网站能够驯服在线评论吗

    自从网站开始允许读者发表评论以来，它们就一直在努力克服一大难题：评论者的声音往往特别难听，但他们也带来了流量——至少在理论上如此。鉴于广告收入越来越难以获得，任何能够提升流量的事物都是难以割舍的。话虽如此，一团糟的评论江湖仍然存在。但是，一些网站正在采取截然不同的措施来解决这个问题，有的网站完全取消评论，有的网站则将评论摆放在与专业制作内容相等的位置上。

    为了让网站变得不那么让人郁闷，掴客网（Gawker）选择了后一种做法。这种方式从表面看似乎不像是成功的秘匙，但它或许真的管用。互联网普及的初期，一些人相信我们即将迎来一个网民们进行高尚的辩证式对话的新时代。让这些人悲哀的是，许多留言板，特别是一些流量颇高的网站的留言板，俨然已成为下水道。在这些网站（包括YouTube和一些最大的新闻网站），评论就算不是充满恶意，也是是破坏性的。而如果评论没有破坏性时，它们往往又很无聊，毫无意义或偏离主题。评论者偶尔会说一些有用的东西，但在太多的网站上，有价值的评论往往是凤毛麟角，淹没在了一片谩骂和病句的海洋中，以至于消失于无形。

    一些网站的评论没有那么糟糕，它们的价值实际上往往并不亚于内容本身。通常情况下，这些都是一些关注面狭窄的小网站，比如科技新闻网站Ars Technica。一如往常，差劲的评论也会出现在那里，但只是少数。大多数用户至少在关注相关主题，而且常常会参与网站文章引发的讨论。然而，绝大多数拥有庞大读者群的网站往往是各色人等的聚集地——包括一些“飞车钓鱼党”（drive-by trolls）。这些网站的大量评论往往跟主题风马牛不相及，一无是处。

    掴客网正在实施一个叫Kinja的项目，以期把更好的评论者留在网站。它没有像Facebook 和Twitter那样，把网站文章引发的讨论置于受到更多控制的环境之中——随着人们纷纷逃离开放式的网络环境（在这种网络环境中，起领头作用的通常都是最差劲的参与者），这类举措越来越多。根据这项掴客网创始人尼克•丹顿已实施了大约一年的计划，读者就评论进行表决，最受欢迎的评论上升至顶端，并连同写手撰写的文章一起置于掴客网不同页面的显著位置。这种方式的本质似乎非常接近于利用免费劳动力——很长时间以来，《赫芬顿邮报》（Huffington Post）《看台报告》（Bleacher Report）等网站因这种做法而被骂得狗血淋头——但这样做是为了去芜存菁，提升最佳评论的地位，借此打压最差评论。用户拥有自己的主页，他们不仅可以掌控页面内容，甚至能够在掴客网撰写自己的头条文章。起到帮助作用的是，相对而言，掴客网的评论本身通常并没有那么糟糕，这一点也许令人惊讶。

    与此同时，以惊世骇俗的评论闻名于世的YouTube正在尝试着通过将用户账户与其Google+个人资料信息捆绑在一起，同时改变评论的显示方式等措施来解决这个问题。这家视频网站的评论目前是按照逆时间顺序排列的，意味着你在某段视频下面看到的第一个评论很可能是令人恐惧或愚不可及的。正如YouTube就改变评论现状发布的博文所言：“最新评论并不一定意味着最切题。”这篇文章给出的例子是，如果著名歌星贾斯汀•汀布莱克在他自己的某段视频下面发表评论（这种情形不大可能出现），随着时间的推移，这段评论就将被淹没。以后不会再这样了。这套新系统将凸显“对人们有意义的对话”。

    Ever since they began allowing readers to comment, websites have been wrestling with a major conundrum: Commenters are often terrible, but they also increase traffic -- at least theoretically. And with ad revenues increasingly difficult to generate, anything that boosts traffic is hard to let go of. And so, the terribleness remains. Several sites, though, are taking different approaches to the problem, from eliminating comments altogether to actually elevating them to the level of professionally produced content.

    The latter approach, by Gawker, doesn't intuitively seem like a recipe for success if the idea is to make websites less depressing places to visit, but it might actually work. Sadly for those of us who, in the early days of the popular Internet, believed that we were on the threshold of a new era of high-minded dialectical conversation, many comments sections -- particularly on well-trafficked sites -- are sewers. On those sites -- which include YouTube (GOOG) and some of the country's biggest news organizations -- when comments aren't hateful, they're disruptive. When they're not disruptive, they're boring, pointless, or off-topic. Every so often a commenter will have something useful to say, but on too many sites, a worthy comment is so rare as to be de facto nonexistent, lost in an ocean of bile and bad grammar.

    There are sites where the comments aren't so bad, and indeed are often as worthy as the content itself. Usually, those are smaller sites that have a narrow focus, like, just for one example, the tech-news site Ars Technica. As always, bad comments appear there, but they're in the minority, and most users at least stay on topic and often add to discussions started by the site's articles. But for most sites with large readerships, drawing people in from all over the place -- including what we might call "drive-by trolls" -- comments are worse than useless.

    Gawker's approach, a project called Kinja, is designed to keep the better commenters on the site rather than taking discussion of Gawker's articles to more controlled environments like Facebook (FB) and Twitter, as has been increasingly happening as people flee the open Internet, where the worst actors too often set the pace. Under the scheme, which Gawker founder Nick Denton has been working on for about a year, readers vote on the comments, and the most popular rise to the top and are featured on Gawker's various homepages, alongside staff-written articles. That might seem dangerously close to essentially exploiting free labor -- sites from the Huffington Post to Bleacher Report have been lambasted for doing so -- but the idea is to separate out the best from the worst, pushing the worst down by raising up the best. Users get their own homepages, over which they are in charge -- even having the ability to write their own headlines on Gawker posts. It helps that, comparatively speaking, Gawker's comments are generally (and perhaps surprisingly) not all that bad in the first place.

    Meanwhile, YouTube -- the poster site of horrifying Internet comments -- is addressing the problem by tying user accounts to their Google+ profiles and changing the way comments are displayed. Currently, comments appear in reverse chronological order, which means the chances are good that the first comment you see under a given video will be horrifying or idiotic. According to the YouTube blog post introducing the changes, "recent does not necessarily mean relevant." The example given is if Justin Timberlake were to comment under a video of his (unlikely as that might be), it would be buried over time. No longer. The new system will highlight "conversations that matter to you."