Anyone using the internet a decade ago–when AOL was still relevant and adding version numbers to The Web wasn’t even a thought–will surely have noticed a change in the landscape of comments. A nonexistant phenomenon at first, websites slowly opened their doors to commentators, and now the internet is overrun by them. Unfortunately, as the number of comments has grown, so has the quality of comments dropped. Matt Haughey sketches some possible causes for comment degradation over at A Whole Lotta Nothing, and (ironically?) a long list of readers provide high-quality responses.

Haughey’s sentiments are summed up in his deriding comments as “just another content management feature available to you on the web.” Though Huaghey hints at the technology being the problem, he actually lays blame on the audience, saying:

I’m starting to think there’s this “new generation” that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you’d never say anything in a comment that you wouldn’t say to a friend’s face.

A good scratch at the surface, but the mystery runs deeper, and it takes a few dozen comments to take the argument to further, more insightful ends. The audience’s attitude is important, but that attitude is shaped by the available technology and the context in which that technology is used.

As Haughey points out, technology has enabled comments to be added to a website with no thought at all. This has resulted in almost every blog to have a comment system, and a majority of comments to be of “poor quality”. A lot of blogs are of “poor quality” as well, so it is not surprising that comments are no different. Lowering the barrier of entry means letting in both the intelligentsia and the idiots.

But the technology deal cuts both ways. It is easier than ever to comment, and it is easier than ever to blog. As Brad says, “the big problem with comments is most people who want to engage thoughtfully with blogs and bloggers already have their own outlets (blogs/twitter/facebook, etc).” Your mileage may vary with this argument, but you could easily find examples in big name bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber. Really any “cabinet of curiosities” blog with an abundance of links and commentary is an example of someone who took their good comments and turned them into an independent blog instead.

Thirdly, technology’s deficits also play a role. With the proliferation of blogs, and the move away from relatively few structured communities (newsgroups, forums), user identity is becoming more and more fractured. Even when entering the same personal information for each comment on ten different websites, there is no system setup to link one comment to another. On ten different websites, I am ten different Spencer Sugarmans. OpenID is a start, but a million more things need to happen to get from where things are (multiple usernames) to where things need to be (decentralized tracking of user activity). (One of those “million more things” being reconciling the need for community with the need for privacy.) Some grand solution would turn the internet into a single, giant conversation.

Lastly, technology aside, why do we even care about comments? Originally, grandiosely, comments acted as “a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post.” comments falling into this category are generally labeled as “good quality”. “Poor quality” comments, on the other hand, are usually short, off the cuff, and add little in the way of meaningful dialogue. Disregarding spam and flames, “poor” comments are pretty much the linguistic equivalent of an upvote (or downvote) on Reddit or Digg. They scream “I visited!”

But this use of the commenting system is hardly unreasonable. Spurred on by sites like Reddit and Digg, comments have become a system for feedback, showing website owners their users in ways Google Analytics can’t. And often dialogue is not disregarded in total, but shifted from a conversation between the reader and the author to a conversation betwen the reader and another reader. “A place to argue amongst themselves, quite independently of the author and his ad impressions,” as Nick says.

Of course, “good quality” comments still exist (look at this recent Hacker News thread), and are even flourishing. But so are the new kind of comments, at an exponential rate. The crap found below the videos on YouTube is an unavoidable result of changing technology, but this is only the public face of commenting. Thousands of blogs incite deep, meaningful conversations; it is just a matter of slogging through the mud to find the gold.

I am sorry to say it has been two weeks since my last post, but happy to say those two weeks have not been entirely ill spent. Okay, one week was spent wallowing in tears as I waited for Comcast to install broadband, but the other was productive. I am happy to introduce:

the forward lean

The Forward Lean is a weekly discussion of every substantive piece of information in the world. Every week, a contributor will take a piece of writing (anything ranging from New York Times Magazine articles to arXiv physics theses), be inspired by it, and author a lengthy post describing all the thoughts drummed up by the piece. Throughout the days following, others will respond at length, creating an intellectual conversation about some of today’s most engaging ideas and events.

The inaugural post is inspired by a passage from Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, a 1988 book chronicling the life and times of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. before his emergence as a national figure. Thusly inspired, out comes a post presenting disenchantment with Barack Obama’s ubiquitous declaration of Change™, and deriding the presidential campaigners for not leveraging their money and influence into widespread local transformation. Is it right to stand so tall on a platform of Hope® and Change™ without ensuring all that invested manpower leaves some lasting, local good, not just a fleeting economic bid for votes?

I’ll be providing my two cents when I can, but my main involvement in The Forward Lean is as tech director. I’ve tried to keep the design entirely minimal, and work through some of the complexities of the ExpressionEngine content management system. Things are running smoothly so far, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed until we get a few more posts in and stress test the system with more than just a few dozen visitors.

There it is; my life until now. Expect your regularly scheduled programming to be back online momentarily.