Yahoo News cut their commentary section right out. Probably because they had to dedicate too many tech-hours to deleting the offensive shit. I’m not talking things like, “Obama wants to teach 5-year-olds sex education,” I’m talking things like, “McCain is a big fag and he wants to fuck your dead grandmother!” – all in the oh so intelligent 133+ shit language to get around the auto-cullers, or whatever they have.
It was either that or any story – it could be a story on egg production levels in Iowa – and you’d get 14 screeds on why you need to turn your life over to Jesus Christ.
And then there is my local newspaper’s site. They too suffer from the backward listing of messages. They do offer links to re-order it, and show more than just the first (or last) 5 as the case may be, but that too is turning into nothing more than Offenderati v Offenderati.
Like the Yahoo boards, it doesn’t matter what the story is about – county fair, car accident, lobster boat sank – you will get 25 messages demanding that the Liberals get their hands out of my pocket and 25 rebuttals on how Conservatives just want to make oil companies rich.
Nothing as civilized as we see on this board … {chuckle}.
It doesn’t look like most of the posters on those sites are really interested in conversation or debate, and I don’t think that’s what they’re supposed to facilitate. Those comment sections are 99% drive-by’s and non-sequiturs. I think the reverse order is there because it allows people to see their own posts without having to scroll down. instant gratification. All they care about is seing their own words. I think the vast majority never even read the other comments.
I was saddened when they got rid of that – it was very grounding. Every time I started to feel optimistic about the mental state of our nation, I could just pop in to any Yahoo News story feedback and be reiminded of just what kind of fuckwits we still have crawling around out there…
I’m going to defend complex comment nesting: It allows much more complex threads because each little sub-thread can drift in its own direction, with nobody getting confused about who’s talking to who and what the topic really is now. Going off-topic becomes much less of an issue. It’s one of the things I wish this place would adopt. (Yes, Usenet had it first. Usenet is old enough it’s tried just about everything.)
vB does have a threaded mode - you can select it at the bottom of any thread page. I’m neither here nor there on it - what threading brings in conversational coherency, it loses in participation, as individual conversation branches tend to end up as exclusionary private conversations. Certainly the flat-thread model allows those who shout loudest (or most often) to dominate, but it’s more participatory, as anyone can jump in at any time. Six of one, half a dozen of t’other and all that.
I agree with DtC to a point; I think these comment systems are designed by people who don’t understand that dialogue occurs in them. Old media publishers like the Times assume that people want merely to comment on the article, and aren’t interested in the other commenters, so they design their systems accordingly. The surprising thing to me is the persistence with which commenters actually continue to converse, despite these impediments. The Economist, for example, has a decent user community despite its entirely perverse system (it’s possible, of course, that regular Economist readers naturally think in Reverse Polish Notation). By contrast, I think the Guardian understands user interaction better than most, which is why it’s disappointing they’ve implemented such a shoddy system (although to their credit they’ve already rid themselves of the “most recent comments” display in response to feedback).
I disagree, again: Anyone can jump in anywhere, in any subthread, just like in the model we have now. In threaded mode, however, the subthreads are explicit and much easier to avoid if you don’t want to be bothered with one or more of them.
A television station in my hometown has a feature where anyone can make comments about news stories posted to the site. In every story about crime or arson, half the comments will be racist; not something using the N-word or teenagers posting one-liners, but rather more subtle; “those people”, “East Siders”, and so on.
There’s also the usual reactionary posts in articles about such things like public transportation, traffic rotaries, public art, and so on.
