Gamification of Blog Comments is Like Social Control Media
AROUND 2008 and 2009 we experimented with polls and also allowed readers to "rank" our articles. It was a 1-to-10 star rating system (we still have all the database tables for that) and the same applied to comments. We dumped (abandoned altogether) this system about a year later because we found that it added no real value and sometimes facilitated abuse. The scores also served to distract from the things that truly mattered: words, pictures, videos...
A couple of days ago we mentioned that a week earlier Hackaday had complained about how bad (or negative) blog comments had become. It later complained that it only suffered further abuse for merely pointing that out. It seems like they're being "trolled", to put it mildly. To quote what they published 2 days ago: "despite the interruption, we got a good discussion started about how to make a comment section thrive. A valid critique of our current system that was particularly evident during the hack is that the reported comment mechanism is entirely opaque. A “your comment is being moderated” placeholder would be a lot nicer than simply having the comment disappear. We’ll have to look into that."
"You were basically divided down the middle about whether an upvote/downvote system like on Reddit or Slashdot would serve us well. Those tend to push more constructive comments up to the top, but they also create a popularity contest that can become its own mini-game, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Everyone seemed pretty convinced that our continuing to allow anonymous comments is the right choice, and we think it is simply because it removes a registration burden when someone new wants to write something insightful."
The problem is that Hackaday seems overly obsessed with so-called "engagement", i.e. the thing that Slack "added" to IRC (wasting workers' time). Time wasted clicking on things (e.g. "like") is time wasted, not invested.
We'll never go back to having blog comments. In a few years we had about 35,000 of them and that was enough. We'd rather produce accurate material than waste time on lunatics vandalising good pages with comments about UFOs, racist stuff etc.
Gamification on the Web was an experiment that culminated some time before Digg (maybe Slashdot counts as a much earlier example) and if we value positive discourse, then we must explore a better way of doing things. Gamification is stuff like Fentanylware ('TikTok'). The "users"... like drug users... may feel productive, but they're actually addicted, not productive. Addictive and productive are typically opposites because addiction can blind oneself to the lack of productivity.
Speaking of productivity waning, WordPress is moving in a bad direction. These are the latest blog posts from WordPress.org (not .com):
They are thanking proprietary spyware (Slack). Truly bizarre. They also celebrate CoC censorship. Has anyone advised them on these alienating statements? Who runs the show there?
I find myself increasingly unhappy about the way Automattic handles the situation. Yes, it is certainly besieged, but this is not the correct response. █