How to Improve Internet Comments

The most promising and yet most disappointing aspects of the Internet are the written comments left by the general public.  On one hand, comment sections are a great democratization of personal opinion.  With public commenting, anyone can make their opinion known until the world on whatever topic interests them.  On the other hand, comment sections give voice to absolutely any nutjob with Internet access.  As it turns out, and this is evident to anyone who has ever scrolled down on any video anywhere on YouTube, comment sections often devolve into base attacks, non sequiturs, and general insanity.

So how to deal with that problem?  In an upcoming paper, in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Stroud, Scacco, Muddiman and Curry1 explore this issue on news websites by randomly assigning 70 political posts made by a local TV station to one of three conditions:

• Condition 1: An unidentified staff member from the TV station participated in the discussion.
• Condition 2: A political reporter participated in the discussion.
• Condition 3: The discussion was permitted to run unmonitored.

2703 comments were made on these posts.  And as it turns out, participation in your comment section can change the tone.  Findings included:

• Reporter participation improved the deliberative tone of discussion, decreased uncivil comments (17% reduction in probability), and increased the degree to which commenters provided supporting evidence for their points (15% increase in probability).
• Reporter participation also appeared to improve the probability commenters left comments relevant to the post and asked genuine questions, but these effects were much smaller (and not statistically significant, given the sample size).
• Presence of the staff member had no effect in comparison to unmonitored discussion.  Troublingly, uncivil comments in fact went up and genuine questions went down when staff members were present.
• The specific type of prompt right before the discussion began had a smaller effect on discussion quality.  Specifically, open-ended questions (e.g., “What do you think about x?”) versus closed questions produced slightly more genuine questions and evidence, but only changes in probabilities were only about 10%.

The take-home here is that an “official”, knowledgeable, and active participant in the comment section did improve the quality of discussion.  Considering the link between discussion quality and time spent on websites, this has important implications for the use of discussion forums in contexts other than that of TV stations.

And although I don’t think we’re going to fix YouTube any time soon, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

1. Stroud, N., Scacco, J., Muddiman, A., & Curry, A. (2014). Changing Deliberative Norms on News Organizations’ Facebook Sites Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication DOI: 10.1111/jcc4.12104 [↩]