Conversation Overload
Social media is friggin huge right now. Is seems that everybody is talking about it and using it. Blogs, forums, wikis and social networking apps have all emerged from the shadows of back-room geekery into the public spotlight. Even my mom has an idea of what most of these tools are and she’s not exactly what I would call tech-savvy.
All of these tools work best when their user base reaches a critical mass and many people assume that the more users you have the better. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that this is assumption is false. For most of these new social media tools, having a user base that is too large can destroy the social aspect.
I’ll use Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog as an example. He made a pretty good post yesterday around 11:00am. After about 24 hours, there are already 51 responses. In some cases, this might be good. Unfortunately, the comments are really leading to any conversation. There are a lot of useless one phrase responses and even worse trackbacks to blogs with one phrase responses. The abundance of users have taken what could have been a good discussion and turned it into a big mess. The same thing happens on many popular blogs (almost every post on Scoble’s blog is like this).
This isn’t limited to blogs. In fact, many forums started suffering from this long before blogs. Here’s an example on the WoW Forums. Not only does it have over 25 pages of replies, the vast majority are completely useless. Some of my favorites are:
- i had chicken marinera for lunch today
- spoon
- woot i win the internet
- feed me humans i demand it!
It seems that with almost any social media / user controlled site, there is the potential for the valuable information to get lost in the garbage. This essentially leaves 2 options, throttle the number of people in your community, which would generally be bad, or implement a system for collecting garbage.
Writing a program to automatically collect garbage could be tricky, but some basic rules for submitting comments or posts might help. Here are a few ideas I’ve had to help get rid of garbage.
- Set a 5-10 word minimum on comments. Chances are anything that’s less than that isn’t really relevant to the conversation.
- Moderate track backs with the same rules as comments.
- Add a bump option to forum posts so users don’t have to post the word bump as a reply. An even better solution would be to provide a method for users to rank or rate post interest and use it for a sorting mechanism.
- If you have a blog or moderate a forum, try to discourage garbage comments or posts.
7 Responses so far
June 25th, 2007
8:12 am
+1
(Just kidding).
I’m with you on the problem, but worry about some of the solutions. Setting a minimum, for example, will just make the idiots add comments that are just as inane but more verbose. Combining together your four examples above doesn’t result in anything more meaningful.
It’s all about real moderation - only approving comments which actually add value, or trackbacks which engage in meaningful discussion.
But that’s hard to do when you’re not an A-List (or B, or C, or even D-List) blogger, since you’re happy to get all the comments you can.
Once you are a popular blogger (Zeldman or Scoble, for example) you get too many comments to have time to do meaningful moderation - and people who’s comments you deny will get upset and complain - it isn’t worth the hassle.
I suppose some kind of meta-moderation (Slashdot-ish) would help on those highly popular blogs - so that you could filter for comments above a certain “relevance” rated by other users. But you’d have to build that community at each blog, until we get the whole “real identity federated over all sites on the internet” problem nailed.
June 26th, 2007
11:43 am
A lot of good points. I see an opportunity for a new service based industry. Professional comment moderation.
I’m sure that some of the popular bloggers would mind having it.
June 27th, 2007
4:25 pm
After thinking about this for about a week, I think I finally have my answer.
My feeling is that blogging is not a medium for conversation. The poster says his piece. The commenter replies. The poster might reply to the commenter in comments, but 9 times out of 10, the “conversation” gets carried no further because commenters rarely check back on places they’ve made comments. Yes, there are tools that can facilitate people coming back to check comments on your site (WP’s subscribe to comments, for example) but it’s optional to install in the first place, and it’s optional for your commenters to subscribe…. and even with it, the conversation rarely goes on. Personally, the pointless yet vaguely on topic comments don’t bother me because it was never a discussion in the first place.
Forums, I think, are a separate issue. I don’t have a problem with pointless posts if they’re managed correctly. By proper management, I mean containing silliness to a handful of threads. For example, if your board members really like to share what they had for lunch today, there ought to be a specific thread for “What I had for lunch today?” so the board members aren’t cluttering the board with useless threads.
June 27th, 2007
9:34 pm
I’d suggest that we haven’t seen a true conversation medium yet.
In my medium of choice (RSS), I don’t even see a *mention* of comments in most blogs. If I’m trying to keep track of a conversation, it usually turns out pretty one-sided for me; the only reader interaction I see occurs when the blog author decides to respond to a comment in a post.
Forums have their own set of problems; they’re hard to follow at times, and there’s usually not much organization at all. I for one don’t frequent them at all.
It’s interesting, but I think the closest to a conversation medium we’ve seen so far is Usenet and mailing lists. For those two comments are treated equally with original posts or questions. Conversations in those arenas are often intelligent and relevant, too. Could the thought that all comments will be treated as a meaningful part of the conversation contribute to their quality?
June 29th, 2007
3:27 am
Alas, despite the friggin’ hugeness of social media, the blog-o-wik-o-forum-osphere is crying inside:
http://tastyresearch.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/americans-getting-lonelier/
Maybe people have come to expect that if they try to make casual conversation in RL they’ll just get inane responses like the ones on the WoW forums. Come to think of it, I *do* get inane responses to casual conversation like those… I’ll have to throttle my RL user community. Especially the ones who talk about chicken marinara.
BTW, I want to be the one to write the error messages for your garbage collector… “Take it to MetaFilter, you worthless hack!” “Banal rotgut comment limit exceeded, please try again later.” “Which of the last 12 blogs you read did you *not* post this on?”
June 29th, 2007
8:31 am
@nikkiana
I guess I’m an abnormality when it comes to commenting. I usually subscribe to comments on posts I’m interested in or at least check back a few days later. I would agree with you that blogs are a less about conversation and more about broadcast.
@Justin
Maybe the next generation of the RSS standard should support comments. That might help facilitate things better. RSS is my main means for reading blogs as well.
I would also say that the quality of posts in usenet and mailing lists might be better due to the audience. I’d say that most users that use those tools are a bit more technical that the average WoW player.
@Tim
I would definitely agree. I unfortunately think some of the bad conversations we have in real life are influenced too heavily my our online conversations. Everytime I hear somebody at our company use the phrases bandwidth, offline or sync-up in the non-technical form I cringe.
If do get the garbage collector plugin written, I will definitely consult you for error messages. Though I would add a message urging any forum users with 500+ posts to go outside and speak to something that breathes.
May 25th, 2008
5:26 pm
Scat….
Scat….
Leave a comment