Gold nugget gone toxic The history of online commenting
The introduction of the commenting feature has added a whole new dimension to the internet. The promise was: everyone can participate. But things took a different turn.
The early days of online commenting saw something of a gold rush: comments were supposed to add value to the texts under which they appeared – even when it was obvious that user submissions would also be littered with all kinds of rubbish. As recently as the late 2000s, providers of comment features spoke of gold nuggets that had to be fished out of the mass of harmless rubbish. The team headed by Professor Johannes Paßmann from the Institute of Media Studies at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, is examining how metaphors and our understanding of online comments have changed since they were first introduced. The Ruhr University’s science magazine Rubin reports on their findings.
New metaphors signify urgency
The researchers analysed, for example, the corporate self-presentations of the company “Disqus” – one of the world’s largest providers of commenting functions that customers can integrate into their websites. Between 2007 and 2021, the metaphors Disqus used to advertise its services changed significantly. In the gold nugget metaphor era, the company advertised that its technology helped customers prompt discussions. Later, Disqus promoted its tools as a way to facilitate discussion moderation. The gold nugget metaphor disappeared and was replaced by the concept of “healthy communities” that are immune to the polemical debates of certain users.
In 2016, the term “toxic communication” took root, and war metaphors such as “hate speech must be combated” were also introduced. “We call these ‘metaphors of urgency’,” says Johannes Paßmann. “The choice of words suggests that we can’t go on as before.”
Software helps detect changes in our approach to comments
The team at Ruhr University Bochum is approaching the history of online commentary from another angle. The researchers are working with large data sets from the Internet Archive, which contains records of websites from the past. Martina Schories, a member of Johannes Paßmann’s team, programmed software that automatically searches the archived pages for updates in the comment features. The researchers then examine these passages more closely. “We noticed, for example, that there came a time when a major German daily newspaper started to disable the comment feature at night,” says Paßmann.
Interviews with people in charge of comments shed light on backgrounds
He and his colleague Lisa Gerzen use such findings to conduct interviews, for example with former employees from newspaper editorial offices who were in charge of the comments on the pages of the respective medium. This is how they track down the stories behind the automatically detected changes in the comment features. In Rubin, Johannes Paßmann reveals the story behind the nightly deactivation of comments.