For some reason, Mephisto isn’t behaving on my server right now, so comments aren’t working. I plan to move the whole shebang over to Wordpress sometime “soon”. That said, I’d like as a gentle introduction back into me blogging here again about “Innovation in Software” (less ‘what is happening in Manchester’ in future), to talk about comment systems.

This cartoon from the excellent xkcd strip sums up my problem with comments right now:

The problem I have is this: on any popular system where users are allowed to comment, as the number of users able to comment without fear of genuine peer review increases, the signal-to-noise ratio drops exponentially.

In other words, if I and 5 million other people can comment on a YouTube video without any fear of us being reminded of what we said not just in the future but the very next time we meet a friend, we are more likely to be flippant, irrelevant, and “noisy” than if we knew people whose opinion of ourselves mattered to us were going to be reading that comment and evaluating it.

It’s why social network status updates and posted items are relatively sane and measured and why blog posts are more considered. We care about what the readers think, because what they think will have a direct impact on our future relationship with them.

So, whilst thinking about kagtum a lot recently (background if you’re unaware), I’ve been thinking about this problem. How do you allow for user comments without them descending into noise?

The “mission statement” for kagtum in its current form is something along the lines of “delivering relevant news and event information”, where “relevancy” is the secret sauce that gets quite complicated. How do we make sure every comment you see is relevant in order for it to stay within that mission statement?

I have a possible answer, but I need to keep it close to my chest for now. Normally my ideas are thrown out into the wind as being worthless, however my answer has a direct consequence on execution of a business plan. That said, if you come and meet me at an event and ask me, I’ll tell you what it is if I trust you. ;-)