Comments – a Throwaway Expression of Approval and Opposition

Nicolas Holzapfel wrote a guest post on TechCruch about comments, a subject I have obsessed about since the Internet. Ostensibly the post talks about the introduction of Echo functionally by J-KIT commenting platform but it really touches on the fundamental dilemmas of the internet old online conversation culture. Nicholas slices through – Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead:

“Lots of comments amounts to an enormous long list of entirely unstructured text. There are no dividers or subheadings, no logical progression of arguments or groupings of opinion and no distinction between unique, intelligent insights and throwaway expressions of approval and opposition. Because nobody can be bothered to read through such a mess before they add their own comment, there isn’t even the structure of a coherent conversation. Instead, there is endless, pointless repetition; conversations emerge, peter out and then re-emerge 50 comments later with new participants who haven’t noticed that the same issues were discussed 50 comments ago….

…I’m disappointed with how comments are handled. To my mind, the Internet should be the world’s parliament. It should be a massive conversation, a democratizing collective debate which abolishes the distinction between authors and readers – the active opinion-producer and the passive opinion-consumer. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen if all that the readers author is a garbled, unstructured mess that nobody reads.

Some people believe that comments on popular articles will always be like this because many-to-many conversations are impossible. They believe that if we want coherence we must content ourselves with either conversations in small groups (few-to-few) or one-way conversations whereby a throng of admirers hang on the words of an admired expert (one-to-many).”

I will add couple of points:

One should add to the conversation Disqus commenting system arguably more influential platform compared to J-KIT that just introduced “echo: functionality this week, many say in a competitive response to J-KIT. The race between commenting platforms is about the geekiest of functions not about the “parliamentary culture”. Human conversation craves simplicity of a dialog, not the hotness of the next gadget.
And speaking of “a throwaway expressions of approval and opposition” one should mention Twitter as one of the culprits and it’s detrimental influence on traditional comments.
The idiotic likes and dislikes. They all point to the style that departs from a coherent conversation towards the supremacy of emotional reactions. The importance of how I feel as opposed of what I think. For an author the thinking part is so much more valuable yet the morons still persist with “LOL, Amazing!!!!!”
Anonymity is at the root of the eroding conversation. You can’t have a dialog with handle, especially a deceptive handle. This is huge problem; people need to be taught away from the retched anonymous culture.
As long as the meta-blogs don’t lead in this, little will change and the comments will continue to erode. Alas the big blogs don’t care about conversation. They hideous “likes”, the “echo” and the rest of the visual garbage are the vanity mentions that translate into clicks.