Ideas of Civilisation has written a really interesting post about the state of the Scottish blogosphere compared with the dodgy comments that get posted on The Herald’s website, Scotsman.com and the like.

The Scottish blogosphere is indeed, by and large, a pretty good place for a debate. Nowadays it is probably dominated a bit too much by SNP supporters, but I think the debate is usually pretty respectful. IoC asks, why does this respectful atmosphere not cross over into the mainstream media comment sites?

The answer is that they are mainstream media comment sites. As I have pointed out before, trolls, flamers and knuckle-draggers are attracted to MSM comment sites like flies on a shit. The blog spEak You’re bRanes, a blog I mention many times, does a good job of compiling the most ridiculous comments posted to MSM outlets.

The thing is that IoC is right when he says that the debate in the Scottish blogosphere is good. But this isn’t peculiar to Scotland. The debate in the blogosphere world-wide is also good. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of extreme comments in MSM websites does not just exist on Scottish websites (although Scotland does have a distinct phenomenon with its ‘cybernats’). It is known to media outlets the world over, and even some big websites such as Digg and YouTube.

So why is there such a difference? After all, the point of blogging is meant to be that it’s really easy to get involved in. So why don’t people with poisonous views pollute the blogosphere so easily?

The answer is that it’s so simple to avoid poisonous people in the blogosphere. Does someone have a terrible blog? That’s okay, because no-one will read it. Knuckle-dragging extremists find that they will reach a far wider audience if they post on a website like Scotsman.com or the BBC.

There is another answer. Even though in theory it is easy to set up a blog, the reality is slightly different. You still have to put in quite a lot of effort. It can be time-consuming and you have to come up with the goods to make sure people read it. If you are not interested in having a genuine discussion, you will soon find that blogging is quite costly. But for those who are willing to put the effort in for there to be a good debate, the pay-off can be good. For this reason, bloggers tend to be more articulate, reasoned and intelligent than your average Have Your Sayer.

Does this mean that we should give up on the idea of having comments on the BBC’s blogs or The Herald’s political stories? Far from it. All you have to do to improve the nature of the debate is create the right mechanism to ensure that the cream will rise up.

Websites such as Digg and YouTube have implemented a voting mechanism in an attempt to get rid of trolls. You can choose to give a comment a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. The BBC’s Have Your Say has a similar voting mechanism. However, this doesn’t work in my view. In fact, if anything, it exacerbates the problem. It just makes the comments section even more of a hotbed of demagoguery — the loudest attention seekers, not the most reasoned and articulate, will grab the most votes.

Some websites are just lucky enough to have a good audience that respects debate. The Economist’s website is said to be relatively free of HYS-style trolls. That is probably due to the target audience of the publication. I suspect many HYSers aren’t even aware of the existence of The Economist and if they are, they aren’t interested in posting there because it’s not a publication for them.

However, for the more mass-market audiences of the likes of the BBC, The Herald and The Scotsman, it’s too late to do anything about this. They made a decision long ago to appeal to the masses, so its audience will have that demagogic element that will be reflected in the comments.

Another alternative might be to force users to post under their real names. It is generally believed that once people’s cloak of anonymity has been removed, their online debating style becomes more respectful and considered.

On the other hand, many bloggers and commenters have genuine reason to wish to remain anonymous. And, barring the universal adoption of an OpenID-style system, it would be nigh on impossible to police. A decent ‘middle ground’ option might be to place OpenID comments at the top of the thread and hide the anonymous comments towards the bottom of the page.

Another possible solution is simply to make it costly for the ill-informed jokers to take part. For some, it may be an anathema to make people pay to post comments — almost against the culture of the web. But it needn’t be.

There is one big website that is known for having decent comments sections that avoid the numbskullery of sites such as YouTube — MetaFilter. There it costs $5 to post comments. That is a one-time life-long fee. Pay $5 and you can post to your heart’s content. There is also a one-week time lag between signing up and being able to post.

This ensures that only the people who are interested in contributing properly get involved. $5 is quite a small fee for those who really value MetaFilter, but it is enough to deter time-wasting trolls. A one-week time lag also prevents people from just posting a crazy extreme rant in the heat of the moment. Just like blogging, MetaFilter is costly for the time-wasters, but beneficial for those who want to make a genuine contribution.

The solution for the MSM websites if they want to clean out their comment sections is therefore to somehow create a mechanism that makes it costly for extremist ranters to post, but makes it beneficial for those who want to take part in a reasoned debate.

Perhaps a MeFi-style one-off fee or a time lag might do the trick. If you had to pay, say, £5 to open a lifetime account on Scotsman.com to allow you to post, you might just go for it if that £5 was enough to deter the ranting trolls. It could also be a handy (though potentially small) additional source of income for the media outlets.

IoC’s issue isn’t just with the media websites though. It’s also with the Scottish Government’s website. If a government website becomes an outlet for extreme views, that is undoubtedly a problem. The Scottish Government’s “National Conversation” has been accused of being “a chatroom for cybernats“. That was probably always inevitable. After all, a “conversation” about independence initiated by the SNP is bound not to last long or be very meaningful.

Nonetheless, I have to applaud the Scottish Government for going ahead with the project. To have user-generated content on a government website is pretty big stuff if you ask me and it’s probably the right thing to do — engaging the citizens in the policy-making process and all that.

But the contributions have to be meaningful. I’ve not been following the National Conversation very closely. Skimming through it just now, it doesn’t look too bad, but obviously it’s caused concern among some.

Perhaps for user-generated content on government websites there should be an expectation that you do not contribute anonymously. I think that is probably a reasonable expectation for someone who wants to take part in civic society. People who write a letter to their MP or MSP or another figure in public office can’t expect a reply without supplying a name and address. The Government’s e-petition website also requires you to enter a name and address. The authenticity of some of these names is questionable though.

Perhaps future projects like the National Conversation might require people to supply real names and addresses (not publicly viewable of course) in order to participate. This would remove the cloak of anonymity and improve the likelihood of there being a sensible debate. Looking at the National Conversation website, it looks like most (but not all) participants are contributing under their real names anyway. Still, it’s a thought.

Anyone who has read this blog for long might get the impression that I am anti-mainstream media or anti-journalism. I don’t blame you for thinking this because I am always blaming this, that and the other on the media. I’ve done it twice this week alone, even in this period of “light blogging”.

I must come across one of those awful people who always manages to blame everything on the media. But while occasionally I have a beef with certain aspects of the mainstream media, I know that it would be grossly unfair to tar all journalists with the same brush.

Look in the comments section on any major website, and you will find loons aplenty. I used to be a big advocate of letting people comment on MSM news articles. I thought the BBC’s terrible Have Your Say was just a one-off accident due to the fact that it was among the first major attempts at allowing comments on MSM websites. Now that comments are commonplace, it is clear that it was a mistake to believe that it would enhance accountability or improve debate.

The first time I truly realised that comments on MSM sites were almost universally awful was when Scotsman.com introduced them. I wrote about it at the time. The comment box obviously just attracts loudmouths and morons. Anyone looking for good debate would be sorely disappointed.

This isn’t just a problem with the media. Anyone who has read the comments on huge websites like Digg or YouTube will have probably found their inner misanthrope jumping out and despairing about the state of humankind. It seems as though the bigger the website is, the worse the comments are.

Anseo at North to Leith has written a brilliant post about the comment sections of both Scotsman.com and The Herald’s website.

I`m getting more than a wee bit pissed off at some of the bloody loonies who leave comments on the Scotsman and the Herald’s websites. I`m know a great many of the Scottish Press Corp and on the whole they have my respect. Are there those who are members of the Labour party? Yes, but there are also members of the SNP – and party membership generally among the press corp is very very low…

Some so-called cyber-nats (if they actually are nats and not simply flamers or stirrers) seem to take any story which has any criticism of the SNP as evidence that the journalist behind the piece is some form of Labour ‘fellow traveller’.

Which, in short, is total pish.

Anseo’s description is sadly true. Visit the Scotsman or Herald comments sections and all you will find is a bunch of shouty SNP / independence supporters whining about the great unionist conspiracy and generally making themselves look a bit stupid.

I have sometimes wondered if there is some kind of Ron Paul-style alert system telling SNP activists whenever a relevant story is published. But if this was the case, they would surely have stopped by now, because they will have realised that anyone reading the comments will just get the impression that SNP supporters are a bunch of morons — which isn’t the case.

The likely explanation is that there really is an army of people waking up and visiting the Scotsman first thing in the morning to fire off a few diatribes. I would say they are people who have too much time on their hands, but that’s not necessarily the case because they obviously don’t spend very much time constructing these sledgehammers.

I highly doubt there is any institutional political bias in the Scottish media. My guess is that there are fair few Labour supporters working in the Scottish media, but this is surely a reflection of the huge base of support Labour has in Scotland anyway. In fact, I am surprised that the SNP haven’t been given a rougher ride in the media as a whole since they won last year’s election.

It can be a fun game to guess which parties the major journalists support. But it’s just that — a game. Readers of Brian Taylor’s excellent blog will be aware that he leans to the orange side — but only in football. In politics? Who knows. He is very even-handed. It would be like knowing who David Dimbleby votes for.

These accusations of bias can affect more than just politics. Sport is a prime example. Just look at the many people who (either with their tongues in their cheeks or not) accuse various football pundits of secretly supporting Glasgow Rangers. Chick Young doesn’t really support St Mirren, they say. It’s all a smokescreen as part of the great Rangers conspiracy.

As Anseo points out, the reality is almost certainly that the main political commentators are not aligned to any particular party at all. After all, that is the case with most people. Indeed, I am rather suspicious of anyone who identifies too closely with a political party.

Anseo’s conclusion is neat, and brings us back to the subject at hand:

So to all those supposed cyber-nats out there if you fancy putting your own brand of loony views on the internet…get a blog (like the rest of us loonies)…and try and at least engage in debates rather than simply abuse.

I couldn’t agree more. Increasingly it looks as though introducing comment facilities on media websites are a mistake. They add either no value or negative value to the website. I am not the only one to have come to this conclusion.

A couple of months back a story caught my eye where an expert in online discussion said that some newspapers have made a bit of a hash of introducing comments to their websites. Robert Marcus reckons the problem is the lack of community:

News sites should be wary of comment areas being dominated by campaigners or those seeking ‘their name in lights’, a phenomenon that can occur because of a lack of ‘friendliness’ and community between readers and journalists in this area, he added.

I personally think it might be to do with the size of websites. If a website has a large audience (and therefore a large number of contributors), then the only way to attract attention is to use attention-seeking tactics. Nuanced debate will inevitably fall by the wayside.

I agree with Anseo that people who want to scratch the commenting itch should start up a blog. Despite my bleak outlook on user generated content on the MSM, I still believe that bloggers have inherent qualities that lead to good debate.

Okay, so some blogs are not all that great, and we can probably all think of some big blogs that have bad debate. Cassilis wrote about this last week:

Can there be any more dispiriting a sight than the phrase ‘Comments (86) - Add your own’ - you just know there aren’t 86 insightful observations there (you’ll be lucky to find 6) and the exchanges no more deserve the term dialogue than a rowdy pub brawl does. The invitation to ‘Add a Comment’ feels like being tapped on the shoulder at a football match and asked why you’re not shouting with the other 40,000….

This is the same problem that faces all other websites — the bigger the website, the worse the debate. But for the likes of medium sized blogs like this, and upstarts, blogging is a breath of fresh air and the comment sections are generally good.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, blogging is a skill; it’s difficult. How many of us have seen upstart bloggers give up after a couple of weeks? Secondly, bloggers are held to account in the comments section and by other bloggers. You have to be prepared to defend what you say. As such, what you say has to be robust and sensible enough in the first place. Thirdly, trolls get ignored on their own blogs — it’s only when they go elsewhere that they can get any attention.

I admit that this is a rather elitist approach. But if you want good debate you have to set the barrier at an appropriate level.

The loons who dispose of their verbal diarrhoea on popular websites are polluters. Websites like Scotsman.com and The Herald should perhaps consider removing the comments facilities.

But that needn’t mean there should be no discussion about their stories. In its place they could — and should — have a system like pingbacks or a Technorati widget so that readers can see what bloggers have to say about the story. The standard of debate would surely rise.

There is a fixture of the modern web that I really don’t understand. And in terms of annoyance it is probably second only to Snap Preview.

Millions of links to social bookmarking websites littering the bottom of every news article and blog post written. You know the ones. “Digg this!” “Send to del.icio.us!” “Pimp-me-do to Reddit!”

A particularly bad example comes from one certain WordPress plugin which appends this awful mess onto every post:

I mean, just what the hell are you supposed to do with that?

It is not just blogs that do this sort of thing. Many major newspaper websites also now incorporate such links pretty much as a matter of course. Thankfully, they tend to show a bit more restraint than that WordPress plugin.

BBC News has become the latest website to add such buttons to its news stories. Thankfully, they too have kept it relatively restrained, with simple links to five of the most popular social bookmarking services.

Ryan Morrison thinks that the inclusion of the buttons is a good move from the BBC (by the way, sorry, Ryan, for nicking your screengrab! I’m not leeching off your bandwidth though, honest). But I just don’t understand why they go to that bother.

I have steadfastly refused to include such buttons on this blog. For one, the advantages of being submitted to Digg are dubious (something like having hundreds of drunk arseholes coming into your living room to violently vomit on your carpet before going away without paying the cleaning bill, never to be seen again).

But this is what I really don’t understand about these social bookmarking links. As Inquisitor points out, surely if you wanted to submit a story to del.icio.us, Digg or whatever, you would already know how to do it. If you make a habit out of Digging a site, you will surely have the relevant plugins / browser buttons installed in your browser. Why rely on the disparate approaches taken by the near-infinite number of websites on the internet when you have that trusty button in your browser?

I am a heavy user of del.icio.us. Yet I have never used one of the buttons placed on a website itself. I always use the buttons that I have installed on my browser. I am familiar with these plugins. I know exactly where to find them and what to expect when I click them.

Most major social bookmarking websites have Firefox extensions or little bookmarks that you can drag into your toolbar. The above image is a screenshot of the navigation toolbar bar in Firefox. Next to the address field are two different buttons for del.icio.us (one for my main account, the other for Scottish Roundup). Then, if I should feel like Digging a story there is a Digg button. Next to that is one for StumbleUpon. Facebook has an entire toolbar if you really want to use it.

You might say, “Okay, maybe that is how you submit stories to social bookmarking websites. But you are an awful geek. What about the rest of us?” Maybe so, but how many normal, non-geek, web users are users of social bookmarking websites? If you took the geeks off the internet, social bookmarking websites would probably not exist at all.

I would be interested to know how often the buttons used on websites like BBC News and blogs are really used. I can’t imagine they are used that much. Why would you, when you can use browser buttons that are so much more efficient?

Still, I guess the links placed on websites must work, otherwise nobody would bother with them. I have pondered installing Alex King’s “Share This” plugin. At least it quite sensibly hides the ugly smorgasbord of links before you actively ask to be shown them. But still, why would you do that when you — presumably — already have your own trusted methods of posting an item to your social bookmarking website of choice?

Am I the only person who thinks that Technorati’s “WTF” feature is absolutely terrible?

For a start, it has got the worst name ever. I’m sure it seemed like a funny joke at the time. But now it looks silly with “WTF” plastered all over Technorati. For the uninitiated, “WTF” means “What the fuck?” to the cool kids. Technorati devised an oh-so-funny backronym for its new feature: “Where’s the flame?” Uhh.

But not only has it got that awful name, but the feature itself is utterly diabolical. It is supposed to help explain why certain search terms are popular at the moment. But if you wanted to find that out, wouldn’t you just, err, search it and look it up?

Seemingly, any old person can get their terrible writing just one click away from the Technorati front page. Mostly — and this could have been predicted — it is people with bees in their bonnets.

One WTF for Facebook, which is currently in the news for its awesome Facebook Applications, is this:

Recently, Facebook made some changes – to make their site more ‘user friendly’… they even have a link “Spread the Word… Invite your friends to Facebook”…

But if Facebook still has ties to the CIA, DARPA, and Department of Defense… do you think I really wanna invite my friends?!… I’ll let them have at least SOME privacy…

Why are Google and Facebook always hiding their intentions? Why is it that when advocacy groups address their concerns on Privacy Rights… Google and Facebook ignore them? Why aren’t Google and Facebook TRANSPARENT companies like every other ETHICAL business on this PLANET?!

If Google and Facebook are really for Peace and for helping their users… why don’t they correct their ways and SHOW us that they care about our Privacy Rights?

I don’t even know what this means. It doesn’t explain anything about Facebook. It is just a badly written puff piece about privacy — but without making clear exactly what the privacy implications are meant to be. What, for instance, is the supposed link to the CIA about? Any evidence? Any explanation of what the supposed implications are meant to be? Frankly it looks like it was written by a loon.

You could say the same thing about blogs, but the point is that blogs succeed and fail under their own steam. Bad blogs simply do not get read. A bad “WTF” entry is, as I said, one click away from Technorati’s front page.

And while there is an attempt at some kind of Digg-style “wisdom of crowds” democratic moderation, nobody uses it. The WTF I quoted above is currently the second-highest WTF for Facebook, with a grand total of 2 votes. Third, also with a total of 2 votes, is a piece of spam. I think this might have something to do with the fact that WTF is useless, and voting would be a complete waste of time.

Even if you could add comments, so that you could have a discussion around the issues raised in the original ‘blurb’ posting, that would add a great deal to the feature. But then again, this sort of thing is what blogs are meant to be for. And Technorati is meant to be a blog search engine. So this feature ought to be totally redundant. My guess is that it is, and Technorati just don’t realise it.

Why can’t Technorati just concentrate on its constantly broken blog search engine, which is after all what Technorati is meant to be about? These silly features are just a distraction to both visitors and no doubt Technorati’s developers.

Even though I just criticised Digg less than a week ago, I decided to subcribe the the RSS feed recently. And now I’ve just registered on it. Maybe you can blame this on summer boredom, but I only registered so that I could bury rather than actually ‘Digg’ something. I’ve only found one or two interesting things on it. Despite Digg’s good reputation, there are a lot of turds managing to float to the top.