Careful with those comments

Online Comments are supposed to be a crucial way to increase interactivity between media producers and consumers, but they come with dangers.

The threat of Internet trolls and their hateful and vitriolic comments that can hijack a news story are well known. This week, Popular Science announced it was dropping user comments because it is bad for science. A study led by a researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that not only do comments have an impact on, and sometimes reverse, the reader's opinion of the issues in a scientific story, rude comments have an even more powerful impact. (The authors wrote a piece for the New York Times that summarizes the research.)

On the same day, YouTube announced changes for user comments. The goal here is to increase the usefulness of comments, by displaying more "important" comments higher in the comment list, rather than the most recent comments first. For example, if the celebrity that is the subject of a video comments, that comment is given prominent display. "Important" people in general are given preference in comments. Comments from a video's creator are also preferred. The improvements will also allow users more moderation control over their own videos.

Then there are the grand-daddies of commenting, Facebook and Twitter. Many media websites require commenters to register, often through Facebook. Facebook as a medium seems built for comments, with each wall post offering an invitation to comment. Since you pick your Facebook friends, you've essentially pre-moderated the responses, and you can always block, edit, and drop wall posts if you get comments you don't like. Twitter is simply 140 character comments broadcast to the entire world, with pre-moderation in the form of who you chose to follow.

Perhaps ending this entry with an invitation to comment is gratuitous.