AOL News, Music, Video and Games Comments
Posted on Oct 23rd 2007 4:58PM by Joseph Manna
Filed under: New Features, Other Stuff, Community Info
A lot of you have noticed that popular AOL channels such as Video, Music, News and Games carry a Comments feature. I'll share some info on the features of AOL comments as well as my personal thoughts on the subject.
You can usually find the comment sections below the featured content, such as a news article or a hot video. It allows you to post your thoughts on the specific item. In case you haven't been using comments, pictured below (and explained below it) are the various features of comments:
I have mixed thoughts on this community experience. It's great because it makes it incredibly easy for someone to share their thoughts, but it's a challenge to follow the discussion. I enjoy multi-threaded discussions because they enable a variety of topics to be broken out and discussed by people. (Ahem, Message Boards, anyone?)
Naturally, if you remove "barriers," like additional links to click on to post something, you pave the way for trolls, idiots, psychos and spammers to come in and rain on everyone's parade. There is some good news, though. As new technologies emerge, so do the solutions. The team that manages comments has implemented and is pursing additional ways to prevent spam, junk and otherwise undesirable comments. (Srsly, chain letters are so 1996.)
I believe one of the ways to help users read comments more effectively is to allow individual comment replies, so you can reply to specific ones and your reply is nested underneath; in addition, make use of ratings so the wisdom of crowds can stomp out disruptive users. This should also encourage more favorable uses of comments by the users.
It should be acknowledged that the Comments product has made quite a bit of progress since it was first implemented. Bugs and various issues that couldn't be reproduced in-house have been resolved, and the overall user experience has improved quite a bit.
I know it's rather cliché at this point, but if you have any thought-provoking reactions, share them in the comments below. :-)
~Joseph
You can usually find the comment sections below the featured content, such as a news article or a hot video. It allows you to post your thoughts on the specific item. In case you haven't been using comments, pictured below (and explained below it) are the various features of comments:
- Post Your Own – Click there to take you down to the bottom of the page to post your own thoughts on a story.
- Turn Off Comments – Loading comments can sometimes affect the page load time for people on older computers, so you can turn the loading of comments off so your page can load faster.
- Current view of Comments – If you are paging through comments, this will indicate where you are out of the total number of comments.
- Screen name and time stamp – The information about the author of the comment and the time it was posted are generated here.
- Report This! – If you find a comment that violates AOL Terms of Service, you can report it via the Report This link so it reaches our Enforcement team. We'll review it and take action within 48 hours.
I have mixed thoughts on this community experience. It's great because it makes it incredibly easy for someone to share their thoughts, but it's a challenge to follow the discussion. I enjoy multi-threaded discussions because they enable a variety of topics to be broken out and discussed by people. (Ahem, Message Boards, anyone?)
Naturally, if you remove "barriers," like additional links to click on to post something, you pave the way for trolls, idiots, psychos and spammers to come in and rain on everyone's parade. There is some good news, though. As new technologies emerge, so do the solutions. The team that manages comments has implemented and is pursing additional ways to prevent spam, junk and otherwise undesirable comments. (Srsly, chain letters are so 1996.)
I believe one of the ways to help users read comments more effectively is to allow individual comment replies, so you can reply to specific ones and your reply is nested underneath; in addition, make use of ratings so the wisdom of crowds can stomp out disruptive users. This should also encourage more favorable uses of comments by the users.
It should be acknowledged that the Comments product has made quite a bit of progress since it was first implemented. Bugs and various issues that couldn't be reproduced in-house have been resolved, and the overall user experience has improved quite a bit.
I know it's rather cliché at this point, but if you have any thought-provoking reactions, share them in the comments below. :-)
~Joseph
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1. Glad to see your still here Joe, and blogging despite what has all happened. =)
Posted at 12:26AM on Oct 24th 2007 by Mike
2. Joe---I, too, am glad to see you are still here and posting on Social Media:) Now, as to Message Boards and Comments. When you have a plethora of comments on a particular story, Comments do NOT have threading. They come in order posted and not by topic or thread. Thus, a sense of continuity does not exist. Instead you have one big mishmash of comments, in no particular order and sometimes on topics which have nothing to do with the news article above.
Message boards with their threading do have a sense of continuity, however, and a person can choose whether or not to read a particular thread. Message boards can breed a sense of belonging to a group or community. Comments do not. The more random comments there are, the less a sense of belonging. A news story just becomes another mass media publication.
Now, I can see where both have their places here. That's why I'm in favor of both. Franki
Posted at 12:20PM on Oct 24th 2007 by Franki
3. Franki,
Thanks for commenting. I'm still around, picking up some of the pieces from last week's restructuring, but I'm still here.
I'd like to reiterate that comments are really useful for certain products, but so are message boards and can make for a good recipe for a great community together. :-)
Thanks again,
Joseph
Posted at 1:11PM on Oct 24th 2007 by Joseph Manna
4. how to post comments on aol news
Posted at 1:27AM on Dec 14th 2007 by D H
5. save
Posted at 1:28AM on Dec 14th 2007 by HEICo International
6. Why can't I get on AOL Games?! I feel I know the answer, but would like to hear something from you!!
Posted at 6:31PM on Dec 27th 2007 by Richard Cumberworth