The comments section of news and information sites has been getting prolonged attention in recent years, with some claiming it’s a bastion for ugly racism and hate-mongering and others bemoaning that while anonymity and reader feedback is helpful and critical, the resources needed to moderate commenting platforms makes it a bane on many newsrooms.Either way, however, we can all agree that commenting needs an upgrade — and a team of coders from The Times may have found a viable solution that’s prime for subscription and metered sites.The Times, which participated with six other newsrooms in the UK in a two-day hackathon where coders were challenged to “re-imagine commenting,” won after developing a “thermometer” that would sort comments according to sentiment. The code would compare the language in a given comment with a dictionary of positive and negative terms. Readers could then move the needle to view comments for or against a given article. The thermometer was designed with the heavily-commented-upon editorial and opinion pages.
The Guardian also developed a note-worthy system by which commentators would be given badges as “expert,” “eyewitness,” or “personal experience” as a way to indicating the social justification of their comment.While I find the Guardian’s system ripe for fraud (how could one fact-check a commentator’s “eyewitness” self-report?), the two systems combined would be great for metered news sites.By only giving paying subscribers commenting access, any subscription site can increase the perceived value of a subscription. Furthermore, gamification, such as giving out badges for site engagement, has been shown to increase retention rates for many subscription sites (see our Case Studies on SimpleK12 and Gantthead.com for great examples of this).There are plenty of sites and message boards that encourage free expression about any topic — news sites shouldn’t confuse their mission with informing and engaging the public with the Internet’s implicit mission to democratize free expression. Instead, news sites can foster a community of engaged and like-minded individuals (not necessarily politically like-minded; rather with a like-minded interest in current events, sports, lifestyle topics, etc.). Instead of focusing on the value of local newspapers for developing community, news sites now have the ability to foster globalized “tribes” across a certain topic.And that’s something that can’t be done in print.
