I stumbled onto Christa Mrgan’s Civil a few weeks ago. What is Civil Comments, you ask?
I could tell you, but you should just watch this instead:
Comments are a touchy subject in the blogging world. Some publishers think they are an indispensable aspect of modern blogging. (Why force readers to take their conversations to social media in lieu of having them on publishers’s websites?) Yet other publishers find that the vitriol of public comments leads to a poorer experience for everyone, so they turn them off.
In the past, I’ve thought about implementing comments on TheOverAnalyzed, but ultimately decided against it. I used to read The Verge a lot more than I currently do. And when I would read their articles outside of Instapaper or my RSS reader, I was exposed to the comments sections of their posts. Guess what I found? The majority of their comments were either extremely vulgar, accusatory, or otherwise full of bad vibes.[1] That’s not what I wanted for TheOverAnalyzed.
I plan to tryout Civil Comments once it goes live. I’m all for intelligent conversation, and like any “publisher,” I like the idea of keeping folks on my website as much as possible.
Today, Mrgan unveiled Civil Comment’s “Public Test” mode. And what better crucible to test Civil Comments’ civility than a snarky post detailing how Star Wars is better than Star Trek?
Obviously, I enjoy the Star Wars universe much more than Star Trek.[2] And like any true Star Wars fan, I’d be the first to enter into an intelligent debate between Star Wars and Star Trek. Just to be clear, Trost’s post is not that—it’s a post meant to test the efficacy of Civil’s commenting platform. I scanned the comments right before publishing this, and from what I could tell, everything looked …rather civil.
So there you go.
(Hat tip to John Siracusa)