Robert Scoble caused a stir yesterday with a post on how tech bloggers are failing our readers. We all chase the same stories, get spun like a top by the PR machine, and can’t sustain a conversation about a single topic for more than a few days before we all rush to the next shiny object.
I caught him on video at the (surprisingly snoozy) Fortune Brainstorm conference. He pines for the old days of blogging, before comments were taken over by trolls. He seems to think the trolls all came from Digg and should go back there. More likely, it is just a sign that blogging is attracting a bigger audience
The problem is, as he put it in his post:
Our commenting systems really suck. . . . Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.
It’s not only that. There was a time when a good idea (like a cheap Web tablet) would be chewed on for a month by the blogosphere, going back and forth between different bloggers, and getting refined along the way. We’re all slaves to the news cycle now, talking about the same thing for a day or two, and then moving on. But does it have to be this way?
Yeah. The PR machine has taken over. I miss the old days.
he looks tired.
he looks drunk on coffee
Totally agree about the comment jerks. I find that the “smaller tech blogs” (JKontherun etc) are the only places where you can get a sane and rational exchange of views and actually learn something.
The other problem that it ultimately creates is that with everyone chasing the same story, most tech blogs don’t have any unique selling point that would draw you to subscribe to them. I’ve even unsubscribed from Techcrunch, figuring that the important stories will find me through social media.
Oh and your vid is only 2 seconds long
He makes a good point
hehe ,intersting~
mike - it may be time for bigger SM brands like TechCrunch and @scobleizer to invest in professional moderation. Heavy regulation of comments will kill the spirit/spontaneity buy the trolls will drive everyone away if left unchecked.
Best,
Aaron | @astrout
Nice post!
I run a newly-established tech news blog and I can certainly see where Robert’s coming from.
However, commenting systems have always attracted trolls. Trolls are a part of the online community. Their comments deserve to be aired; if nothing else just to highlight an alternative perspective.
Great blog guys!
Jim Connolly
http://www.TheTechNewsBlog.com
For celebrity bloggers like Robert, his points may be valid. But for those of us, lower down in the blogging food chain, not so sure. I occassionally get blog spam, but that’s fairly rare (although I’m only getting a few hundred hits/day). I get good quality comments, most of which I am happy to post (some are best dealt with with private email).
To some degree, Robert has only himself to blame. During his time at MS, he raised the awareness of blogging to the point where he became the story, rather than the story teller.
As to tech blogging ‘failing’ the reader, well, that sounds like a pretty self absorbed point of view. I started a new blog (http://pshscripts.blogspot.com) that does just what it says. How is THAT failing the reader?
I can’t help thinking that Scoble is wrong, at least as regards most tech bloggers. We write relevant stuff and help to improve the conversation.
This is very common problem in every media which use open comment system. Personally, I call that “over developed democracy” showing up its ugly face.
We focus so much on freedom of speech and we believed that it will sort most of our problems but as result we get a huge masses of non-competent people spreading their frustrations wherever they can.
Thats also why modern politics does not function too. Important politicians have to be chosen by experts and not masses.
Freedom of speech just follows the pattern of universe law which is that everything has its maximum expansion and after that it goes backwards. Soon we will appreciate a close circle communities with chosen people and with very strict rules who can participate.
Tech Crunch, I suggest a membership fee. Something symbolic, like 20€ a year. It would filter out huge amount of rubbish. I believe that you build your brand big enough that you would easily attract real followers to pay this.
“politicians have to be chosen by experts and not masses” - wow, that is a truly scary thought - sounds like you’re yearning for some kind of benevolent dictatorship.
Comments don’t work not just because of jerks with an axe to grind, but because there are too many uninformed, unintelligent, unknowledgeable idiots who think that because they can fog a mirror, others might want to hear their opinion.
Idiots are much more the problem than Jerks. A VERY simple step a comment sections can take to weed out the idiots and jerks, is simply to incorporate an AJAX thumbs up - thumbs down voting system and let the valuable posts rise to the top while the posts from jerks and idiots get pushed down to the last page.
Comments and opinions *DO* work, check out urbandictionary for proof. Sorting comments chronologically rather than by value is what is at fault here.
Robert,
A public debate is just that: public. You have to take the good with the bad and learn to ignore the background noise, much like your earlier theory on twitter. You must filter out the nonsense and focus on the important comments. There is no such thing as a comment utopia where the trolls are under lock and key. The more popular you are, the more people are gonna hate. Accept that and move past it. I sympathize but complaining isn’t going to stop the trolls from trolling…
There’s some real substance to this topic. It’s most certainly true that many tech blogs run from story to story faster than anyone can process. And it’s all in an attempt to get more viewers, hits, revenue.
the value of blogging, for me, was the ability for conversations to go deep. Not to have a million different conversations daily.
In this way, I really don’t see anything different to the big tech blogs than any other online news source. What, adding comments? most news sites do that now anyhow. Heck, with the NY Times, you can get hundreds of comments on an article. So what’s the difference? that the reporter/blogger is involved in the comments and community? Maybe.
The other criticism, that tech blogs are all chasing the same stories, is absolutely true. Hard to
Regarding the comment trolls… I agree with the assessment that it’s a natural byproduct of attracting wider audiences. A victim of it’s own success. But if the bloggers were more focused on real substance and taking conversations deeper, rather than many topics more shallow, it would naturally filter out…
and payed membership as a option also make sense because of many people who are advertising their own business trough their name links. There are many of them who are here simple for that purpose. And its nothing wrong with that. But than they should pay for it.
This would create a unique tech blog in the world where people would join with pleasure and feeling of exclusivity.
Welcome to the world of Capitalism, Robert.
With a free society comes the spinsters and assholes. The people that are true and honest and looking for the same things will find each other but it will constantly get harder because of expanding knowledge and access…. for the spinsters and assholes.
Fight the trolls and they just escalate the fight. Start by freeing yourself from their control by using something like Disqus.
The rest is just up to you to provide compelling content.
BTW, my earlier comment was accidentally directed to @mike arrington vs. Erick. I read the post on my iPhone so I didn’t pay close enough attention to the author (sorry Erick).
I actually read Scoble’s article and I’m kinda’ caught inbetween. I think that there are alot of people out there who simply go around leaving “quality” comments on blogs with the hopes that someone will click on the link back to their site..but alot of these same people don’t actually read the content nor do they care what kinds of exchanges are taking place. So, yeah- in a sense, it sucks. But on the other hand, perhaps the blogs are reaching a wider audience…
Considering Scoble’s way of driving traffic is to flame and insult something he knows is popular, then change his mind and promise never to do it again (repeat 2 weeks later) if trolls were banned he would never be able to blog again.
Why is it a troll in comments; but not when a blog author does it?
If you are seriously interested in better communication, here is an idea for you. One of the problems is that every TechCrunch article attracts a few dozen of not 100s of comments.
This is a lot of text, a lot of noise. But you only care about the best comments. This is a question of ranking the answers so that the best ones rise to the top. What you need is some sort of PageRank for blog commentators.
Imagine a mechanism, where comments are sorted according to who writes them. You could maintain a whitelist of people who will get a high ranking. You could share that whitelist with other bloggers, so people who are on everybody’s list get an even higher ranking. You could then ‘promote’ unknown commentators to your whitelist when they (continuously) post great comments.
Relegate the trolls to the bottom of the comments, maybe even a separate ‘trolls’ section.
I am sure a little bit of innovation can go long way to solve these problems.
If you are interested in improving the situation, here is an idea for you.
The problem seems to be that there are a lot of more or less irrelevant comments that people write on high traffic blogs (partially so they traffic themselves).
What you want is a method to distinguish the best comments from all the noise. This is a question of ranking. Why not have some sort of PageRank for those who comment on blogs?
Imagine a ranking mechanism, where the comments of those with a ‘credible’ rating rise to the top of the comments. You could maintain a whitelist of people whose opinion you are interested in. This could influence the rating. You could even share your whitelist with people whom you trust to create some sort of master whitelist. You can also connect a persons ranking with the traffic of a blog that that person maintains. You could also ‘promote’ people onto that whitelist when you believe that they continuously contribute to the conversation in a great way.
I think a little bit of innovation in this area can go a long way to improving the situation.
I agree with Jeff Hock - just adopt what YouTube has and allow people to rate the comments so that we can bury the crap.
With freedom of speech comes responsibility and those who do prefer to be idiots/jerks deserve to be buried just as democratically.
I have never understood why anyone thinks that just because the masses can guess the weight of a person when you average all the answers that somehow it makes each INDIVIDUAL answer smart.
The masses still have idiots in it and empty barrels make the most noise right? (wait…only 19 comments. Am I an empty barrel?)
Seth Godin has what I think is a successful blog and he doesn’t even have a comment feature. Maybe that is the future?
I love Seth and I’ve read his books, but I think it’s amusing that a guy who’s so big on two-way communication between companies has only one-way communication between himself and his readers
Makes you wonder how necessary some of the concepts from his books are
Aaron, true, but Seth Godin is way above standards in writing. You can’t just copy the concept of his blog and slap it on everyone out there with a Typepad or WordPress account.
I agree, he’s a fantastic writer. I actually don’t understand the rest of your comment. I’m just wondering why he doesn’t practice what he preaches in his own books ;p
Fyi I’m in the middle of reading “All Marketers are Liars” right now.
The slashdot commenting systems makes for some good content
The thing that surprises me is when you check the number of comments. For a few hours it will rise steeply and peak! Wait a day and you will see no changes or barely no changes at all.
Could all the “YouTube’s mania” with amateur teenagers’ comments scared everyone? Maybe. Some of the reasons are explained in the video and I think the “assholes” he mentioned are best explained when you read any single page of comment from YouTube.
On the one hand, it’s easy to blame the blogosphere’s hollow discourse on the ignorant, the abusive, and the manipulative. Wading into the commentspace on some of the more popular blogs is about as appealing as walking into a seedy movie theater barefoot.
But a lot of the blame for that lies with us, friends.
We’ve got to remember that what we’re dealing with here is analogous to (a hyper-simplified vision of) urban decay:
Times get tough in what is otherwise a pretty good neighborhood; People start losing their jobs. Homes and lawns go to seed a little. Property values start to drop, and before long all the people who still have means pull up stakes and move on. In their wake come those of means lower still, or else parts of the neighborhood lie altogether fallow. Over time, crime rates will climb: vandalism first, then petty larceny; maybe a little low-key drug trade. Still more of your friendly, upstanding neighbors will pack up and leave as they can.
If we extrapolate this trend far enough, eventually we’ll see property values so low that none but the slumlords are able to make a nickel, and none left there but those that have no options left. Our once-pristine neighborhood is reduced to tenements and hovels, its streets ruled by violence and greed, its people empty and afraid.
This is exactly the sort of decay that’s drained the blogosphere of its conversations. Otherwise-silent comment threads and disinterested, uninvolved readerships are the perfect breeding fodder for trolls, and they propagate like rats in empty warehouses.
But our real problem isn’t too many trolls, it’s that there are too few bright, motivated, genuinely interesting, intellectually-engaged netizens out here who give a damn about the greater discourse. Let a little flame war break out, or a couple of idiots bouncing in meme-o’-the-minute style from Digg or Reddit to spew froth about an issue they don’t understand, and we just grimace with distaste and leave.
There will always be a noise floor. That’s the price of democracy. But if we pull it together, remember why we came here in the first place, and keep cramming our forums and comment clusters and social networks full of enlightening, thought-provoking idea exchange, then we can rise above the noise.
We can make the blogosphere a great place to live again.
I disagree with Scoble. If you take a look at our publication you will see that a lot of our users do leave comments on articles.
Also, some or most of our writers are Digg users, and I would LOVE to have the Digg crowd come to our Tech News site. So much so that I am installing a Pligg script at Newslusive this week to attract more of them.
Scoble is all about pushing people away with his inner circles and closed circuit, and look where it got him.
( click on the 6 month tab at this link )
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....leizer.com
TL - http://offur.com/BetterThanTechCrunch
Here is an even better link
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ize=Medium
Do you wanna be like Scoble and lose hundreds of thousands of readers?
I’m trying to sell adverting and I know I sure don’t.
I agree that the comments on many of the tech blogs have gone to hell….but coming from Scoble…the biggest comment wh*re of them all is quite laughable.. my opinion
You have just figured this out now? All you fucking people do is parrot press releases, and readers don’t know any better. They will take whatever slop you give them.
install intense debate and be done with it.
I’ve really enjoyed using the system on one of my favorite blogs, the Texas Startup Blog
Where are all the trolls? All of these comments are so civil. Maybe Scoble scared them away.
Suck it, Schonfeld.
Amen, Scobble. Karma should be requisite on large discussions. Anonymity is fine, but we need to weed out the dolts.
I really hope that Disqus et al. help get this figured out.
Getting rid of links in comments would remove the feeling that everyone has to promote themselves, which is a good start in my opinion.
Remove the link from the name and strip out all links in the comments itself. Make all of the comments with URLs in them go into a queue which you can approve if needed. There are some times that links are appropriate in a comment, by many times they are not.
+/- ratings would also also work.
You’re all stupid and you should get a life.
Is that better, Erick?
Our success at AGORACOM came from turning financial discussion forums (far worse than blog comments) on their head and handing moderation control back to the members.
A reputation system (votes by other members + site activity) determines the ranking of every member on the site. The higher the ranking, the greater authority to delete posts and even terminate members.
As such, we now have hundreds of highly-ranked and trusted members providing moderation on the site.
It has served to eliminate 95% of the noise and increase quality by several magnitudes.
I would guess that a similar system would work very well for blog comments.
Regards,
George
Wow, this guy hit the nail right on the head.
Yes, the community today judges ideas way too quickly. It’s really unfortunate.
And comment trolls need to be dealt with, I think the worst example is YouTube. Perhaps some sort of Karma system should be built out (possibly business idea) where you can only create visible comments that make the “comment stream” with a system of points already established that show you’ve, historically, made viable, logical, well-thought comments.
Maybe in short: a troll detector. This is all a valid complaint, and I’m sure some company out there could build up an algorithm-driven point system with authentication built right into it in order to weed out some of the trolls who shouldn’t be allowed to comment in the first place.
The real question is who really takes the time to read comments? I guess the author of the post do, but who else ?
Well obviously you have and so have I. People who like to provide alternative viewpoints or even gain new ones read comments. On certain sites I always read the comments. Other sites like digg, ill just read the top comments to see if there is any additional info I find interesting and leave the rest alone.
First of all, people should have to use their real name rather than a nickname. It is a lot more personal, you know it is going to be traced back to you so you think a lot more about what you are writing. It also looks more personal from a reader’s perspective.
People have to stop promoting themselves. Stop counting the number of posts or reply, how many agreed or disagreed with you. The more interesting part is the development and how we got to an answer, rather than what the answer is.
I think blogs have become more a form where the one that makes the most noise gets the most intention, rather than the one that takes the time to think and come up with a good explanation. It is also more based on who is talking rather than what he is saying.
Here’s a suggestion…..
To get rid of trolls add a FriendFeed or Twitter box under or before comment box. Those who are trolls would use the comment box, those who want to be truly a part of the conversation would use their FF or Twitter accounts to leave comments.
Here’s a suggestion…..
To get rid of trolls add a FriendFeed or Twitter box under or before comment box. Those who are trolls would use the comment box, those who want to be truly a part of the conversation would use their FF or Twitter accounts to leave comments.
Agreed that we should be able to rate comments, then filter by the best (Newsvine did this well at one time). Also, Agoracom’s idea of building reputation until people reach a status to edit comments sounds like a good idea (dangerous, but possibly a fine experiment).
Posting under real names will just strip out comments from knowledgeable people who might be rendered vulnerable by expressing unpopular opinions.
This seems solvable with today’s technology…
I think Scoble is just tired: trolls have always existed, civil people wanting genuine conversations have always existed. It’s the increased flow that he simply can’t handle. It’s a wonder that between his Twitter/Friendfeed/Qiking/blogging/press release chasing/ interviewing he hasn’t had a mental breakdown yet. It’s a testament to his stamina I suppose, and a price for his A-lister status.
Has it gotten him rich enough to afford a personal assistant ? It’s pretty obvious he needs an outsourced person from the Sub-continent to filter out *some* of the “poisonous noise” directed at him.
The issue of people people’s attention being on one topic and then forgetting about it the next day (with respect to techcrunch) is actually something that can be solved quite easily.
The structure of TC reinforces only a few things being “active” on any given day (i.e. what’s on the home page) After that, things are effectively buried. No visibility is given to activity that could be happening several pages deep. This is pretty easily solved and can be approached from a couple different angles.
video wont play in firefox or opera except the first two seconds .. loads fine … ie7, yuk, here i come
not i9e7 either .. i am sure scoble was not the problem thought
I agree with Robert. Part of the problem is that a niche idea has become huge business for several players able to effectively monetize blogs, podcasts, etc. That success has attracted folks looking beyond conversation to profit. Has the profit motive captured the larger brands? Isn’t money now driving the growth of major blogs and podcasts today? It’s no longer just conversation or innovation. Seems like it’s money - ads, selling posts to the highest bidder, and all kinds of BS. So if there is a perversion of the system, it’s not just those jerks posting hurtful comments. It’s flowing top down too.
My comment is not appearing
Just trying to be apart of the conversation and offer a possible solution….
To get rid of trolls add a FriendFeed or Twitter box under or before comment box. Those who are trolls would use the comment box, those who want to be truly a part of the conversation would use their FF or Twitter accounts to leave comments.
Scoble Wars: Attack of the Trolls
http://thetechnewsblog.com/200.....the-trolls
Enjoy!
Jim Connolly
Scoble Wars: Attack of the Trolls
http://www.thetechnewsblog.com.....the-trolls
Enjoy!
Jim Connolly