Echo won't kill comments – they're already dead

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This article was originally published on TechCrunch

Widget developer JS-Kit recentlyproclaimed the by way of its innovative comment management system Echo.This would-be executioner pulls together disparate comments across theWeb about a particular article and places them amid the conventionalcomments below the article. If it takes off, popular sites likeTechCrunch could end up with hundreds if not thousands of additionalcomments. And therein lies the problem. How many of us can be botheredto read through more than the first few dozen or so comments on anarticle? Not more than a handful I'm sure; a handful that won't be madeany bigger by Echo's invading army of snippets from Twitter,FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and Delicious. It may be nice for thearticle's author to conveniently track every last mention of his or herarticle, but for the reader it just means hundreds more comments tonot-read.

That's not to say that Echo doesn't benefit readers atall. Seeing new comments appear without having to refresh the page ishandy, but not game-changing. Being able to post images and videos,log-in via OpenID and conveniently share our content across ourdifferent networks are all nice touches, though really these are justbasics we've come to expect everywhere, not the stuff of epic commentmass-murder which Echo trumpets.

In reality an aspiration to bethe death of comments is doomed to failure because it ignores the factthat comments, where they become at all numerous, have long been doingjust fine at killing themselves by way of drowning in their ownpopularity. Lots of comments amounts to an enormous long list ofentirely unstructured text. There are no dividers or subheadings, nological progression of arguments or groupings of opinion and nodistinction between unique, intelligent insights and throwawayexpressions of approval and opposition. Because nobody can be botheredto read through such a mess before they add their own comment, thereisn't even the structure of a coherent conversation. Instead, there isendless, pointless repetition; conversations emerge, peter out and thenre-emerge 50 comments later with new participants who haven't noticedthat the same issues were discussed 50 comments ago. And these are themore productive comment threads. Much more often comments areunreplied-to and unacknowledged: futile, audience-less clamours andlonely questions without a hope of ever being answered.

Bymassively increasing the volume of comments and taking them from manydifferent social networks, Echo will only exacerbate this problem:completing comments' transformation into a disjointed stream ofmutually-ignoring cries into the void, each destined for a briefflicker of prominence before vanishing without trace under the weightof a thousand tweets.

I don't say any of this because I dislikecomments but because I'm disappointed with how comments are handled. Tomy mind, the Internet should be the world's parliament. It should be amassive conversation, a democratizing collective debate which abolishesthe distinction between authors and readers – the activeopinion-producer and the passive opinion-consumer. Unfortunately that'snot going to happen if all that the readers author is a garbled,unstructured mess that nobody reads.

Some people believe thatcomments on popular articles will always be like this becausemany-to-many conversations are impossible. They believe that if we wantcoherence we must content ourselves with either conversations in smallgroups (few-to-few) or one-way conversations whereby a throng ofadmirers hang on the words of an admired expert (one-to-many). Idisagree. I believe that the Internet offers the potential for coherentmany-to-many conversations for the first time in the history ofhumanity. As MG Siegler, today's "commenting structure [has] been inplace basically since blogging began". What is needed is anevolutionary shift which is suitably adapted to the Internet's uniquepotential and pitfalls. We need something that allows massive numbersof comments to be navigated quickly and easily so that coherent massconversations can emerge. We don't need amplified echoes of whatalready exists.