The BBC's Nick Robinson on the comments left on his blog:
"So I'm going to be honest with you and I've said this before and I've upset some people. I don't read the comments anything like as much as I used to because there is too much static white noise in them and not enough pure feedback. But if we could find a way of having a more thoughtful, less abusive debate via blogs I think that would be a good thing."
[Via Mediating Conflict]
He's not alone in this observation - many big, high traffic blogs have abandoned comments, employed moderators, or left their comments as a bear pit, because one to many conversation doesn't scale very well. Forums have been dying under the weight of moderation problems since before blogs were first published.
This is a challenge for mainstream media companies as social media becomes a more central part of what we do, and not just a fringe activity (in fact, I'm in the process of arranging a meeting with one of our titles that is going through the early stages of this issue).
What's the solution? Community managers? User voting? Enforced registration?
A very valid conversation that you've started here. I'm part of a group that runs two main media sites and we are in the thick of the battle here in terms of raising the level of the conversation so it's more useful to the communities we hope to be a part of.
There are several things we'd like to try. For example, having the content collector or reporter get into the conversations more often, setting clear expectations and living up to our part of them and also contributing to the community as a company better (i.e. getting away from the one-way push of content)
I think getting the reporter / collector involved is a big step forwards. Too many sites leave their comments entirely to the visitors, and thus create mini-forums which often exist in almost complete opposition to the original post.