“It’s just noise”

5 Responses to ““It’s just noise””

1. Ketch (2 comments.)
   July 26th, 2007 at 10:50

   Rob: It’s not just noise. I think Spolsky/Winer go too far. Comments, properly done, can be effective, enlightening, informed. A universal ban on comments means that some excellent discussion, even if it is in the form of an argument, will be lost. Putting your thoughts and views onto the web should mean you are prepared for effective, thoughtful criticism. I’m thinking, most recently, at least that I know about, of the comments on Pithlord’s post encouraging a new law student blog (http://haloscan.com/tb/pithlord/5809930836540304286) on http://www.pithandsubstance.blogspot.com. The discussion between one of the students responsible for the blog and David Cheifetz (of http://www.slaw.ca, among other things) was indeed argumentative, but not insulting, and it was hopefully enlightening to the student blawgers. I think depth and effectiveness was added to the discussion by the comments. Now, those comments could have been posted on the student blog, but then we sometimes-readers of the blawgosphere would not have had the benefit of them, most likely, given the infancy of the blog, and would have been the poorer for it, in my view.
   GK

   
   
2. Rob Hyndman (317 comments.)
   July 26th, 2007 at 15:07

   I hear what you’re saying, but I think the catch is “properly done”. Far too much of what I see is not useful, and amounts to little more than a waste of time. Sigh. It’s the time angle that’s troubling. Someone has to tend the garden. And it takes a lot of time … There’s also the cumulative corrosive effect of the acidity. My sense is that once you’ve been in it for a couple of years (that seems to be something of a threshold for some reason), that effect starts becoming an issue.

   No question that some comments and discussions are useful. But far too much of what I’m seeing is ‘just noise’.

   
   
3. Ketch (2 comments.)
   July 26th, 2007 at 15:39

   You’re the gardener, not me, so I’ll defer to you. There is a lot of garbage out there that I don’t read, or try not to. But how to separate that from the good stuff? Maybe what you need, when you get big(ger) and (more) successful is a professional editor, hired away from globeandmail.com, or some such place, to moderate your comments pages.
   GK

   
   
4. Rob Hyndman (317 comments.)
   July 27th, 2007 at 07:36

   Separating it is a real challenge. There are certainly tech tools that can help - community moderation, blocking / suspension approaches and the like. And of course the tone of the community is as much an aspect of the brand as the content itself and there are certainly communities for which that kind of user contribution is vital (eg, because the biz model is to push low CPM ads at mass numbers of eyeballs, so anything that draws people in is good).

   I think that partly what I’m talking about is the general deterioration of tone online. It’s always been an issue - flame wars are as old as the hills - but as it becomes easier for anyone to host a community or contribute to one the phenomenon is spreading. And so it seems to be getting more and more difficult to keep the garbage out of line of sight. There’s lots of great new content available, but as one would expect the good stuff - whether comments or otherwise - is (increasingly?) exceedingly rare. I’m spending much less time reading user-generated content now than I was this time last year.