Comments on: Comments on the New York Times’ Comments System http://jonathanstray.com/comments-on-the-new-york-times-comments-system Information, Culture, and Belief Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:56:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 By: Colin http://jonathanstray.com/comments-on-the-new-york-times-comments-system/comment-page-1#comment-668 Colin Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:07:07 +0000 http://jonathanstray.com/?p=1382#comment-668 I haven't really dug into the comments on NYT but if they are anything like the dismal hatefest of comments on SFGate, then I don't blame NYT for not paying attention to them and promoting email for error correction. Sometimes it's better to encourage more hoops as you get less tripe. As for not all articles having open comments, I can see this is relevant too. Not everything small piece of news needs to be a discussion. And since they are in the business of timely news shutting it down after a bit also makes sense. Now having thumbs up/down votes for relevent comments and having nested comments would likely improve the system—sfgate needs this. Nested comments tend to limit flame wars to a small nested area rather than have the entire comment thread get hosed by it all. I haven’t really dug into the comments on NYT but if they are anything like the dismal hatefest of comments on SFGate, then I don’t blame NYT for not paying attention to them and promoting email for error correction. Sometimes it’s better to encourage more hoops as you get less tripe.

As for not all articles having open comments, I can see this is relevant too. Not everything small piece of news needs to be a discussion. And since they are in the business of timely news shutting it down after a bit also makes sense.

Now having thumbs up/down votes for relevent comments and having nested comments would likely improve the system—sfgate needs this. Nested comments tend to limit flame wars to a small nested area rather than have the entire comment thread get hosed by it all.

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