst, comments sections can be home to vicious racism, homophobia, sexism and bullying. And that’s just underneath the light-hearted, innocent and seemingly harmless material. The worst comments can easily drown out the many productive, useful and engaging contributions the same websites regularly attract.
Things have gotten so bad that some sites have opted to disable comments entirely. Popular Science, for example, just yesterday announced they are done trying to moderate and steer debate on their website. Online editor Suzzane LaBarre writes “because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”
LaBarre does emphasise ”there are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more. We also plan to open the comments section on select articles that lend themselves to vigorous and intelligent discussion”. However, the general comments ban is just one example of how attempts to encourage sensible community interaction have failed on many websites.
YouTube
With its huge userbase and endless amount of content, YouTube comments have become some of the most infamous. Google has acknowledged the issue, however, and the YouTube team are now making efforts to confront it.
The first major change is that comments will now be linked to a Google+ account, meaning it will be harder to post anonymously. New filters, meanwhile, will ‘weight’ posts depending on the reader, pushing comments from friends and ‘connections’ to the top of the comments list. Comments from the video creator, popular YouTube personalities and ‘engaged discussions’ will also be given increased prominence.
There will be more advanced privacy tools that will allow users to decide who sees the content they post. Uploaders will also be able to moderate comments more effectively, including more advanced approval tools and filters to block out comments featuring certain words. You can read more about the changes here.
We’ll have to wait and see whether YouTube can genuinely offer a more productive comments section than the existing one. These steps could well go some distance towards ensuring the worst commentators get drowned out, though.
Elsewhere, other websites are also trying to discover effective ways of countering problematic comments: whether that’s outright bans like Popular Science or the ‘verification’ procedure for new accounts announced by The Huffington Post last month. However successful their efforts are in drowning out trolls and spam, it will ultimately boil down to the users themselves to ensure websites feature the best possible discussion.
