The I-Ching for comment threads - balance your reach, volume, and passion. (image source: chinesefooddiy.com)

Do you read the comments thread at the bottom of a news article?  Do you ever get anything of value from it?  Websites have wrestled with the ‘comments’ section for over 14 years now (since the beginning of the web, really).  How to guide a comments section along to where it actually provides useful and helpful content, and not just random people throwing out grammatically-challenged non sequitur?  We’ve seen sites try various methods: rating the comments, rating the raters, completely open forums, targeted censorship, random censorship, oligarchies, democracies, and anarchies.

Here are some basic generalizations that I’ve seen:

1. There is an inverse relationship between the breadth of topics (reach) for a given website and the cohesiveness of its audience. The greater the breadth of topics, the lower the cohesiveness of the readers.  Said in reverse, the more targeted the topics of discussion, the tighter the demographic for the group of responders.  For example: both USAToday.com and ForeignPolicy.com can cover the exact same issue (i.e. Wikileaks), but USAToday.com will be all over the map for comments, while foreignpolicy.com will be pretty tight.  This is because the demographics for USAToday are pretty much 20M+ Americans who stayed in a hotel last night or are stuck at the airport, while ForeignPolicy.com is limited to those eggheads at Foggy Bottom and college kids wanting to sounding erudite at a local bar.  We can call this ‘reach’.
2. There is a positive correlation up to a certain point between breadth of topic (reach) and the volume of respondents/commentators (volume). The more topics covered on a given website, the more channels of bringing in audiences for readership, and thus the more chances that people will respond.  This is true to a certain point, until a website becomes so generalized in nature that the passion drops off, and ends up becoming a limiting factor on comments.
3. There is a positive correlation up to a certain point between passion of topic and the volume of respondents/commentators (volume), in that passion requires responses, and that requires a certain amount of volume.  Overall, a wider audience means a greater stage for performance, and invokes a greater passion among commentators, up to a point.
4. After a certain point, volume begins to harm passion, and the discussion threads will either:
   1. bifurcate into smaller groups where volume is reduced but passion continues,
   2. devolve into a flame-war with eventually someone invoking Nazis, or
   3. dissolve away with someone posting a bunny with a pancake on it’s head.
5. There is an inverse correlation between breadth of topic (reach) and passion of topic. This is likely a general sociological point, in that experts can only show their expertise among learned peers.  People won’t argue the finer points of civil war reenactment accuracies on usatoday.com, but they will on history.com, and watch out if you ever find yourself at reenactmenthq.com
6. Quality is likely a balance between reach, volume, and passion.

Quality is a very tricky thing to define, let alone quantify.  The rules laid out above all build to that last one: quality.  Quality online discussion threads bring a lot of benefits to a website– they generate return visitors, they provide great Google-food, they inform the product, reduce returns, build brand value, and inform both the reader/user and the website owners about their demographics.

How to build quality online threads?  Evaluate your website carefully:

• How is your reach?  Is it broad or narrow, or somewhere in between? You can tell by the rate of responders to other posts: too broad and you’ll see random comments without responses.  Too narrow and you’ll see great passion but little cross-over and probably some flame-wars.
• How is your volume?  Do you get not enough comments or too many? For most of us the answer is usually ‘not enough’, and in the rare cases of ‘too many’, there are mechanisms/technologies available to guide the threads to maintain passion and thus build quality.
• How is your passion?  Do your commentators have insufficient passion or too much? We’ve all heard the 90-9-1 rule: 90 people will view a website, 9 will read comments, and 1 will actually write something.  That makes a good guide: are you getting comments from 1% of your traffic?  If not, you’re lacking passion.  If you have too much passion, you’ll know it pretty clearly (see the indicators for flame-wars above).

We can see many different ways to build quality.  In general, the comment thread technology out there really only kicks into gear once a certain reach, volume, and passion are already in place.  There’s no default order on which one to do first, but know you have to build all three to get to “quality”: extend your reach, build your volume through incentives or questions, and then invoke that passion by personally connecting your readers/customers/users to each other and to your products.