Jun 22, 2010

How do we design for the Great Conversation?

In the past, when we read something, we would rarely have a chance to immediately discuss it. Maybe we’d read a passage in class during a college seminar, or we’re proofreading a document that needs immediate attention for work. Usually, we would never have a chance to discuss what we read, or would have a few minutes, hours, or even days before it came up in any conversation. This was a great thing, we would have some time to think about what we just read, time to ponder and reread, perhaps do some research. Though, more often than not, we would usually read it, file it off to some corner of our mind and forget about it. Then the Internet happened.

Nowadays on blogs, newspaper websites, and everywhere else we often have a chance to voice our opinions immediately after we consume something. We can say the first thing that comes to our mind, regardless of whether what we say is complete or coherent. We have sacrificed thoughtfulness for timeliness. Furthermore, because of the anonymity of the web we can often say it with no consequence to ourselves. This combination has given us Prometheus’s courage and conviction, but none of his foresight.

That isn’t to say that the increased amount of discussion is entirely bad. As I have said before, the increased amount of social interaction and communication can only be a net positive to our cultural development. The question is how do we guide and shape the discussion to be better? How do we cut out the junk?

As I wrote yesterday, the most important design element is writing to be read. Our writing must be worth being read and thought about. The second thing we must do is remove distraction and let our readers read. We constantly distract our readers with flashy advertisements, extraneous media, and bad typography. This has got to stop. Ms. Mandy Brown wrote a wonderful A List Apart article on helping our readers. Our best readers, those we most want to talk to us, need to be able to read without interruption from our annoying advertisements and extra media. They go through enormous effort to try to engage with us. They are using scripts and tools like Readability, Reeder, and Instapaper, but they shouldn’t have to. We should be helping them because if we keep distracting them, then they will never fully engage with and understand what we are saying. We should them respect, stop distracting them, and let them read in peace. But this is only half the story.

I hate the way most commenting systems on websites work. We craft our articles with love and devotion. Many of the longer articles taking hours, if not days to write. Then, at the end readers are able to submit comments to the entire article. If the author is popular, many people leaving will leave a comment that is one or two sentences long, a few people may offer a few paragraphs, but on the whole there is very little insight and added value.

This happens everywhere.

With sites like Slashdot anybody can comment, and honestly, most comments are not worth reading. Though, as Mr. Jason Treit notes, Slashdot is to be commended for its attempts to push comment curation. Through its algorithms and scoring system, good comments are promoted while bad ones are depreciated. But these issues are only tangentially related to the sort of conversation I am striving for.

Comments are a little better when the site caters to a niche or more educated audience. They become even better when moderated carefully. But even then, often on sites like A List Apart or 24 Ways which cater to a niche audience, often comments are little more than short affirmatives. While there is some analysis and discussion, it is time consuming to weed through to follow the real discussion.

To try to raise the quality in the comments, sites like Drawar design the commenting system to be obtuse and require people to jump through more hoops to actually leave a comment. This means that only those that really want to say something, which probably correlates with those with something substantive to say, are likely to say something.

Metafilter requires people to pay a $5 membership fee and then it is kept under strict editorial control. But that is not all. We know that size matters. Larger text input boxes encourages people to write more, and comment length seems to correlate with quality.

Others have gone a different route, another of my favorite blogs, Bobulate, doesn’t allow comments at all. In a recent interview, Ms. Liz Danzico said that since she doesn’t allow comments, people often email her their thoughts. Some complaining that comments aren’t allowed, but many telling personal stories related to her posts, many of which probably would never have been posted as comments. She is not the only one that has experienced this.

In response to Mr. Gruber’s original critique, Mr. Joe Wilcox decided to experiment with removing comments from his blog, his immediate experience is that instead of receiving a slew of rude comments — which he normally received in his Disqus comments — he started receiving responses by email, nearly all of them thoughtful.

Do I know exactly why the quality of comments Mr. Wilcox received suddenly increased? No. But I imagine that two things happened.

First, because it was harder to express an opinion, only those that were dedicated and really have something to say took the effort. Second, because it was harder to comment, it took longer. People who ultimately comment take more time to think about what they are saying.

Ideas that change the world do not just come in a day, they take time to mature. Timeliness and immediacy must take a back seat to thoughtfulness.

In his comments, Mr. Treit says:

Blogging is more curatorial…. [But it’s] anything besides a bold experiment in filtered conversation… The weblog reprises broadcast media with its dear readers. Certainly the web has far to go in separating conversational signal from noise; reputation and visiblity should correlate more than they do. But putting that on the shoulders of individual sources is never going to scale on a many-to-many communication medium.…

Blog comments suck… Aside from being sandboxed and feature poor, comment sections are diasporic, herding readership from yesterday’s topic to today’s irrespective of where else their conversations were going. Their persistence despite suckiness hints at a big leak: blogging fractures conversation.

I agree that blogging is filtered conversation. But that’s what we want, we want to filter the wheat from the chaff. And yes blogging fractures conversation, but the conversation has always been fractured, it is a continuation of the status quo.

Essays take days and weeks to write, journals take months to edit and publish, books can take years. They should, these are where the big thoughts are. Currently, many-to-many communication depends on timeliness. Conversation does not make sense without it. The conversation is too distributed, too complex to follow. But we engage in this new conversation at the price of quality. The quality of conversation is abysmally low. 

The question, for me, is how do we raise the quality of conversation in this new medium to new heights? How do we design this new medium not just for curated conversation but for the Great Conversation?

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