Thinking outside the box can be a matter of life and death

WIRED:ONLINE COMMENTS – those small opportunities readers have to write their piece at the bottom of web pages – have developed a reputation for rudeness. I've heard many say that reading the comments (especially YouTube comments) under commissioned articles has destroyed their faith in humanity.

Dave Winer, blog software designer and one of the earliest adopters of comments, recently decided they were not worth the effort and removed them from his site. Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker online media empire, recently bemoaned the state of the commentariat in a keynote at the influential tech convention SXSW Interactive. He’s seen cruel comments make his employees cry; and he’s afraid that those who might provide the best commentary are scared away from saying anything at all.

However, the consequences of the curious flame-fanning nature of online commentary can be far more serious than even Denton realises.

I was recently talking to editors in Culiacán, Mexico, home of one of the most powerful drug cartels in the Americas. There, rival drug gangs get into public arguments through comments on the website of local newspaper, El Debate. When the newspaper’s web editors deleted one of the comments, they received a message from the cartel: reinstate the comment, said the user, or else – then listed the current location and movements of one of the editors’ wives.

On the other hand, in Bangkok, Thailand, webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiporn faces 20 years’ imprisonment for taking too long to delete vague messages that some interpreted as being critical of the monarchy.

Clearly, comments are a serious business. But is their viciousness really a result of our squalid human nature? Another online pioneer, Anil Dash, who uses the phrase “tragedy of the comments” to describe this issue, thinks the fault lies with website editors. If your comments are being provided by assholes, he says, it’s as much your fault as theirs. Comment spaces have to be pruned like a garden: if they aren’t, they go to seed pretty quickly.

Denton isn’t entirely fatalistic about the future of comments either. His company is working on a better tool for handling them. He plans to prioritise commentary from those most directly connected with the subject matter of the web article. For example, Lady Gaga should have a greater chance to comment on a Lady Gaga article. Of course, for a company that writes so much about celebrities, having celebrities feeling comfortable chipping in with free content seems to be a win-win situation. But what about the rest of us?

Denton’s idea for the hoi polloi is that we should have our own investment in the comments. The originator of a subject thread should own the replies, he says, implying that they can moderate and manage their own patch of comment land.

I like that idea. Those who write comments aren’t the dregs of society. When comments go wrong, it’s because the users don’t feel invested in where they are; they don’t feel they are part of an appropriate conversation.

Articles are written for a general audience, but comments are conversational. And in conversations, we speak in a more casual and, yes, sometimes ruder tone. Nothing is meant by this rudeness. If we all spoke like the editorial page of the New York Times, we’d just sound weird.

But that conversational informality strikes the wrong note in comments. A YouTube commenter may critique the appearance of a person in a video, apparently unaware (or not caring) that the person will be reading and reacting to their comments. Others may display strong opinions without the qualifications and hedges that most of us employ when we’re in mixed political company.

All of these slips occur because we’re given insufficient cues about our fellow commenters, the creators of the original subject of the comments and the wider audience. We type into an empty text box on a screen, but we don’t get any sense of who is out there and how they may react to our words.

And these errors compound themselves. A brazen comment about looks inspires others to pile on. A glib political comment attracts outraged overreaction. And eventually those in the wider web audience watching these train wrecks can’t help but add their own ha’porth of poorly chosen words.

Like Denton and Dash, I think we can fix this. We need to build tools that give us gear changes between informal and formal styles. Most importantly, we need to make it clear to everyone – commenters, courts, and even drug barons – that it’s commenters who own their own words, not sharecropping publishers. I just hope we can build those tools and create those environments quickly – not just for sites like Gawker, but for those in Mexico and Thailand for whom the failings of comments have far more drastic consequences.