Why Comments Are Hard

Comments are in every corner of the interwebs. Sometimes they're wise, sometimes they incite good heated conversation and sometimes they link to male enhancement websites. And after decades of use, things aren't getting any better. Comments are hard. Just go on any YouTube video and see how useful most of the comments are. For the user it's another password to remember and something else to maintain. Post something that not everyone agrees with and say goodbye to your clean and cut comment feed and say hello to a barrage of insults coming your way. For the person who's hosting the comments it's something else to monitor and clean up. So to summarize, comments are hard, and this is why.

The Implementation

How a comment system is designed will determine how well it does overall. Does it require the user to verify their email. Does it allow the user to comment as much as humanly possible. Does it allow outside links, etc etc. All of these are things to consider when developing a commenting system. If no email verification is required, then getting spammed is super easy. Most of the time, bots don't have the time to go check their emails and follow a link back to verify. If users are allowed unlimited comments back to back, then at some point they'll run up your entire comment feed and leave their two cents one letter at a time. And allowing any time of HTML is just bad practice in general.

Spam

Almost any commenting system can be spammed given enough time. Even Captchas are no match for pattern matching software nowadays. Or you can even pay people to post comments using mechanical turk, it would be that easy to bypass. The more custom the commenting system of course the tougher it is to automate a commenting script. All of my comment systems have been home grown, and I've never received any spam on any of them. Of course I don't get many comments on those anyhow, which brings me to my next point, ease of use.

How Easy Is It To Post

This one is tough. You don't want users to have to jump 20 hurdles in order to post a "great job!" comment. You might also not want to have users create a new account in order to comment either. Users see "Register" and move along usually. That's a whole new password to remember just to comment on a site which you might not ever visit again. Then there are 3rd party commenting platforms like Disqus which look nice, but inevitably face many of the same issues listed here and not to mention also require logins and the such. The ideal commenting system would allow users to leave comments in the fastest and easiest way possible.

Negative Comments

There's probably more negative comments out there in cyberspace than positive. And whether they have a place on your website is up to you. It is your website after all. Some websites believe that people should post whatever they want no matter how rude or obscene, and that's just fine for them, but maybe you're not comfortable with that concept. I'm lucky that in past sites that I've created with active communities I actually did have some of the best active members that posted productive questions and comments to each other, and that's definitely something that I try achieve when I make a new site.

Goodbye Comments

Sometimes the right answer to comments is to just not have them. Many famous YouTuber's have gone to those lengths and there was little to no effect that came from it. It's not like they sat there daily and read all 30,000 comments posted on various videos anyhow. And if anything, whenever they looked at their new comments posted it was a mixture of insults, spam and people posting how many views the video had when they posted. The more comments you have, the more will be negative.

Moderation

The only way to truly have a clean and meaningful comment system is to maintain every aspect of it daily yourself. You see spam, you delete it. You notice a user insulting everyone in every comment, you remove them. If a commentor insults you, you do what you wish with that account. It's your site after all. But this is also impossible if you're website is getting thousands of comments per day, you can't possibly moderate every single one of those. It would soon become your full time job, and nobody has time for that. You can pay someone to moderate comments as well, but again, that's not the optimal solution. This, along with getting users to want to comment makes for a difficult task.

I don't know what the perfect solution is, or if there is even anything remotely close to that, but there are a few things you can do to promote more active commenting on a website. If you're going to go with a custom solution, then ease of use is on top of the list. The faster the users can get to commenting the better. Say you want to post anonymously on a website. Then you should be allowed to do just that. Users should moderate each other in a perfect world. They see a negative comment, they flag it and it loses credibility. The more positive feedback you receive the more weight is given to your choices on a website. Something along the lines of how Amazon's review system works, but scaled down a bit.

Comments are important, definitely. They let people know how others feel about their work and they can help one improve their content. They can also help visitors ask questions and let others answer those questions. When done right, it can be a win-win eco-system of thought sharing, but finding that magical land is definitely a challenge.