Does moderating comments lead to more and better comments?

The Wall Street Journal spent 5 months studying online comments and reached these conclusions (via Althouse):

Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box. In a sense, some have more interest in having a place to post their thoughts than in engaging with the journalism. . . .

Light commenters are more likely to say that moderation improves comment quality. . . .

One of the concepts you learn in Economics 101 is opportunity cost — which means that when you do one thing, you’re missing out on doing something else. The thing you are missing out on is the opportunity cost. In the case of commenting, we have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.

Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked. . . .

Our standards for posts remain the same — and they can be found here — but they will be enforced more than they were. We owe it to our readers and our journalists to lead the way with thoughtful discourse.

Ann Althouse (my mom) responds: "To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle."

Online comments and the Constitution

When I see online comments fantasizing about what grotesque punishments the commenters would like to see imposed on certain criminals, which is a kind of virtue signaling (“Look at me — I hate evil so much that I want terrible things to happen to evildoers, because I’m such a good person!”) . . . when I see that kind of comment, I’m proud to live in a country that has a constitutional rule against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

When I see comments assuming someone is guilty of a crime before they’ve been convicted of anything, based only on a headline that refers to the government’s allegations, I’m glad the Constitution requires “due process.”

Those and other short phrases in the Constitution, written centuries ago, are in effect regardless of what the majority thinks or feels, and that’s a great thing about America. We do live in a democracy, but there must be limits on the majority’s power, to keep democracy from becoming tyranny.

One of the worst kinds of online comments

One of the worst kinds of online comments is: “Oh, look who’s suddenly the big EXPERT in this field!” As if your only options are either being a distinguished scholar or staying silent on any issue that involves some technical knowledge!

Can you improve your blog comments by using esoteric terminology?

Robin Hanson, the blogger of Overcoming Bias, strongly endorses this idea by Eli Dourado about how to keep a high level of quality in your blog's comments section:

On small blogs, people typically comment when they have something to contribute or ask that is relevant to the post. These are frequently of high quality. … On more popular blogs, this positive commenting dynamic is confounded by the presence of eyeballs. Every post is read by many thousands of people. For the self-involved who could never attract such a large audience on their own, this is an irresistible forum for expounding pet hypotheses, axe-grinding, and generally shouting at or expressing meaningless agreement with the celebrity post-authors.

The first step, therefore, to higher quality comments is “be more niche.” Discourage your marginal readers with technical language, obscure references, and lengthy posts. Your marginal readers are not of high value anyway, and driving them away is an excellent way to improve the average comment of your inframarginal readers.

(I'm going to refer to these as Hanson's views, since I have the impression that Hanson is at least as enthusiastic about them as Dourado is. Overcoming Bias is the more popular of the two blogs, so the point is more relevant to Hanson -- and, indeed, he does seem to put this advice into practice.)

People are rarely as explicitly elitist as Hanson is here, though his reasoning is often used -- at least in other contexts.

I empathize with him in wanting to keep out certain commenters from your blog. (As you know if you've ever posted a comment here and read my notice, I've occasionally had to ban commenters.) But it's an open question how to identify which commenters should be excluded. The most obvious way is to judge the comments as they come in and delete them if they're not the kind of contribution you want. This is more aggressive but also more fine-tuned than what Hanson is describing. His approach is passive-aggressive, but that's not the main problem with it.

The problem is that he presupposes that the people whose comments he and his readers would benefit from reading are those who either already have a certain high-level education (which is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status) or have taken the time to absorb his blog's idiolect. Of course, I just used an esoteric term of art -- it's hard to avoid. But we should reach for these terms only when they allow us to express our thoughts more clearly, not as invisible barriers to keep out a poorly defined group of people we imagine are beneath us.