When Commenting Systems Go Bad | Hacker News Reader

When Commenting Systems Go Bad

charman-anderson.com

42 pointsmbesto25 comments

Disqus user here. Thought I'd try and answer a few of the concerns raised in this post.

1. "Comment display is broken". That's a matter of opinion. I personally prefer threaded comments as I find it easier to see the structure of a conversation that way. HN and (sorry) reddit use threaded comments, and I'd consider their comment systems among the best on the Web. Youtube, on the other hand, goes for "flat" comments, and, well, have you ever tried to follow a conversation on there?

Either way, Disqus actually gives the site's administrator the option: http://whatever.disqus.com/admin/settings/appearance/. The author is right though, having the ability to switch between the two on the front-end would be super.

2. "Comment paging is broken". Completely agreed on the 900+ comments on pages of 10. However Disqus gives the administrator the option to separate comments into pages or keep them all on one page. I personally don't get hundreds of comments, so I keep pagination turned off.

3. "Login kills comments". Sounds annoying, but honestly that sounds like user error. Disqus does say "Post as..." when you're logged out, which I guess is KIND OF ambiguous, but surely it's the user's responsibility to make sure they're logged in under the correct account if that's what they want?

4. "Newest first is weird". Why? I prefer it. Again, personal preference. And again, Disqus gives the site administrator options for sorting.

I don't want to sound negative, but I can't help but feel this post was ill-thought-out and badly researched. The sites the author is speaking about have apparently just switched to Disqus, so I'm going to assume the administrators haven't got to grips with how the service works yet.

Finally: I just realised that I sound like a PR stooge for Disqus. I'm just a user, honestly.

There is no such thing as user error.

Spoken like a true "biz dev" guy.

what does respect for the user have to do with biz dev? if you want to connect with another system (human or machine) you accomodate it.

There is such a thing as user error. Don't be ridiculous.

Issue 3 sounds like a glitch. I've written comments while logged out and been able to log in without loosing them. I use a Disqus account and not a Google account to log in, though.

There is quite a bit of flexibility that the author seems to have missed. But speaking as someone who has just recently tried Disqus on a major blog for work where a number of the comments are anonymous, the simple fact that the button is ambiguous ("Login as...") did dramatically drop the number of comments. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that most visitors are one-time visitors, not regular users of our blog, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption yet.

And how do you build a community with a bunch of anonymous users?

You give them a field lableled "Name" they can type something into when they leave a comment. Now they are not anonymous.

I agree with all of your points except for #3.

I think the "principle of least surprise" rather than the "principle of expecting-the-user-to-remember-how-to-use-THIS-particular-commenting-system" applies here.

My biggest question in response to your points is why the administrator (and not the users) is given the power to set these options. Maybe its much easier from a technical implementation sense? I can't imagine that administrators are more concerned with dictating how their readers see the comments than getting users happy and actually commenting.

How is this on the front page? Nearly all of her complaints are configuration options inside Disqus. If you have enough time to write a rant why not take five more minutes and actually do some research?

I actually vehemently disagree with the article. I submitted it thinking it would draw some very good discussion about her theories on how online communities are maintained.

I was thinking the same thing. Also, some of her concern is just stuff you need to get used to. I bet she's the first one to complaint when _any_ web services updates their layout.

Login itself is the biggest obstacle. If your blog is not as popular as say HN, then don't bother with requiring logins to post a comment.

Seriously no one wants to bother even creating a user login just for yoursillyblog.com. It's pointless. What about spammers? So what, create a moderated posting queue if that's an issue. Just don't make me sign in. This is your silly blog, not my bank account.

It might not even be login, but the ominous "Login As" button which does not suggest the ability to post anonymously.

We recently tested Disqus on one of the major blogs I work on and our comments dropped by about 60% month over month (where a lot of our users choose to comment anonymously).

One thing that bothers is the fact that commenting systems are still completely coupled with the comments themselves. I can view my emails or tweets in a bunch of different clients, why shouldn't I be able to do the same with comments?

I'm not saying we should eliminate the current systems, but if we could agree on a standard for structuring and posting comments (RDFa is a decent choice for the former), we'd be able to have a more consistent and user-centric experience, instead of being forced to use what someone else has chosen.

Well, you can view all of the comments you've made on Disqus-powered sites in one place, and I imagine that Disqus would very much like to become the Twitter of blog comments.

The interesting thing Disqus brings to the table IMO is a persistent identity across sites. And, broadly, I think this is good in that it fights the inherent hierarchical structure of any commenting system.

Ultimately, though, the concept of comments are hierarchical in a bad way. They encourage shallow responses over depth, and banter over meaningful conversation.

I think the best thing to encourage signal over noise is to encourage persistent identity and ownership of comments by the commenter. And I think the only real way to do this is a distributed reference system.

Imagine something like Tumblr (or now, in G+), in which users can re-share others'posts and add their own content. Imagine a distributed version of this, in which instead of comments, you have other people's responses hosted on their own sites, which your browser could aggregate into a comments-like "response" section, where you would have the option to view them in any way you'd like: newest/oldest-first, threaded/non-threaded, etc.

I wrote a lenghthier post on this a while back:

http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/3112676038/the-end-of-comment...

I like HN's feature of showing new comments at the top, it gives me a chance to see something that would otherwise be hidden.

The chance to collapse a tree of comments would be a welcome addition.

The problem with new comments at the top is that you read replies before the original post. HN solves this by using threaded comments and having intelligent commentors.

I think the "view new comments" problem should be solved by setting a cookie with your last visit and marking newer comments in e.g. a different color when you come back. Letting the user view only threads with new comments is also a possibility.

Having to fall back to flat in order to distinguish new comments is a failure of the system

The only complaint I really have about Disqus is that threaded comments seem to stop after a few deep. You have to reply to yourself if you want to continue the conversation.

Arguing against threaded / nested comments must be someone's sick joke.

Commenting systems go bad when site admins ban account users without notification or warning. It's a lack of respect. And then the lack of respect gets reciprocated with the creation of sock puppet accounts and trolling.

Why do you think Lamer News exists? And it will succeed with the help of HN admins. Bank on it.

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