I recently saw this note from Yahoo! News. Long before Web 2.0 was a term, people were grappling with the issue of unmoderated discussions. Unfiltered discussions allow for grand standing and flame wars. It can also be difficult to determine metrics for theses conversations. An active thread or even the number of comments can be misleading when trying to gage interaction. Sometimes, we use the number of posters or people participating in a conversation but that can also be misleading.
The upside to all of this activity and interaction is, of course, that people are involved and helping to create the content.
To Yahoo! News readers:
Yahoo! News is working on new ways for readers to comment on the news and participate in a discussion around it. While we work on our new community features, the message boards that were linked from individual news articles have been taken offline.
As they were set up, the Yahoo! News message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion. In addition, related discussions from similar news articles were not easily linked.
Over the next few months, we plan to offer new discussion forums based on topics in the news and incorporating the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers.
Neil Budde
General Manager
Yahoo! News