dummied

The path of least resistance

At a glance

This entry was written on March 1, 2007.

The entry prior to this is entitled Metadata magic act.

The entry following this is entitled The trunk for the branches.

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This entry has been tagged as Newspapers, Recommended, Work, photos.

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When building ”Steve,” one of the ways I wanted to stretch the photo gallery concept I’ve been fiddling with and building around for the past eight months was by adding some new features – namely public tagging, commenting and limited non-moderated user-contributed publishing.

And I didn’t want to put any sort of a moderation or registration level between a comment and publication.

In all of those three feature sets, I wanted to be sensitive to potential user complaints – but especially with the comments. In many cases, we’re dealing with photos of folks from around the area, and when you allow anonymous commenting, you run the very real risk of hurting the feelings of someone from time to time.

This is especially true of photos taken at bars … and I’ll get into why there are no comments on any of those galleries right now a little later.

Initially, the idea was to monitor everything closely. To enable that, we had RSS feeds for each site’s comments, complete with links to directly edit or delete any offending comment. And that worked for the first week … after a while, though, that solution reaches a saturation point where it just doesn’t scale.

In fact, the RSS feeds couldn’t even keep up with the flow (they were at 15 items and the comment flow was enough that you’d just get snapshot when your feedreader refreshed).

Newsrooms are stretched thin as it is, and we can’t expect to be able to have folks sit there refreshing comment lists all day and monitoring them as their fulltime job.

So, I decided to let the users do it for us.

We implemented a simple “flagging” system for comments: if a comment was flagged twice, it went into a bin that we could later review and revive if we felt a comment was unfairly banished.

By the numbers

A quick glance at the commenting flow on intakeweekly.com’s photo gallery system.

• Start date: Jan. 23, 2007
• End date: Feb. 22, 2007
• Total comments: 2,468
• Total flags: 1,284
• Flagged comments: 752
• Removed comments: 495

You click “Flag,” and get a little thanks message. After the second one, whoosh! comment go boom. This system’s still live on the original incubator of this system, IndyMoms.com if you’d like to take a peek.

In the month or so the commenting system was live on the bar crawl galleries, we learned some interesting things with this system:

Users can be more mean and cruel than you think (and I went in with my eyes wide open). We had one photo that involved a pair of people constantly bashing a young girl in the photo … with really, really mean things (though, admittedly, some were also uproariously funny in a sick sort of way).

Users are also much more strict about policing comments than we were.

Before we added the flagging system, our policy was really pretty light. I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but we knew it when we saw it (and you would as well). You had to curse, be blatantly racist or obnoxiously profane to earn a deletion for the most part.

After implementing flagging, that threshold for removal dropped precipitously. Comments went into the banished bin all the time that garnered little more than a shrug from those of us in the office.

Users were also very quick with the flag. Many times, I’d go to edit a comment when it rolled across the RSS feed only to find it already double-flagged and gone.

In all, we revived exactly three comments from the bin … out of 495 flagged comments in all. Those 495 flags also represented between a quarter to a third of all the comments on the site (I don’t have live numbers in front of me … I’ll update this when I do See the infobox on the left side for actual numbers).

We also had only a few user complaints about a comment in specific (there were a couple more about the feature in general and the format change required by it).

Again, the idea was, “If you have a problem with a comment, just flag it.” That route is less work for the user than firing off an angry e-mail and empowers them to actively change the environment that upsets them.

That’s all well and good and worked great in both theory and, largely, in practice.

So, why don’t we still have comments on the bar crawl photos? Because even some of the comments that make it through are not particularly pleasant, especially when you’re dealing with unaware folks who didn’t realize as their photo was being taken that people would be able to comment about them later. And that’s before you get to advertiser concerns …

And despite our best efforts at enabling the users to police themselves, in the end the 100-percent anonymous commenting model is probably just not feasible. There is enough of a mask of anonymity on the internet as it is without throwing in registration-free commenting on photos (which I think Flickr realized very early on … you’ll notice you have to register to comment on any photos there). The level of discourse was never at what we would call a valuable content level.

We’re still using Steve to manage the backend of the system, which leaves us in a flexible state if we want to revert the display mode away from those god-awful popup slideshows (not my idea … even a little … bane of my existence). Once we figure out how to integrate it into the popup, we’ll also still get to restore the search and tagging capabilities ( … just as soon as I can get back to photo galleries after my current project … so, around Indy 500 time).

But that month stands as an important experiment in social interaction with photo galleries that helped illustrate for me the inherent problems with it as it scales. You need a mix of user interaction, monitoring and user accountability to make it work, I think.

And when Steve gets revisited, those elements will probably become even more key components.