Neil Sanderson

Rob Hyndman asks whether 608 comments at the bottom of a blog item is really “a conversation” or just a way for people to scrawl “I was here”. I think it’s a good point.

To be sure, switching on the comments is an easy way for a news site to look like it is trying to engage with its readers. And there are times when a story or issue generates many more insightful comments than will ever make it into a newspaper’s limited space for letters to the editor. So the web can give everyone an opportunity to be heard.

But, acknowledging that many comments are nothing more than “I agree” or “I think you’re nuts” and do nothing to advance “the conversation”, what are we to make of the Globe and Mail website’s current campaign encouraging people with daft opinions to have them published?

For those who haven’t heard the radio ads, they feature a dim-witted “Trish” who expresses opinions such as “Why should I care about bird flu? It’s not like I’m a bird or anything” and “People who don’t support minority governments are racist”.

Trish, we are assured in the ads, will find her views welcomed at the Globe website.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Trish shouldn’t be free to publish her - if you’ll pardon the expression - thoughts. But I do think it demonstrates Rob’s point - that comments are not equally valuable. And, with the proliferation of them on news sites and in the blogosphere, perhaps we’ll see an eventual swing of the pendulum towards greater moderation of comments by site editors and bloggers. Except, perhaps, at globeandmail.com?

Rob also asks why news websites don’t automatically generate a binary poll as part of each comments thread. I can suggest a couple of reasons for that, and polls are something I explored a bit in this post two days ago.

First, the trend at the moment seems to be towards the automatic enabling of comments associated with all stories. But creating a poll for that many stories would be a mammoth task (when I was editor of nzherald, for example, we published well over 1000 stories a week). The issue at the core of each story needs to be identified, defined and expressed in an unambiguous and unbiased manner so that readers can quickly understand what they’re being asked and respond accordingly.

Moreover, many issues are not resolved through binary decision-making. And a forced-choice, while neat and easy for the pollster, can misrepresent people’s actual opinions. My post on polls advocates offering a comprehensive range of responses.