Reactions to Inside Higher Ed's Unplanned Comment-Free Experiment

On Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019, Inside Higher Ed ran an unplanned experiment. This experiment tested what happens to a news and opinion website when commenting is disabled.

I don't know the details, but due to some technical glitch, the Disqus commenting system that Inside Higher Ed uses did not show any comments the entire day. Every article and opinion piece looked like it had zero comments.

From what I can tell, readers were still able to comment -- and the comments appeared sometime late on Oct. 3 or Oct. 4. But for most of the day, reader responses at the bottom of Inside Higher Ed articles were absent.

What was your reaction to Inside Higher Ed's unplanned comment-free experiment?

Here were my reactions:

Reaction 1: Wow, Inside Higher Ed seems smaller and less relevant without comments.

Inside Higher Ed brands itself as "the go-to online source for higher education news, thought leadership, careers and resources."

What is missing in this self-description of Inside Higher Ed is anything about user-generated content. Yet, what a day without comments reveals is that the majority of Inside Higher Ed content is user-generated.

Someone should fact-check this assertion that readers generate more words each day, on average, than Inside Higher Ed reporters and opinion writers and bloggers. If I'm right (or close to right), then it would be hard to argue with the assertion that Inside Higher Ed is at least as much a community platform as it is a news and opinion site.

Lacking the ideas, expertise and reactions of the readers, I find Inside Higher Ed to be surprisingly sterile on Oct. 3. The news and opinion pieces were, to my eyes, less interesting without the reactions of those reading them.

Moreover, the content on Inside Higher Ed felt less relevant to our higher education community when the community could not participate in a conversation around the content.

What makes Inside Higher Ed relevant is not its content alone, but instead, it is the interaction of content and community. The readership of Inside Higher Ed comes to Inside Higher Ed not only because of the articles and blog posts, but because that readership is connected (in some way) to the higher education ecosystem.

Inside Higher Ed is not a site for the general reader. Inside Higher Ed is a place for those with a strong interest, and often expertise, in higher education.

This does not mean that every comment is informative, cogently argued or posted with collegial goodwill. This is the internet, after all. But most of the comments on Inside Higher Ed are offered with the intent of contributing to the conversation. Most commentators on Inside Higher Ed are motivated to be constructive participants in our community.

Without comments, Inside Higher Ed is a less smart and less interesting place to visit.

Reaction 2: Hmm, I wonder how commenting could be better?

If the contributions of readers are such a critical aspect of the Inside Higher Ed value proposition, then what might this insight mean for the design of Inside Higher Ed?

Here I'll offer some ideas from the safe vantage point of both relative ignorance and the absence of responsibility. I have little doubt that every suggestion below has been thought of by the people who make Inside Higher Ed run. I make no claims around originality or feasibility.

But … here is what I'd like to suggest:

Twitter?

Is there any way that Disqus can be integrated with Twitter? Integrated so as that a comment on Inside Higher Ed generates a new tweet (if that easy option is checked), based on a hashtag that ties the comment back to the article? Or working the other way, can a tweet automatically show up as a comment?

The best conversations around Inside Higher Ed content often end up on Twitter. Twitter is a far more visible, accessible and broad platform to discuss Inside Higher Ed content than the Disqus commenting tools. Can these two platforms be integrated?

Or maybe Disqus and Twitter are already well integrated, and I don't how to use either platform well?

Visibility?

At Inside Higher Ed, like everywhere else, the room as a whole is smarter than any single individual in the room. There is more knowledge and insight in the collective thinking of the Inside Higher Ed community than in the writing of any single reporter or Views writer or blogger.

The challenge for Inside Higher Ed readers is finding those insights.

Smart comments on Inside Higher Ed can be stranded in a sea of weirdness. Like all web-based commenting systems, the price we pay for the wisdom of the crowd is the incivility of the troll. So you read through the chaff to get to the wheat.

What Inside Higher Ed needs is a mechanism to make the best comments more visible. The up-voting in Disqus is not cutting it.

I would recommend that the Inside Higher Ed editors choose the best five or 10 comments on any single day and promote those to an original Views piece. Put the best comments on the top of the page, rather than buried underneath the stories.

Or maybe put the best comments alongside the articles and opinion pieces. Do something to reward readers when they take the time and effort to make a detailed argument.

These ideas are intended to recognize that the value of Inside Higher Ed derives from its community, not its content.

Embracing this community means both a commitment to design for its needs, and a willingness to live with all the complexities of human interaction.

What did you think of Inside Higher Ed without comments?

How would you improve the design of Inside Higher Ed to build on the expertise of its community of readers?