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Gizmodo and Comments

April 20th, 2010 Posted in Building Community

Comment and content moderation is a much discussed topic amongst our clients. Hell, it’s much discussed across the entire socialsphere. Most moderation systems, sadly, remain pretty analog: A group of people are hired to review content and give it a yes/no status which allows or bars it from being published.

Gizmodo posted recently about how their system works and it’s worth the read.

There are three levels of commenters: Unapproved, Approved and Starred. You basically have to audition for the right to comment, by leaving a smart blurb—if it’s good, you’ll get approved by an editor, one of our moderators, or a starred commenter, and then people can see your comment. Your comment is also approved if you sign in through Facebook Connect, since it’s tied to an identity. Truly excellent commenters earn stars, which grant them moderation powers, and makes all of their comments featured (more on that below).

There are three levels of comments: Unapproved, Approved and Featured. Unapproved are only seen by moderators. Approved can be seen by everybody, but a casual reader will have to work a bit to see them. Comments that moderators think are awesome—as well as comments left by star commenters—become featured, which means they’re in bold, and right up front on every post. Think of it as a super version of the karma scheme that Slashdot’s used forever.

More and more companies are building and launching projects that allow users to post/share/comment/upload. Even “small” projects can generate thousands of pieces of content. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) hire enough staff to handle everything manually. Creating smart moderation systems isn’t just smart financially. Smart systems help drive site usage and increase overall user satisfaction. The build culture.

So what about your projects? Are you thinking of moderation as a protection mechanism or as an integral part of the success of your project?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 9:22 am and is filed under Building Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • http://communitas.tumblr.com/ tobymurdock

    Great post.

    Gizmodo is right on. This is the future of content generation. In this post they talk about comments, but http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/got-a-tip-gawker-media-opens-tag-pages-to-masses-expecting-chaos/' rel=”nofollow”>Nick Denton has talked extensively about involving the community not just at the bottom of the page in comments, but at the top of the page in post themselves. For example, he says:

    “But as the front pages of our sites become ever more professional, it’s even more important to allow anarchy to bubble up from below. The goal is to blur the line between our editors and commenter-contributors

    News and discussion have been so segregated on the web. You think of the 1990s era discussion forum software. Really hasn’t changed. Maybe we should think of journalists as the instigators and moderators of discussion.

    News follows from discussion as much as discussion follows from news. Successful sites — and useful publishing software platforms — will bring the two together so they can feed off each other.”

    And to your point: this can only happen with more sophisticated software–beyond standard blogs–that allows for reputation development and community-powered moderation. A number of leading media companies–including Gawker, BleacherReport, SeekingAlpha, etc.–have built these systems.

    But there is great potential for the “crowdsource & curate” model beyond just the innovators, for media companies, but also for associations, brands, etc. Key is having right “crowdsourced publishing” technology (and not having to build it all yourself).

    That's what we do at http://getgrogger.com' rel=”nofollow”>Grogger. We're a platform for “group blogs” that are this new crowdsourced model. Would be eager to talk to you about how we could serve your clients.

  • http://icucmoderation.com/ Dustin Plett

    Interesting article. I talk comment and content moderation all day everyday. I appreciate someone else discussing the merits of good content moderation. It seems to often companies feel comments are the toxic waste of UGC and are just looking for a safe way to dispose of them.

    I'm a big fan of intelligent moderation. A strategy has to be developed to deal with all content just as there was a strategy developed to generate content.