How Men Leave Comments on the Web

Pop-up quiz about the article at question and a few of the following comments to test if the person attempting to comment actually read most of the post and comments.

Hey this almost exactly what I do, except I put a lot of care into my spelling and punctuation.

How about an input box next to the comment entry textarea that needs the correct post number to be entered confirming which post a specific string of text belongs to. Make it just the right length of text and posters will be forced to do more than just scan read the thread.

for the Dutch readers: at the link below you'll find my opinion on comments on the web. All those web 2.0 professionals and visionairs should be able to find a way to improve quality of comments on the web.

http://overhetnieuws.blogspot.com/2006/04/de-klok-en-de-klepel-commentaar-op.html

Ahhhhh... too late I accidentally read what the others had to say and .. I don't have a point anymore.

On the other hand, from the comments that I have been seeing on the vine lately, I don't think the article is too far off. Well, except for my pet peeve of, comments that are off topic. I would provide an alternative to item #3 & #4.

3. Quickly do a complete download and write down whatever topic that came to your mind when you first saw the headline. Even if it has nothing to do with the topic itself.

4. Check back in a couple of hours and read the other comments. Then bask in the confirmation that you have successfully managed to steer the topic away from what the article/seed originally was.

Mike, this is Paddy Ryan's wife commenting, before he wakes up.

A little programming hack will solve the problem for you here on the Vine. Everytime a user posts a comment, check against his/her profile (where you'll have asked for his gender). If he's a male (of course, she wouldn't be a male, right?), simply delete his post. If she's a female, post her comment.

Ah, how life would be simple if all men were women :-)

HA HA HA!
Reading… what's that all about anyway?

Most likey Newsvine was used to research these findings.

I'm not surprised to see this coming from Anil Dash... he's got a great sense of humor. The main thing that bugs me about commenting on the Web is all those anonymous comments, and blogger.com pretty much encourages that kind of thing. It's irritating to try to respond to an anonymous commenter up-thread when, in the meantime, 18 other anonymous comments were made... and people seldom take the time to specify which comment they're responding to either by number or link to it. The blogging software generally doesn't make that part of it easy either (although Newsvine seems to have gotten around that with the ability to jump in and respond to a comment in the middle of the thread, which helps -- now, if only the other blogging apps let you do that).

Whaddya know, I'm a woman. :-)

must liklie nwesvine used to rsearch thse fndings,

So do men comment for the sake of commenting?

I think the first comment makes this whole article worthwhile. Oops - I mean - I thnk teh 1 coment makes tis hole artile wurthwhile.

Mike, what's to solve? If people read each others comments and gave thoughtul replies, well...

1) threads would be really short, simply exchanging comments for a bunch of votes on the two or three prevailing views.

2) the opportunity for tangents and humorous diversions would diminish. Honestly how much fun is it to read the comments of "headline skimmers" who try to jump into a Mykola article without reading the content.

3) "correcting" the behavior would only interrupt a pattern, something else amusing would pop up in its place.

4) identifying the comments from women would be much harder to detect. And we all know we like diversity :)

Easy way to solve this - allow everyone to make their initial post, but not show it on the actual page to anybody apart from the comment's author. Enable an Edit button on every new comment posted, and at the same time only allow new comments to be edited - and edited once only. This means that the comment author can then, after making their post, read the rest of the article and/or comments, realise that what they've said is either repeating someone else or grossly inaccurate, allow them to go back and edit the post, and then, having edited it for accuracy and/or readability, only then show the comment on the web site proper for the world to read. Subsequently disable the Edit feature for that comment as soon as the edits are submitted, so that to the rest of the world it looks like the person's actually posted something of worth and not just posted a load of tripe (or written things they later wish they could revise).

That way, everyone's happy, and Robert is your mother's brother.

... And yes, I've posted things I almost immediately wished I could've edited but been unable to, so I speak from experience, haha :D

I'm not sure I should be making a serious attempt at an answer on such a tongue-in-cheek thread, but here goes...

Why not leverage user reputation? Maybe color code comments to reflect degrees of reputability?

But this would still not be enough. With up-only voting, I could have a great reputation and still make inane comments without fear of hurting my reputation. I understand the rational for up-only voting, but why not factor in the relative lack of votes into reputation rankings? The argument for this can be made easily: a user with 3 contributions and 20 total votes should not be ranked the same as a user with 100 contributions and 20 total votes.

One possible approach (I can think of others) would be for a comment with zero votes in a thread with significant voting to receive an implicit, small fractional negative vote. A comment in the same thread that receives only one vote should also be adjusted by deducting a small fraction from the 1 vote. The function wouldn't be linear, so that the difference in negative adjustment between zero and for one vote should be much greater than that between 7 and 8 votes.