platonic ideal: a comments section that you actually want to read

it is a law universally acknowledged that you “don’t read the comments section”. but this is only because of what most comments sections contain, which is influenced by the people who ignore this law and comment anyway, as well as the design of the commenting system, plus the moderation in play (if any). and also by you, the reader, who brings their own worldview into their role as audience and reader.

what does it take to foster a comments section that you would actually want to read?

i think community and personal relevance are important factors, but the primary cause of this despair is the centralization of comments sections. by which i mean: you comment directly on the article in question. so the publisher is now no longer just a publisher; they must act as a community manager and moderator as well.

several publications have found this to be untenable and have disabled their comments as a result, leaving things like social media to pick up the slack, which is not better.

i think a radical paradigm shift might help here:

make publishers manually add links to responses and discussions that they wish to elevate.

one interesting model for this that i’ve seen is a site where every article contains in its footer an email address, and if you have something to add to the conversation, you email that address, after which the author *might* manually add your comment for everyone else to see.

this also discourages responding to a comment instead of to the article.

i think a way to model this in the social web (using as2 vocab for now) is that each direct response to an article may be manually Added to the “replies”. a centralized comments section might be represented as having the article be the first post in a discussion which serves as the “context”. but the unmodeled bit is how to represent external discussions. crawling the replies recursively is one way, but it sucks.

what if the discussion was inReplyTo the article?

which is to say: the `replies` collection might not contain only “posts”. it might contain “discussions” as well.

this allows different communities to discuss the original article in a separate context and audience, which may be linked back to if the author of the article wants to elevate those discussions.

kind of like saying “hey, this article spawned some interesting discussion in this other forum thread! maybe check it out if you want to see more?”

@trwnh that's essentially how “quote boosts” are supposed to work, and was the idea behind ping backs and webmentions

@oblomov not exactly. webmentions sure, they notify you that *something* happened that relates to one of your resources. but the bit i’m talking about is how you represent or markup the linkback. in the simplest case, you incorporate it directly into the content of the html page.

for a “quote boost”, that would likely go in the activitypub `shares` collection, which is not the same thing as the responses collected in the as2 `replies` collection.