You can't make a crowd become smart commenters by criticizing the way they comment. Instead, TechCrunch should really move to some sort of voting scheme so that the good comments move up and you can ignore the bad ones. I really don't know why more big blog sites don't do this already - it seems like a straightforward win in terms of user experience.
Why can't you criticise (did I spell that right?) your users now and then, when they do that to you on every single post? It's not like you care about offending them anyway, since they are the kind of users you do not want :)
I feel that way about a lot of these "tech bloggers." A lot of them just have the wrong combination of immaturity, poor writing skills, and little sense of journalistic integrity.
We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great.
Apparently, on the Internet Michael Arrington knows you're a dog.
To my astonishment, this writeup was actually interesting. I wonder what they could do to improve the quality of the comments on TechCrunch. These 11 types seem to make up the vast majority of the things said there, unfortunately.
People usually are lazy to express their agreement with someone, however when we have different views we want to let our opinion be known to the world ASAP.
That's why usually the louder sectors of users/readers/etc are the ones that are not pleased for one reason or another (or the most bored ones). It's very obvious in customer support forums (take for example a MMO forum, 90% of the posts are whines, although it only represents a 20%? of the real playerbase).
Probably the only thing to do to improve quality is write what they want to hear, but then you'd have the group that was previously happy complaining about how you betrayed your own standards, etc. And why should you submit to them and change your ways, in any case?
IMO Techcrunch is fine as it is, it's people who need to shape up and have some manners in 'teh internetz'. Remember that PennyArcade comic? :P
I'm all for an optional up/down vote with more granularity (with one click.) There are ambiguous situations where you get stuck on just voting up or down. For example, you might disagree with a post but consider it important to the discussion. Another typical problem is the +1/bump vote on forums. And "Thank you." A whole thing is the flag for relevancy. It gets messy, but IMHO something is needed.
Looks like a multiclass text classification problem to me. Adaptive Dynamic Markov Chains or Predictive Partial Matching combined with Error-Correcting Output Codes should handle it pretty well.
I thought this was going to be a much more insightful / useful article, pointing out 10 different /common/ arguments or sub-threads that you see all the time, such that conversation would be improved if we all avoided starting or continuing them. Maybe with a nice, anchored list, so we could point people to them.
This one line made the entire post worthwhile: We don’t strive to be balanced. We strive to be correct. I don't know if TC is correct, but I like the sentiment.
Techcrunch comments could be a great launch pad for an anti-comment-troll API/service. Ultimately it does come down to trust networks. Couldn't pagerank methods be applied to the 'trustworthiness' of commenters, and therefore people who consistently troll could be removed from the conversation entirely?
