I just read an article on WordPress on how a girl who was recently hired by Cisco was fired for talking jibber-jabber about her new employer. I had made a comment on the subject, but had seen that my comment had sunk to the bottom of all the chaos.
As you can tell, my site gets no comments. I probably average around 20 people a day, and I have hit zero a couple of times. It isn’t anyone else’s fault but my own.
But, if I had a site that was flourishing with comments, here is my idea ( WordPress plug-in developers, or any website developer, write this down ): A malleable comments structure.
What would A Malleable Contents Structure Be?
When people discuss things, the structure of a conversation is seldom linear. Time is linear, but a forum isn’t so. If it were linear, then it would be hard to make sense of the interaction. Especially when there are many people, there is then exponential amount of interplay, and a linear structure would not bold well.
Commenting is linear-structured. It is impossible to interact with the discussion since you would have to scroll down and pick and choose the content replies that you like. This hurts on two levels:
1) First-come first-serve model doesn’t justify content: A comment is content. A comment is a message. The content/comment most viewed are usually the first few. This doesn’t help since the first comments may not always be the best ones ( and you can see this in many sites, as this parody explains.)
2) Due-diligence is less as someone finds discussion replies: So the best reply is comment #67. Are you going to find it? Probably not. The website writer who moderates will read it, but then it consolidates the discussion between the writer and commenter and not everyone that is involved.
Is the first person that enters the Pub the most exciting person in the establishment? If not, then why is the first commenter rewarded? Is a comment that is muddled to the dark-depths of a blog not worth reading?
These issues can be solved with the utilization of a malleable contents functions. The function works using :
- 1. Voting on best comment ( such as Digg )
- 2. Randomizing first four comments.
- 3. Flipping comment order after a finite amount of time or randomly.
Voting and Randomizing
Voting on the best comment would help because it would show that other people in the discussion participated by acknowledging someone else had something insightful to say. This shows appreciation to good commenters, and their popularity can grow as more people vote for him ( as well as recognize him/her if they are consistent commenters.)
The reward for the commenters would come from the randomizing feature. The randomizing feature would semi-randomly put four comments in the first four comment spaces, regardless of how late they replied. So if you are commenter number 60, you still have a chance to be in the top spot.
The people who receive votes should have a better chance percentage-wise to land a random spot. And one random spot should be reserved only for someone who receives votes.
The third function would invert the comments after a certain amount of time. The Huffington Post shows their comments from latest-to-earliest. Most other blogs conduct a first-come basis for comment structure. What would be the best of both worlds is the ability to invert them either randomly ( so sometimes older comments are shown, sometimes newer ), or after a certain amount of time/comments ( 50 comments, invert to most recent first ).
This wouldn’t be the perfect situation, but it would allow comment structure to have more movement, and push some of the discussion towards where people pay attention: the first few comments. As well, commenters would be more enticed to write if they know their response could get equal exposure. And they will write better responses if they can get votes, and get better placement.
It is a win-win for any blogger or content site. The blogger gets extra content and discussions ( and exposure to advertising ), and the commenter gets to shine ( as well as have a chance for his URL/link to get some exposure as well.)
For WordPress, could this commenting cocktail ever be possible?