The biggest question mark in this whole thing is how they are going to raise the level of discourse around articles via smart moderation features. News sites are often a race to the bottom in terms of comment quality where all the trolls kill off any meaningful discourse.
A while ago when this very problem for news sites was discussed on an HN thread, someone posted a pertinent question "Why should the discussion of an article occur in the same place as the article itself?". The point that person was making is that all the aggregator sites like HN and Reddit for example, have done a good job providing a forum for commenting on content posted elsewhere (like the NYTimes and WaPo). With that in mind, how would one turn this splintering into manageable communities into a feature. There needs to be a way where there is automatic segmenting based on quality of commentary. Maybe like a Major leagues, minor leagues and troll leagues, where there are two or three simultaneous threads going on. People who've never commented before and have no karma end up in the minor leagues by default. If they get upvoted enough their, their comments go to the major leagues. Likewise, if their comments get downvoted enough it ends up in the troll leagues, where the trolls can quibble among one another.
The hardest part is going to be establishing a culture that reinforces high quality content like here on HN. I can't even begin to see how you build something like that overnight. It takes weeks to months of slow stable growth with really good people to establish a high quality commentary culture that is self policing without using their moderation powers for censorship. I have no earthly idea how you create a feature that promotes the same in a community where hundreds to thousands of commenters are going to show up on day one. Maybe you could launch the comment system as a private beta feature where entry into the private beta is based on posting a really high quality comment and that good enough comments get inducted into the thread so that current private beta people can comment. Once you've posted enough such high quality comments, you get general access to participate. Then, like on HN, you eventually earn the right to upvote comments and one day, with enough points, the right to downvote comments.
I don't know if you're referring to my comments, but I've made that point here a few times.
Great comments come from great communities. Building a great online community is hard; online forums and social media platforms have succeeded far beyond any content website I can think of.
So: the technology of a commenting system is the least hard part. The challenge is social: why would people come to the WashingtonPost or NYTimes to build human relationships? I don't think people relate to newspapers that way.
In contrast, social media and forums are optimized around enabling human relationships. So I think the wave of the future for content publishers is to optimize their integration with those existing communities. Otherwise they are basically trying to compete with them directly--in addition to producing great content. Good luck with that.
A while ago when this very problem for news sites was discussed on an HN thread, someone posted a pertinent question "Why should the discussion of an article occur in the same place as the article itself?". The point that person was making is that all the aggregator sites like HN and Reddit for example, have done a good job providing a forum for commenting on content posted elsewhere (like the NYTimes and WaPo). With that in mind, how would one turn this splintering into manageable communities into a feature. There needs to be a way where there is automatic segmenting based on quality of commentary. Maybe like a Major leagues, minor leagues and troll leagues, where there are two or three simultaneous threads going on. People who've never commented before and have no karma end up in the minor leagues by default. If they get upvoted enough their, their comments go to the major leagues. Likewise, if their comments get downvoted enough it ends up in the troll leagues, where the trolls can quibble among one another.
The hardest part is going to be establishing a culture that reinforces high quality content like here on HN. I can't even begin to see how you build something like that overnight. It takes weeks to months of slow stable growth with really good people to establish a high quality commentary culture that is self policing without using their moderation powers for censorship. I have no earthly idea how you create a feature that promotes the same in a community where hundreds to thousands of commenters are going to show up on day one. Maybe you could launch the comment system as a private beta feature where entry into the private beta is based on posting a really high quality comment and that good enough comments get inducted into the thread so that current private beta people can comment. Once you've posted enough such high quality comments, you get general access to participate. Then, like on HN, you eventually earn the right to upvote comments and one day, with enough points, the right to downvote comments.