Comments and Community: Online Facilitators, what do you think?
Chris Pirillo writes about Digg vs. Slashdot and the commenting culture of each community. The essense of his question goes to how comments contribute or drain value from the community. His direct question in this case is "My question: which community of commenters is worse?"
What do you think? More importantly, to all you online facilitators out there, what do you/does your community do to make commenting productive or in synch with the community goals and ethic?
Technorati Tags: onlinecommunity, online_facilitation
posted by Nancy White at 8:40 PM
4 Comments:
Personally, I can't stand the communities at either site. I get most of my 'top interest' links from the del.icio.us/popular feed.
Josh, do you consider getting links a community action? Or is it just a benefit of being part of the del.icio.us network?
I'm not sure. It's a good question. I use del.icio.us for my bookmarks, but I don't think anything I've bookmarked before has become 'popular'. On the other hand, I'm guessing that most people who use del.icio.us don't expect their bookmarks to become popular either. It's extremely viral. So, I guess it's a bit of both: I DO take part in the del.icio.us community, by using it for my bookmarks. But I also consider my usage of the del.icio.us/popular feed as rather like a leech. I know 'good stuff' is within, so I take it.
As an aside, I find the whole 'popular links' thing rather interesting. Once something is flagged as popular, it's popularity just increases, because so many people check the 'popular' area. So, THEY bookmark the item as well, which just shoves it even higher, popularity wise.
Hi Nancy: Interesting question. I'm wondering how many community facilitators find the quality of comments to be a day-to-day concern. I know that my chief concern is trying to coax the right quality of content out of my team to generate any comments at all.
The occassional commenter who just doesn't get it and who is so off target can usually be turned away by a "that's not appropriate here" response. Like a school yard bully, if the community simply ignores them, most provocateur will go elsewhere.
On one occasion where politeness didn't work, I had to nuke the person's comments and block their IP. But I'm very cautious to take that drastic of a step. Others who might be watching may be frightened away if they feel they don't fit a communal norm.
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