I just read this really great essay by a dude who went from an ultra-orthodox jewish school to public school, and his first crush on a girl, and how difficult it was to go from "you cannot even look at girls" to, "is it ok if I kiss you?" when he was 16.

Really lovely piece. And half the comments are a few people calling him a shitty waste of space writer. You know what? You don't actually NEED a comments section at your online magazine. You just don't. If you have quality, interesting pieces, people will come and read them.

Feedback forms are fine. Sure, nut jobs will still write asshole shit to you, but you cut out the waste products who are only there to troll. Trolling is no fun if you can't even be sure your troll reached the target.

You guys, the tart I just made is fucking delicious. This soft cheese business, leeks, and lemon basil from my CSA, plus egg and crust. Now I want to eat the whole thing! That was not the plan.

so, I get that Internet commenting is in complete and utter disarray generally. But I am questioning the aims and the points now.

Some comments DO show up. So how do they show up? Is it based on a ratings system? How can we rate posts if we can't see them. Just disable commenting if you are working at cross-purposes. It is too much work for the results you get.

Jesse,

you must share with all the buffistas. this is how things work.

The gawker sites were, by and large, exceptions to the 'don't read the comments' rule (every single time I went to kotaku it was a display of pre-MRA male privilege whining, but there was distinct selection bias taking place in determining what caught my attention). Over 50% of the point of any given article on their main sites was the commenting--when they shut commenting down on gawker.com for the initial transition over to "powwow" (the first, really awful version of the software) pageviews dipped lower than their normal seasonal fluctuations would have predicted. Which makes sense--why would anyone click on an article twice anymore? But I'm not sure what the unique views numbers were like.

The tone of the articles have changed (not as much on IO9, but markedly on gawker and jezebel, IMO), and they've had waves of trolls (it's easier to get an account--if you want a legit account, it's more involved, since you need to tie it to google+, fb, or twitter, but you can get a burner account that's not tied to shit, and has slightly curtailed posting rights (no pictures--that was a quick amendment after the initial burst of kiddie porn from 4chan) trivially easily, and at the very least gawker, jez, and io9 (but thankfully much less) have had problems. Mods also have less control from an admin point of view. They can't move posts out of articles anymore--individual posters can move comments away from replying to them, but they stay on the article--in fact, they bump up to root level, instead of being nested under you--it's counter intuitive/productive/BLARGH--and they can't ban people anymore.

It's just so deeply stupid. Denton touted first powwow and now kinja like he had a revolutionary understanding of web community and monetizing comments that no one else had ever grasped before, but...it has yet to play out. He's basically CalGal with angel investors.

The first basic premise--no banning, no moving--has given trolls a funner playground than ever before.

The second basic premise--you can't scan root level comments without one click per comment --means that people don't read all or even many of the comments before they post. Sure, people weren't reading most, but not reading many? Any? Means there's lots of repetition, and less conversation. There's a magic algorithm that's supposed to affect which threads are pushed to the front of the pile (Denton spins it like that's key to manipulating the environment and marketing the...the whatever), but all we've been able to determine so far is that if you're logged in, your stuff seems to float to the top of your view--yay?

The third basic premise--outsource security, or basically dispense with it--they had a very badly handled password oops a while back, and decided they weren't equipped to protect anyone's credentials, so they'd let people who were doing it anyway take care of it. This rattled a lot of people who don't have one of these accounts, or don't want any link, no matter how hidden (they say it will never be evident which FB/G+ account is tied to which gawker account name) between identities. It's a really buggy implementation, which will log you out on half the page, and have you logged in on the other half--obviously you're logged out on the half where you're trying to post, and support is all about the "delete all the cookies, flush all the cache" school of troubleshooting. On the flip side, Denton wants to be a haven for whistle blowing and insider secrets, ergo the "burner account". This is totally anonymous, not tied to anything. Limited, as noted before--you can't post pictures, you can't have spaces in your user name (I dunno), and it uses a "key" instead of a password. And there's no recovering--you lose the key, you're locked out forever, and the account is dead dead dead. And Denton seems to think that this way he will get his very own RDJ spilling Hollywood's inside secrets, or maybe his sights are set on Scientology. It's hard to tell--he's a very ambitious man.

This soft cheese business, leeks, and lemon basil from my CSA, plus egg and crust. Now I want to eat the whole thing! That was not the plan.

That sounds amazing. I want some!

So how do they show up?

Holy crap I've been trying to figure that out. I don't even know who is responding to whom.

You guys, I will start shoving pieces into my modem -- hold tight.

The soft cheese is this stuff, and I did just eat some of it on bread, and it was delicious. If my bread had been better, I would have done the whole thing that way.

You guys, I will start shoving pieces into my modem -- hold tight.

And I'm closest! Well, of those who want some.

Share the recipe, Jesse?