Jayne: Little Kaylee here just wishes you was a gynaecologist.
Mal: Jayne, you will keep a civil tongue in that mouth, or I will sew it shut. Is there an understanding between us?
Jayne: You don’t pay me to talk pretty. Just because Kaylee gets lubed up over some big-city dandy doesn’t mean…
Mal: Walk away from this table. Right now.

Simon: What do you pay him for?
Mal: What?
Simon: I was just wondering what his job is – on the ship.
Mal: Public relations.

Firefly – Serenity

The ‘social web‘ has brought many things to us, but possibly the most pervasive thing it’s brought is the ability to (and the general assumption that you should) comment on just about any piece of information published. Blogs offer this as a matter of course, but many news organisations are introducing the ability to comment on their articles.

By and large this is a good thing, people want to have their say. Also, for companies, engaging with your customers can be a sure-fire way of getting repeat business.  The wide-ranging discussions on the web, as they flow from site to site (see TechMeme) can be a great way to get a lot of different perspectives on a topic.

However, there can be a downside to allowing comments on your site & I’m not just talking about the usual gripes of spam & trolls.

Humanity, on the whole, tends towards self-interestedness.  That isn’t to say it’s evil, just that we tend to think of ourselves first.  Altruism doesn’t come naturally, it needs to be taught¹, and it needs continuous, conscious effort to actually act in an unselfish way.

Given this, it should come as no surprise when presented with a fairly detached communication medium (i.e. the internet) people have a tendency to be a wee bit hostile at times. 

I ran across this fact recently (although rather indirectly) in relation to the FriendFeed Comments Plugin.  Sarah Perez included it in her recent post on Read Write Web: Blog Comments Still Matter. Sarah makes some good points in that article² about the popularity of content on the web and how it can be measured & she happened to use the plugin as an example of how FriendFeed helps the positive conversation keep going.

Apparently this irked Nick Halstead, the creator of the the RSS / social aggregator site fav.or.it who said:

Cannot believe that a hacked together wordpress plug-in gets coverage on RRW – when fav.or.it just demonstrated a system for tracking comments across the *whole* blogosphere and it does not even get a mention…

Now, this didn’t really bother me.  I didn’t even notice the comment until it was pointed out to me, and even then I really didn’t get offended at it (I have people who do that for me, thanks Corvida!).  It didn’t bother me largely because it is a hacked together plugin.³

I’m more interested in what the comment represents.  Nick has also dropped a fairly nasty comment on Louis Gray’s site.  Now, to be fair, the post is a pretty negative review of fav.or.it, but I don’t think Nick did himself or his product any favours by his comment.  If you read the following comments (and the comments on the post on FriendFeed) you’ll see that a number of people said that they probably weren’t going to try out fav.or.it because of Nick’s comments.  As a developer & a ‘creator’, I completely understand the defensiveness Nick is feeling, but I think the old saying holds true: “you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar”.

My point is that many of the conversations on the web have a tendency towards the negative.  There are exceptions, niche blogs who have a fairly close community tend to attract less negativity, but I feel they are the exception to the rule.

This was actually one of Sarah’s main points on her RRW article:

It’s true. When you’re agreeing with an author of a blog post, it just seems kind of silly to take the time to write out a comment that simply states: “I agree.” So instead, the agreement or the liking of the post stays off-record. This means that even on a more universally well thought of post, the comments will often be the domain of the discordant few. This doesn’t give a fair representation of the thoughts and reactions of the readers and, therefore, doesn’t provide any true insight into the way the issue is perceived. It could be that 90% of the readers think the author is correct in their opinion, but only the 10%  who feel differently have made their voices heard.

This is one of the reasons that I really like FriendFeed.  It gives the reader an easy way to express a positive reaction, by ‘like’ing a post.  You’ll note however that there’s no way to ‘dislike’ something.  You can hide a post, or all a person’s posts, but that’s silent, and just for you.  You can also leave comments, so you can leave negative comments, but the way FriendFeed is structured encourages you not to.  When you ‘like’ or comment on an item, it pushes that item back up to the top of the feed, for everyone.  That means that if you like something it will stay visible for longer, but if you don’t like something, the best thing you can do is ignore it & it will go away. See your mother was right.

You can, of course, leave that negative comment, but all that does is push it back up to the top again.  By giving you the ability to hide content you don’t like, it encourages the leaving of only positive feedback, while you just make the stuff you don’t like go away.  It would be interesting to take a fairly high-traffic site & see the difference in tone between the comments left on the blog compared to the comments left on FriendFeed over time.⁴

I don’t buy into the argument that blogging & other online discussions are inherently narcissistic, at least, not any more than any other form of human communication.  But I do think a move towards more positive communication can only be a good thing.  It has been said that your blog is your own personal PR organisation, but with the online comments ecosystem becoming more and more pervasive, I think there’s more to it now.  Your Facebook profile, your FriendFeed/SocialThing/etc feeds show everything you’re saying. Your NewsGator/Google Reader shared item feeds show the sort of things you’re interested in (which can sometimes be more telling than what you publish yourself).  But also the comments you make around the web, what you say & how you say it, will determine people’s opinion of you. If you’re just promoting yourself, that’s important.  Remember, recruiters read blogs.  But if you’re promoting, or even just representing a product or company, it’s vital that you remember these things.  People will associate your product with you.  If they think badly of you, they won’t buy what you’re selling.