So, the question is: can we do anything to prevent good authors from having to retreat to their own fortresses (or not writing / not publishing anymore) after they gain “too much” points for doing what we want them to do? What kind of platform would achieve that?
My feeling is that what Medium is aiming at is to accomplish the vision of Vannevar Bush: hypertext done properly, in a way so that the community dynamics and the financial dynamics work, and reinforce the good parts of many-to-many hypertext rather than the bad parts, and avoiding the tearing-itself-apart in the many, many different ways we have seen over the past two decades...
Could you describe how specifically the commenting works on medium.com? Because that seems to me like an important part where you just can’t make everyone happy, because some people want mutually contradictory things (such as “to filter unwanted comments” vs “not to be filtered”).
Commenting is actually one of the most interesting parts of Medium. It’s surprisingly similar to a combination of your “removing debates” and “making attacking costly”—you can reply to a post on Medium, and your reply is itself a post on your own Medium, with a metadata tag linking it to the post you’re replying to. People will generally not see your reply underneath the original post, but they will see an ‘other replies’ button they can click which will reveal it. But people can recommend your post; if your post is recommended by (1) the original post author, (2) Medium staff (I think?), or (3) someone I follow, then I will automatically see it under the original post like a ‘comment’, above the ‘show other replies’ button.
Wow, I’m impressed! This is pretty close to how I imagined it, and it also seems simple enough for everyone to understand.
Essentially, by default you only see content recommended by someone you care about (i.e. in long term you care about the people you follow; and in short term you care about the person whose article you are reading right now). So people cannot insert themselves into debates forcefully.
I’m trying to imagine how Facebook would look like if they switched to this system (using the existing “like” button as the sign of approval). So when you post something on your wall, the comments you “liked” are displayed to all readers; the comments to didn’t like are displayed only to friends of the person who posted them, and you are not allowed to remove any comment.
Sounds reasonable, assuming there is a visible difference between “the comments I didn’t approve because I don’t want to approve them” (e.g. the “hide” button), and “the comments I haven’t approved because I haven’t seen them yet”.
The only possible form of “spamming” here is to annoy someone by posting many replies to their articles, and even then you are only annoying them privately. (There should be a way to block a user, that is “auto-hide” all their replies, so the only possible way of “spamming” would be posting many replies with many sockpuppets. This would take the usual attacker much more time than the attacked person.)
Maybe the disadvantage is that it kills the “linear debate of trivial comments”; the type of discussion where everyone only types a line or two, which best resembles how people chat, but maybe that’s good. People who want to chat without writing an article-length reply might miss this feature.
So I guess my perfect system would be a combination of the Medium way, plus old-style linear discussion below the article, where all replies are invisible until approved by the author (optionally, the author could switch it to “auto-approve” with possibility to delete anything afterwards). Or, to make it more unified, every reply would start as a comment below the article, but you would have the checkbox “also show this reply on my homepage as an article”. All approved replies would be displayed below the article, but replies longer than three lines (that includes full articles) would be shortened until you click to expand them.
One serious, business answer is medium.com
Here is a look at what they are trying to do. Sample:
Could you describe how specifically the commenting works on medium.com? Because that seems to me like an important part where you just can’t make everyone happy, because some people want mutually contradictory things (such as “to filter unwanted comments” vs “not to be filtered”).
Commenting is actually one of the most interesting parts of Medium. It’s surprisingly similar to a combination of your “removing debates” and “making attacking costly”—you can reply to a post on Medium, and your reply is itself a post on your own Medium, with a metadata tag linking it to the post you’re replying to. People will generally not see your reply underneath the original post, but they will see an ‘other replies’ button they can click which will reveal it. But people can recommend your post; if your post is recommended by (1) the original post author, (2) Medium staff (I think?), or (3) someone I follow, then I will automatically see it under the original post like a ‘comment’, above the ‘show other replies’ button.
Wow, I’m impressed! This is pretty close to how I imagined it, and it also seems simple enough for everyone to understand.
Essentially, by default you only see content recommended by someone you care about (i.e. in long term you care about the people you follow; and in short term you care about the person whose article you are reading right now). So people cannot insert themselves into debates forcefully.
I’m trying to imagine how Facebook would look like if they switched to this system (using the existing “like” button as the sign of approval). So when you post something on your wall, the comments you “liked” are displayed to all readers; the comments to didn’t like are displayed only to friends of the person who posted them, and you are not allowed to remove any comment.
Sounds reasonable, assuming there is a visible difference between “the comments I didn’t approve because I don’t want to approve them” (e.g. the “hide” button), and “the comments I haven’t approved because I haven’t seen them yet”.
The only possible form of “spamming” here is to annoy someone by posting many replies to their articles, and even then you are only annoying them privately. (There should be a way to block a user, that is “auto-hide” all their replies, so the only possible way of “spamming” would be posting many replies with many sockpuppets. This would take the usual attacker much more time than the attacked person.)
Maybe the disadvantage is that it kills the “linear debate of trivial comments”; the type of discussion where everyone only types a line or two, which best resembles how people chat, but maybe that’s good. People who want to chat without writing an article-length reply might miss this feature.
So I guess my perfect system would be a combination of the Medium way, plus old-style linear discussion below the article, where all replies are invisible until approved by the author (optionally, the author could switch it to “auto-approve” with possibility to delete anything afterwards). Or, to make it more unified, every reply would start as a comment below the article, but you would have the checkbox “also show this reply on my homepage as an article”. All approved replies would be displayed below the article, but replies longer than three lines (that includes full articles) would be shortened until you click to expand them.
I don’t play there so I don’t know—but it’s an open website, you can go take a look any time...