Tag Archives: meta

On comments

CC image from premasagar.

A few days ago in my RSS reader, David Levinson’s Transportationist blog has a post about the end of comments on his blog. I’m somewhat sad, as (at appropriate volumes) comment sections can produce valuable discussion. Commenting on blogs was part of the reason I started my own. David’s platform (hosted by the University of Minnesota) requires registration for commenting, however – the reason I never offered comments on his blog. If compulsory registration was indeed out of his control, then there’s not much difference between disallowing comments and burdening them via registration.

David’s post shared a few links on blog comments I found interesting.

On trolling: Never read the bottom half of the internet. The idea here being that trolls are aiming to provoke you into an argument, whether solely for the purpose of exposure and notoriety, or to discredit the idea of a post.

The sad thing is, tolling works: One of the purposes of trolling would be to discredit the main content, fighting an honest post with FUD, disingenous comments, or outright lies – all without accountability. The sad thing is that it works. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

A new obstacle to scientific literacy may be emerging, according to a paper in the journal Science by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

The new study reports that not only are just 12% of Americans turning to newspaper and magazine websites for science news, but when they do they may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself.

In an experiment mentioned in the Science paper and soon to be published elsewhere in greater detail, about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.

“Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story,” wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.

“In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.”

Comments as a dinner party: One piece that immediately came to mind in reading Levinson’s links was this On The Media session (written semi-transcription here) with Ta-Nehisi Coates, discussing the challenges (positive and negative) of comment sections – perhaps thinking of comments as a dinner party with interesting conversation, but noting that good commenting requires curating the comments – e.g. a lot of work.

Nonetheless, I love the idea of curating comments, if only thanks to seeing interesting and productive discussion in many blogs.  Perhaps these places have the virtue of a critical mass of commenters (unlike, say, this blog) without the vice of too much trolling – or even too much volume (with too many people shouting, how can one expect to get a word in edge-wise?)

Application to this blog: Limited. I don’t get too many comments here, nor do I post frequently to spark much discussion. Despite the value in commenting under the right circumstances, one of Levinson’s last points did hit home for me:

If you have comments, you should get a blog (or if you have one, post there). As someone on the web remarked, that will get a lot more attention for both of us due to Google’s PageRank formula than posting on comments with a nofollow tag.

Again, that’s part of the reason I’m here.

Updating the reading list

CC image from sabeth718

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the reading list, so I’ve added several new (and several old) reads to the list. I also kept the link to my old (and no-longer supported) Google Reader shared items feed, while also adding the full del.ici.ous links feed.

I’ve got a few more books on my bookshelf that I’d like to add to the list.  Any suggestions for books/content to add?

The new Google Reader

Pass the crow, please.

Last week, I noted that the hullaballoo about the impending changes to Google Reader were likely overblown.  Insofar as we’re talking about the sharing and social features migrating to Google+, it probably is overblown.  But the new user interface stinks.  From Google’s official blog:

A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

Cleaner?  I guess.  Faster?  Not in my experience so far.  Easier to look at?  I don’t use Google Reader to look, I use it to read.

The functionality of the old interface is completely lost.  The buttons are all in the wrong place.  Simple features (such as ‘mark as unread’) are nowhere to be found. The color scheme is harder to read, fewer RSS items appear on my screen, the spacing is awkward, there’s excessive and wasted blank space, the hierarchy of information is all wrong (why is the subscribe button so big and red?), etc.

What a mess.

The least Google can do is to offer users the option to retain the old interface.  Gmail offers this for users (via themes), Google Docs and Google Calendar’s recent interface redesigns offer the option to switch to the older, more compact, more information-dense interface as well.  Google should make the same option available for reader, or I’m going to be in the market for a new RSS feed reader.

The initial reaction isn’t good.  Not that most UI changes are universally embraced, but this is more than a Garth Algar ‘we fear change‘ moment – this is a step backwards in utility.

Pass the crow.  For the time being, the reader items in the sidebar won’t be updating.