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'Comment cops' help manage websites
Michael sits at his computer looking for ways to earn cash.
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CLARIFICATION: The transcript of this story has been updated.
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: Time was when all that websites wanted was traffic. Eyeballs and attention. One way to do that, one way to get some buzz going and make readers feel involved was having a comments section. News stories, sports teams, even big consumer brands invited people to chime in and speak up. That helped build vibrant online communities that are sometimes liabilities. The muck that flies around in your typical online comment stream can devalue a brand, and can scare off advertisers and, eventually readers. With so many companies soliciting your comments, the work of policing those comments then has become big business.
Marketplace's Jeff Horwich reports.
Jeff Horwich: In Internet culture, the tendency of online comments to head for the gutter has a name: "The Greater Internet Jerkwad Theory." OK, it's not really "jerkwad" -- but what do you think this is, the Internet?
Eva Galperin with the Electronic Frontier Foundation defines it:
Eva Galperin: The theory posits that the combination of a perfectly normal human being, total anonymity and an audience will result in a cesspit.
Read the original theory here
Online comments are a magnet for name-calling, political screeds -- nastiness that turns off web surfers like Meg Fielding of Baltimore.
Meg Fielding: The level of bile and just rage and hate -- I sometimes almost have to push myself back from the desk, because I'm so appalled and so horrified at what people will say.
For news-related sites, especially, the free-expression free-for-all is wearing thin. And the cost of all that online vitriol is mounting. So, they're calling in the comment cops.
At a company called Pluck in Austin, Texas, 20 moderators-for-hire keep the peace for sites like Detroit Free Press and the Green Bay Press Gazette -- as well as non-news clients like Kraft Foods or AARP. Pluck is a division of the online media company Demand Media. It's general manager, Steve Semelsberger, says professional comment moderation has become a business necessity.
Steve Semelsberger: When you have a core article that has a number of advertisements running against it, it's important that it's not something major advertisers are uncomfortable with.
Pluck moderators review thousands of so-called "user abuse events" every day -- applying a heavier or a lighter hand depending on the customer. The NFL, for example, might be fine with comments that wouldn't fly on NPR.
With 3.2 million comments in June, the Huffington Post didn't hire a company to moderate. It bought one. This summer, the politics and news site acquired Adaptive Semantics, and its proprietary software called "JuLiA."
Arianna Huffington is the site's editor-in-chief.
Arianna Huffington: You can program JuLiA to look for whatever you don't want on your site. For example, we don't like people comparing either Democrats or Republicans to Nazis.
But JuLiA is way smarter than that. Its algorithms look for patterns that indicate anyone disruptive -- veering off-topic, ranting like a zealot, using insulting language. Even mild terms like "moron" or "empty suit" can flag you for a look from a human moderator, who gets final say over whether to ban your comment.
Huffington is also trying to take on the bad seeds by deputizing the best commenters with digital "badges" -- like "Level 2 Networker" or "Level 3 Superuser."
Huffington: They actually become incredibly useful in helping us moderate the site -- it's like their site.
The HuffPost requires commenters to register -- and it encourages them to use their real names. That makes things more civil. It also creates a data trail of individual passions and preferences. Huffington says that data might be useful down the road.
Huffington: Making sure that they get more of the content that particularly interests them, and then selling advertising around that content.
Facebook is also helping pull the curtain back on anonymous web commenters. An increasing number of sites, including HuffPost, allow users to log-in using their Facebook ID. It's convenient, sure -- that's the appeal. But it also links commenters to their real names and photos.
And Facebook has changed the online culture. Steve Semelsberger of Pluck says Facebook's MO -- no pseudonyms -- has made millions of people more open with their opinions.
Semelsberger: There is an increased sense of accountability -- to come right in and present yourself as your true self versus a screen display name.
As technology makes it easier to enforce accountability and civility online, that may be good for business. But Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says anonymity still has an important place in online life.
Galperin: People can voice unpopular opinions, they can maintain a certain level of privacy and safety and distance. This goes all the way back to the founding fathers, who printed their pamphlets under pseudonyms.
Who knows, perhaps the next revolution will begin with a trenchant post on Marketplace.org -- if our comment managers don't catch it first.
I'm Jeff Horwich, for Marketplace.
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@Joshua Rose:
Regards Slashdot (and I've got a 3-digit UID), I'd chalk the comment quality more to the community than the moderation schema. Interestingly, DailyKos, which runs on Scoop, at least started with the comment moderation system I'd designed for Rusty Foster. 5-point Likert scale, final moderation as the arithmetic mean of submitted values. This avoids Slashdot's range problem (comment scores are the sum of moderations, but are capped at -1 - +5). The problem is boiling this down to a single value: mean tells you what the average score is, but standard deviation tells you how controversial the post was.
The problem isn't moderation, but what you do with it. Slashdot's Web 2.0 redesign with dynamic comment filtering (sliders allow showing/hiding comments based on scores). Here's where Slashdot wins. There is some discussion of Scoop's moderation design on the Scoop/Kuro5hin blog itself from the early aughts.
Ultimately, the forums which have worked best involve a relatively small number of core contributers, some form of moderation, and a commitment to the community. Most of these are diametrically at odds with mass-media ventures, unfortunately.
HuffPo is a shining example of quality and community when it comes to their comments. But what's most impressive to me is that with such high quality standards, they've not sacrificed the quantity of comments one bit. They're still one of the most commented on sites on the web.
Shameless plug because it's relevant: At Livefyre we've built an embeddable comment platform that puts the same focus on improving both the quality and quantity of conversation happening on your content. We hope to give blogger and publishers of all sizes the tools they need to create the same kind of commenting environment, without the need to outsource moderation.
We're in private beta right now, but will be doing a wider launch in the coming weeks.
Step 1: How nice to hear Jonathan Gabriel's Greater Internet (eff-wad) Theory cite, on Marketplace of all place. And appropriately!
Step 2: Disappointment at lack of attribution. Resolve to send first-ever nitpick, while praising the overall content and reporting. Traditional journalists get plenty of content from "amateurs" on the web; attribution should make the jump, too!
Step 3: Track down the Marketplace story, and find that not only have several people beaten me to the punch, but Jeff Horwitz went and apologized online for not citing this touchstone of web commentary, saying (all too reasonably) that he honestly didn't know the original source. And this is after Marketplace went and apologized on the air on Tuesday! Delightful.
Stay classy, NPR. The day Fruit-(blank)er Prime makes landfall, I'll be reading Google News, but tuned in to you.
So many people commenting, obvious one liners and 'yes you do, No I don't' commenting back and forth that have little or nothing to add or are completely off-point to earn badges. Once they earn these badges they become HuffPo cops and some of the worst offenders. When someone can continue to comment the same inane phrase 10-20 times the true thread is lost and so is my interest. Sorry HuffPo you were a favorite and now not so much.
Thanks to all of you who pointed out the Penny Arcade origin of the Greater Internet...Theory. The lack of attribution was not deliberate -- like many successful memes, the origins can get obscured with time (the Penny Arcade comic dates from 2004) and I was unaware that any once source claimed unique credit for it. We were happy to add the link to the story and give a shout-out on air the following night.
I would say this is a fine example of online comments providing a useful service :-)
Jeff (reporter on this piece)
I'm not against the comment moderation company you mentioned making a buck, but wouldn't a lot of this nonsense be eliminated if commenters were required to show their names and/or faces and not just exercise their gaping mouths? I have no problem putting my real name in the open on, say, a photography or other hobby related site, and if I have unpopular or controversial views I may wish to express anonymously on a news or political site, there will always be forums for that.
Sites that value civil discourse and their own reputation should probably take this step or requiring ID so as not to attract commenters who won't put their own reps on the line, or who just want to fling bombs from behind the shelter of pseudonyms.
Anonymous commenting may have been a staple of the internet since it's infancy, but isn't it time both we and the Internet "grew up?"
The game publisher Blizzard tired using a system called RealID on their forums that requires posters to use their real name instead of a nickname to promote unity and reduce flamming/harassment. It didn't go over so well.
There is a very large community that revolves around anonymity calling themselves "anonymous" from the website 4chan. Recently "anonymous" waged war against another website, Gawker, over the story of a young (and very disturbed) girl nicknamed Jessica Slaughter, who got trolled by "anonymous." There was even on a story on Good Morning America about it (its not the all of the story). By remaining anonymous, a group collectively gain some sort of collective structure that gives themselves a sense of power similar to that of a large protest (the mob mentality). After all "there is no justice like mob justice."
I find myself avoiding websites for this very reason. Daily Kos can get very inflammatory, and I have always attributed it to screen names and anonymity. If a person won't say it and claim it then their comments are only worthy of being totally disregarded, whether I agree with them or not.
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