With the growth of social media and various forms of participatory media, the line between the traditional content generators and the content consumers is fading. As a result, conversations and comments from consumers as well as their posts on social media are starting to become considered content itself.

As media moves towards utilizing conversations and comments to provide more content and context, it’s important to think about the definition of having a “good” conversation, the motives and incentives to get people to contribute to a good conversation, and also how to get a diverse set of commenters to avoid bias.

For my Intro to Civic Media project, I would like to do an analysis of current commenting platforms, such as the platforms on Gawker, Branch, Slashdot, PolicyMic, and Reddit. I want to look at the motivations driving their structures, their incentives for readers to comment, and their plans for the future.

I would like to start my analysis by exploring these 8 questions (in no particular order):

1. How do you define a good conversation?
2. What motivates someone to join a conversation?
3. What motivates someone to supply good comments?
4. What do people comment on? How do the topics they comment on relate to their interests and the total of what they read/watch/listen?
5. How do we measure influence? Does reading others’ comments make people rethink what they believe in over time?
6. Is there any difference in influence between an anonymous comment and a comment with a name attached?
7. Do people care about fact checking comments?
8. Who makes comments? Does it reflect the same population reading the primary content?

What do you like about our current commenting systems? What frustrates you about conversations online? What do you think could make our current system better? Let me know in the comments!