The Social Media Clarity Podcast

The Rise and Fall of a Comment Empire - Episode 21

Huffington Post Justin Isaf

This is the third in our series of episodes critiquing Huffing Posts changes in commenting policies and technology. This time, we interview an insider: Justin Isaf who was in charge of community at HuffPo in 2011 and 2012.

Transcript

Amy: I’m Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain and you’re listening to the Social Media Clarity Podcast.

Justin: The problem that was being solved was “Why would we want mediocre comments?” Why would we just want mediocrity? Let’s go for greatness. Real name will make people think more about what they’re going to say, put more energy and thought and care into it and therefore we will get goodness. I don’t think that that is true. I think it’s shown itself time and time again to not be true. But it is an oddly commonly held belief.

Randy: You mean not all garbage men are poets?

“Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.”

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.

Scott: I’m Scott Moore.

Justin: And I’m Justin Isaf.

Randy: Monday, January 26, 2015 is the Community Manager Appreciation Day event. There will be a series of online panels about everything having to do with online community management. And Scott and I will each be on a panel.

I’m on a panel entitled Modern Moderation: Moving Beyond Trolls and Ban Hammers and Scott is on Change Management: Migrations, Redesigns and Upgrades, Oh my! Check out the program and the archives at CommunityManagerAppreciationDay.com. I hope to see you there.

Scott: In this episode, we follow up on our previous episodes 2 and 3 on the changes The Huffington Post made to their comment identity policies. We originally recorded this in July 2014. Our guest is Justin Isaf who was the Director of Community at the Huffington Post for two years in 2011 and 2012, prior to their commenting changes.

Here’s over a decade of online community management experience including The Startup Bus and Change.org, and is currently the principal of The Communal Group where he consults with companies and organizations on community strategy and large-scale moderation.

As I’m also a member of The Communal Group, it’s my pleasure to welcome Justin to the show.

Randy: Justin, it’s great having you on the podcast especially since we’ve already done two episodes about changes in Huffington Post. Scott, could you summarize those changes for us please?

Scott: Yeah so there were the two changes. There was the one change where they were switching to a Facebook identity as validation for real names. And in the second change, which is the most recent one, is that they just abandoned their entire commenting system altogether and just plugged Facebook comments in.

Justin: Ever since the start of The Huffington Post, Ariana has cared, genuinely cared about the quality of commenting into having a safe space for people to come in and share their opinions and talk about the issues that are happening.

It’s important to have anonymity for our users because a lot of them live in small towns. They work for small companies. They can’t be open about what they believe politically and most of the comments on Huffington Post were politics.

So they couldn’t be open politically under their real name because there would be real world ramifications for them, their jobs, social circles, etc.

That changed when there was across the internet several high profile cases of people being attacked in fairly malicious ways and fairly personal ways. Arianna looked at that and said, how do we clean up our comments to make sure this doesn’t happen here. And to be clear, this was after my tenure there so I wasn’t privy to these conversations.

Somehow, they arrived at the answer that real name commenting was the way to go. And nobody corrected the misperception that real name identity would solve a quality problem. Once they turned on real name commenting, obviously volume dropped. I think that there was definitely by at least some people a cost calculation that was probably done where commenting would be cheaper and there would be additional budget and headcount if they just switch over to Facebook comments because moderation at that scale is not cheap or easy. And not many people want to manage it.

Scott: During your tenure at Huffington Post, what was the scale of comments that you saw?

Justin: I was hired March 28 of 2010. At that point we were getting about 125,000 comments a day. When I left 18 months later, we were seeing up to 450,000 comments a day. We hit maybe 97 million comments that year. And so now that real name identity has been put in, they’re probably seeing maybe a tenth of that now that Facebook’s on. Significantly closely but as a rough guess when they turned on verified identity pseudo-anonymous commenting, I think they probably dropped about 75% in commenting volume.

When they went over to Facebook comments, articles that were getting 20-, 30-, 40,000 comments on them are now getting 2-, 3-, 400 comments on them to a few thousand comments here and there. But it’s certainly nowhere near the orders and magnitude that we had, all pre-moderated of course.

Randy: What is the upside to The Huffington Post of having such a large volume of comments and therefore paying the expense to moderate them?

Justin: There are multiple answers to that question. The first is, Arianna, she believed very heavily in enabling people to have that discussion. She was a consummate host. So she always wanted people to feel safe discussing the news.

The other side of that was obviously that when we would go to sell to potential advertisers in a very social age, we would always be able to say we’re the most socially engaged media platform on the planet.

And then the third side of it is our community. Our community loved it. We simply chose not to stop people from commenting and doing so, we created this amazingly unique set of people and an amazingly unique space for people to come and have discussions about politics and religion and gay rights and immigration when we could actually have meaningful discussions about issues that you should never touch on the internet because they never, ever, ever go well.

The things that we saw on the back end, the things that we deleted were horrifying. Fortunately, they would very rarely make it on to the front.

Randy: And you’d be congratulated. So many sites and the first one I’m aware of that it was Yahoo News. Just ended up turning off comments because they basically couldn’t stomach the cost.

Justin: Yahoo News was one of the few places that actually dwarfed Huffington Post in comment volume. When we took over AOL’s content properties, we also took over moderation of their new sites. It’s really interesting to go from an unmoderated space to a pre-moderated space and just see the changes that that makes. But of course a million comments a day, it’s hard to justify that cost.

I think Google’s probably in the best place to do that right now. They made an acquisition a few months ago of a machine moderation company called Impermium that specializes in social spam. But the technology can very easily be pivoted into a YouTube or into any of their other social platforms. And it would be interesting to see if machines with some smart humans behind them can really take a stab at moderate at a scale like that.

Randy: Sometime last year, Google decided that they wanted to deal with the problem of sentiment in YouTube comments and try to mandate these sub- Google+ IDs which at that time had been mandated to be real names. They were heading down the exact same path causing huge backlash in their community, finding out that just like Huffington Post, using your real name doesn’t prevent you from having a controversial position or stating things too strongly and in violations of terms of service.

But what’s really funny is just yesterday, Google has retracted its real person name requirement for Google+. So everyone keeps moving away from those same ideas. We need to focus on the data - the things the people are producing. Get rid of the bad. Find the mechanisms for doing that and educate people on what’s allowed.

Justin: So the reality is real name doesn’t work because people who are douchebags are still going to be douchebags. It just means that they can now be douchebags to real people instead of fake identities. And when you get trolled as your name in your social circles with people who are able to track down where you live and where you work and who you probably voted for last election cycle, that becomes incredibly problematic so none of this works.

The big volume of people who are in the middle will stop commenting because they just don’t want to be out there with their real name in the space especially in the day and age when Google indexes is everything and your employers search for you before they hire you. And then you just left with people who cared too much and you’re not going to have that meaningful debate anyway. I don’t think they should have put Google+ on YouTube in the first place. But there was never any way that that was going to work. It was a strange move for the company that’s usually data-driven as Google. Maybe we can use it as an example whenever someone else brings up the fact that they should go real name and it will solve all their problems.

Randy: It’s added to the long list including Huffington Post.

Justin: Yup. I’m actually curious whether the people who are at Huffington Post right now think that it was a success or a failure. I actually don’t know if they would go one way or another. I personally think it’s the same as burning art. There was something that was unique and special on the internet and it was systematically dismantled.

And I think it’s a true shame because now, the people for whom it was one of the few outlets where they could actually have their opinions surface and say what they wanted to say and rant if they wanted to rant, that is no longer there. They don’t have that space anymore.

Randy: They all left.

Justin: They all left. Everyone left.

Randy: They dismantled an entire community. So you listed three reasons it’s good to have a large news commenting traffic. One was Arianna Huffington saying she wanted to have such a place. Well that maybe isn’t hacked, I don’t know. Two, was the traffic for advertising purposes. Well, that’s gone. They went from the number one engaged site to I don’t know where but number one anymore. And three, the community itself, which was systematically dismantled.

So two of the three advantages were definitely destroyed. And maybe three of three. So I don’t know how anyone calls that a success.

Justin: This is why “Facebook comments” is so appealing to a lot of for-profit entities. Now you look at it, you look at the equation, say well every one of those comments, every one of those highly engaged commenters is also going to get posted out to their Facebook social graph and, oh wow! we’re not only highly engaged, but every highly engaged comment is going to go out to other people who are, theoretically, highly engaged. That actually doesn’t happen based on the way the news feed algorithms work and the way that people engage with Facebook and the way that people engage with each other.

And even if you do get a slight bump in Facebook where full of traffic in the short-term, you also are undermining your community in the long term. If I’m commenting on Facebook, I don’t know that my comment is showing up on Huffington Post, therefore I’m not having a conversation with anyone else on Huffington Post; therefore I’m not building Huffington Post’s community; therefore my community hollows out and in a few years, I won’t have a community anymore. There’s just individual conversations that are happening offsite and being aggregated onsite.

Randy: It’s like eavesdropping at a party. You hear parts of conversations but not all of it.

Justin: It’s like having three people and three people and three people and three people and they’re all in different buildings around town and you have an audio feed in your living room and you’re listening to all of them.

Randy: Yeah the conversations is fragmented so many different ways when you use Facebook comments.

Justin: It’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous platform.

Randy: The word ‘community’ no longer applies.

Justin: No. It is definitely a commenting platform. It is definitely not a community platform.

Randy: So I think that kills number one. This of course begs the question. What was the problem that needed to be fixed by moving to real names?

Justin: There’s a fundamental misunderstanding in moderation that moderation will lead to better comments. Moderation leads to mediocre comments. Editorial decisions will lead to better content. We weren’t an editorial team. The New York Times moderation system is an editorial process. They hire journalists to be editors of comments and if you want good comments, the way to moderate is not to remove the bad, it’s to promote the good.

The problem that was being solved was why would we want mediocre comments? Why would we just want mediocrity? Let’s go for greatness. Real name will make people think more about what they’re going to say, put more energy and thought and care into it and therefore we will get goodness. I don’t think that that is true. I think it’s shown itself time and time again to not be true. But it is an oddly commonly held belief.

Randy: You mean not all garbage men are poets?

Justin: Yes, I completely agree with that. I will also qualify the fact that moderation at Huffington Post was a unique form of moderation. Moderators in community management has long been multi-faceted tools in the community managers’ toolkit. They’ll engage with people. They’ll talk people down. They’ll guide conversation in a certain direction. Moderation at Huffington Post was housekeeping. Our moderators didn’t engage with commenters. They didn’t guide conversations. All they did was publish and delete with a very solid division of labor that allowed us to keep the scale that we had.

Randy: You’re right. I believe there’s a lot of people who think of moderation as an editorial task, not a janitorial task.

Justin: I think it can be an editorial task and New York Times has put that into incredible use. It’s just incredibly expensive and you have to be prepared to commit the resources to having an editorial process.

Randy: Justin, I’d like to thank you for joining us here on the podcast today.

Scott: Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this.

Justin: Thanks so much for inviting me.

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The Rise and Fall of a Comment Empire - Episode 21

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