I wanted to take a moment to discuss comments on TPM — some practical questions we’ve been facing and a more fundamental one about how the whole comment ecosystem should work.
First a little history. About a year ago we stopped hosting comments ourselves (a truly thankless task) and moved to the increasingly common practice of using a third party service to run that part of the site. The only problem is that we haven’t found a service that we really like. The current one is unsatisfactory. And we pay too much for the unsatisfactory service.
Meanwhile, Facebook is now making a big push for sites to use their commenting engine. (Now, before you grab your pitchfork please read to the end of the post because there are several reasons why we’re most likely not going to use their service. Please read on.) And it has a couple obvious advantages. One is that it’s free — a key advantage when trying to manage budgets. Second, it works. Facebook built its whole company around user experience. So their logins and comments algorithms just work. Again, good thing. Finally, using Facebook comments would probably push more TPM content into the Facebook ecosystem. And that’s good for spreading the word about TPM and getting more referral links back from Facebook.
Now the downsides, which are probably determinative for us. First, quite simply a lot of people don’t trust Facebook for reasons that range from quite reasonable to totally paranoid. Second, and more significant in my mind, is that many people don’t want to bring their true identities into the comments section of a political site. I don’t feel that way. But many people do. And I’m not really a good example since I do this for a living and I made the decision a long time ago that I’m fine with everyone knowing just what I think.
For those two reasons, especially the second, we’re probably never going to do this.
What I want to discuss though is why I would actually like to do it, for reasons that don’t have anything to do with any of the reasons I mentioned above. I actually like the idea of everyone commenting as who they actually are. Partly I simply find the comments more interesting because I have some sense of who the people are, their backgrounds and so forth. (You’ll note that TPM Media Labs is the only section of TPM that already uses Facebook comments and I find the comments here much more interesting.) Far more than that however is that I think it leads to much more fruitful, civilized and even more ethical conversations.
Here’s why. (And at least as a thought experiment, let’s take Facebook out of the equation because that complicates things with their issues rather than focusing on the core issue of true identities.)
Like all sites, we find it’s a constant struggle monitoring the comments sections for obscenity, trolling, abusive behavior and simple screaming matches, let alone the horrible scourge of spam. And the root cause of most of this (beyond the fact that these are contentious issues people are discussing) is that with near total anonymity, all social norms are out the door. People are more insulting, more quick to strike up fights. Quite simply, anti-sociality bears no stigma. So most conversations are cage matches of contending Ids, with everyone else drowned out. Perhaps more perverse still, it makes a lot of quite sensible and civil people into unrestrained ranging crazies. Now, put that way, it makes me sound like a bit of a scold. But comments that are free of the food fight of most comment sections are actually a pleasure to read.
(As a sidelight, I’d note that in the digital publishing world it’s treated as gospel that you want to get as many comments as you possibly can. It leads to more “time on site”, more “engagement” and more page views. And I’m pretty confident that we’d take a hit on each of these if we did this because a substantial number of people wouldn’t want to comment any more. But personally I think the advantages would outweigh those supposed downsides.)
Now, again, there are plenty of caveats and exceptions. Maybe you’re gay and you don’t want your family to know. Or your workplace has a strong political leaning you don’t share. Maybe you don’t want you right-wing uncle to know you hate the Tea Party or you’re conservative and you don’t want your cousin to know you think his views are silly. For whatever reason maybe you just don’t want your political views and expression plugged into your real world family and professional life. It’s not something I can relate to exactly. But I completely get people feeling this way.
Still, the more I run this site the more I think it would actually be better to have people comment as themselves. And I’m very curious to know what you think.
