Kill the Comments, Save the Girl

When was the last time you finished an article online, jumped to the comments and as you made your way through thought “This is well reasoned and cogent commentary, I’m glad I read this.” ?

Probably never.

Let’s face it, comments suck. And not just that but comment technology sucks. The tools that are supposed to make it simple to engage content and surface thoughtful commentary instead promote coarse dialogue and float the garbage to the top. What we end up with is a stew of off topic banter, juvenile name calling and consuming irrelevance.

Another problem is that commenting systems are often maintained by third parties, at least for the largest online outlets, leaving those that need to hear the most relevant messaging entirely out of the loop, missing some of the good stuff with the maintainers totally divested in the quality of the conversations. Senseless if you ask me.

Most commenting tech doesn’t allow for anonymity but for those that do only stand to elevate the most crass conversations. YouTube abolished anonymity (only to reinstate it) due to the infamous nature of the comments there.

What do I propose?

Kill the comments entirely. Reuters, Popular Science, Google Reader (now defunct), Tumblr and many other sites have turned off commenting. And instead? Replace it with…nothing.

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ give users a place to engage content, share their thoughts and repost, retweet and like. One suggestion I make is that authors give readers a hashtag to follow online. If they want to track the conversation closely simply head to http://hshtags.com.

#Killthecomments