By: Anna Chung

Anna Chung — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:42:14 +0000

Really great background research and an exciting are to think about! Making comment sections healthier is a big problem space to tackle though — I recommend narrowing in on one of the more specific questions you had, like “How might we contextualize discussions in a single space to reduce context collapse?” or “How might we increase the diversity of comment section users?” Those are still big questions, but could lead to a more specific and creative approach to this problem.

For even more scoping, I think it could also be helpful to decide on a specific news site that you would want to implement a solution for — this could help you hone in on the audience. For example, Buzzfeed is a pretty different kind of news site with a different audience from a site like The Wall Street Journal.

I’m excited to see where this goes!

By: EthanZ

EthanZ — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 20:03:44 +0000

So, you’re taking on one of the hardest problems in social media design… which you clearly know. Kudos for doing your research and understanding that many people have taken this on and failed in the past.

I like the idea that a specific prompt might be what we need to solve commenting. You might consider what you do with people who ignore or abuse the prompt – are their comments removed? Deprioritized? Who writes these prompts? The article author?

One thing to consider is that communities establish norms through priming. In introducing this new form of comments, you may need a team of people posting appropriate comments to help demonstrate how this functionality should be used.

I’d like to see design sketches, some examples of what prompts might be and how they appear in context. I’d also love it if you would try some prompting in your own social media – use FB or instagram to prompt people to respond in a specific way and see whether your levels of engagement improve…

Comments on: Fixing Comment Sections

By: Anna Chung

By: EthanZ