Managing the Digital Hordes

A strength and a weakness of the Internet is the ability to have anyone comment on just about anything. Visitors to sites are a great repository of knowledge…and opinions…and weird attempts at humor…and vitriol.

Sometimes it seems like the chaff is obscuring the wheat.

Sites are adopting various strategies to try and improve the quality of the contributions from the site visitors.

POST MODERATION
Salon is probably best described as a political/life style publication. They publish articles, news items and opinion pieces, and allow readers to post “letters” in response. With politics and religion being two of the biggest flash points in any web community, it’s not surprising that they have run into their share of problems with posters.

In a post on February 27 titled Anonymous no more, Salon editor Joan Walsh wrote:

We have started moderating letters and comments even more aggressively, but we have also decided to end the option of posting letters signed only "Anonymous."
[…]A few people argued that we'd discourage whistleblowers and other tipsters from sharing information. Honestly, I'm not sure we've ever acquired information like that via letters; anyone wanting to contact us anonymously can do that through "readermail 'at' salon.com,"

Moderation of letters includes not just deleting or editing problem posts; they also categorize letters, letting the reader view All letters, or Editor’s Choice letters (though not in all cases; clearly it requires work to do this.)


In Joan’s letter, she notes that they are looking at other ways to rate/moderate posts:

We've also heard your advice about reader moderation tools that would let you rate posters and ignore those you are sick of, and we'll be rolling out some improvements to letters in the months to come, as well as new tools to encourage reader participation.

RANKING POSTS
Woot is a website that offers one day deals on various items. Visitors to the site can post comments about the item of the day (noting how good it is, or how good the price is, or asking questions about it’s use.) In addition, they do some moderation of this area, breaking out “Quality posts” in a special section at the top of the comments list.

This is possible one of the best features I've seen, and something I wish other sites (like Engadget and Gizmodo) would adopt.

The item of the day today, Myvu Personal Media Viewer Fully Loaded Edition for iPod, found 262 comments at 3:00PM EDT, and 14 of those flagged as Quality Posts. This included items such as links to reviews, and a PDF manual, and comments like:

* "I had a customer who bought one that was re-gifted over and over and over again in his office. Everyone who used it would get horrible headaches from the video."

* “But these glasses were more like holding an ipod screen and arms length away from you. Very small, surprisingly so. It's all about FOV (field of view) for these things, and resolution. Low res (320x240) wont matter as much with movies, but the size is MEIN LIEBEN!. I've yet to see a reasonably priced (300-400) SVGA resolution device available. Just think, you could use that to replace your laptop screen, and just have a small battery powered brick computer with a fold-out keyboard. Awesome."

This weeds out comments like:

* weird... Friend had one.

* Holy Moly!! It's Geordi La Forge's Visor!!

* Are you kidding me? Matrix reloaded!!

It’s unclear how Woot breaks these out, but it appears to be a manual process. There’s no rating system (readers rating comments) though there is a Report option to flag questionable posts.