In defense of comments

You’ve heard it a million times: don’t read the comments.

It’s my least favorite of internet mantras (perhaps second only to if you build it, they will come, but more on that some other time) because it dismisses a huge swath of internet participation, and prevents us from realizing the potential of what comments can be—making it all that much easier to accept the status quo.

Don’t get me wrong, I have few illusions about the downsides of many comments sections out there. They can be chaotic, terrifying messes that serve up the seeming worst of humanity—sometimes, not reading the comments can be an important act of self-care.

But I often hear this phrase combined with an implicit: what did you expect? 

And that’s where I think we need to push back, because not every comment section is a cesspool—many of them are clean, well-lit spaces where good things are happening for people who come to the internet to learn, share, and connect with others.

In fact, at their best, comments are community. If you only skim the comments on YouTube, you might miss it, but on sites all around the web, connections and relationships have been built in the comment sections of journalists, bloggers, news sites, retailers and more.

I little while back, I asked people on Twitter and Facebook to share their favorite comments sections—I wondered if there were sites people would be genuinely sad to see the comments disappear. It ended up being one of my most popular Facebook posts. Here’s what people came back with:

There were a few other suggestions as well—a friend of mine was pleased that she’d never received an angry comment on her personal finance blog, another pointed out that without the help of commenters on ModCloth, she’d never find the right fit, and another recommended The Truth About Cars as having a particularly smart community of commenters.

Obviously, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and it’s biased towards the interests and reading habits of those I happen to be connected to, but seeing the range of these recommendations confirmed for me that a lot of people are reading the comments, and getting something from it besides higher blood pressure. For those who’ve loudly proclaimed that comments are beyond saving, I’d encourage you to check out some of those sites and see if you find anything that strikes your fancy.

Two things stood out to me in reviewing these sites:

Engagement (and moderation) counts

Maybe it’s the observer effect, but many of these sites and individual writers are definitely reading their comments and aren’t afraid to get into the mix. Writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Captain Awkward do a great job of publicly moderating discussions and letting commenters (and the rest of the community) know when something crosses the line, and news organizations like The Guardian have invested significantly in online editors and moderation staff.

Anonymity isn’t the problem

This is most certainly a topic for a longer post, and perhaps I should say it isn’t the primary problem. I think anonymity is a bit of a red herring, but it always seems to come up in discussions about comments. Many of these sites have robust comment sections without any kind of Real Name policy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue for the past few months, and I definitely don’t have all the answers, but since it’s Monday morning and we’ve got a nice fresh start on the week, I’ll invite you to join me in a little weekly goal: be a better commenter this week.

Maybe that just means reading the comments and responding to some of the positive ones, maybe it means commenting on a piece you found interesting or helpful, even if you don’t have much more to add—be part of that virtuous cycle.

If you’re ready to get started, feel free to share some of your thoughts on sites that should be added to the list above, or your ideas on what makes for a good comment section below!

A picture’s worth a thousand words—thoughts on internet privacy

Or, what happens when your face shows up on Cult of Mac.

Maybe you’ve heard about this app, Girls Around Me, that has been getting some attention recently for being, well, creeptastic. If you haven’t, let me Google that for you, because I’m not really interested in linking directly to John Brownlee’s post, the one on Gawker, or any of the other ones that people have linked me to since Friday.

Go ahead, pick an article, read up—I’ll wait.

So, turns out John lives in Boston and I’m guessing he spends some time writing over in my neck of the woods, because when he put together some screenshots for his post, my face ended up in one of them.

Fantastic.

I first found out about this on Friday afternoon while I was finishing up lunch and getting ready for a conference call—a notification popped up that someone had mentioned me on Facebook. I went over to see what was up and found a link to the article, along with a message from a high school friend I hadn’t heard from in years, also pointing out the article.

I’ve gotten a number of messages, emails and texts since then, all from very well meaning people, most containing some version of the message: you’re in this creepy app! Check your privacy settings!

It looked a lot like Twitter DM spam, only it wasn’t. (Many thanks to my friend Sean for keeping things light and pointing out: at least it’s a good picture.)

My first reaction to this was, “I guess that’s what I get for checking in at my office.”

My second was, “wait, WHAT? What I get? For checking in at my office?”

Let me preface this by saying, yes, I think this is a creepy app, yes I’m glad that Foursquare revoked its API access, and yes, it has made me think long and hard about what value I find from using Foursquare publicly, and whether that’s “worth” whatever the trade offs are. For now, I’ve changed my settings on Foursquare to private, because I haven’t quite made up my mind.

On the one hand, I’ve made some Twitter-friends with people because we’ve both been checked in at the same concerts, and I’ve found it pretty useful at meetups and other social media conferences and events. On the other hand, mostly I just use it for myself, with a relatively small group of friends, so maybe there’s no reason to use it publicly.

I will say that the only “bad” thing that’s ever happened to me from using Foursquare publicly is that my face ended up in John’s article.

Here’s what’s getting at me though:

Moreover, the girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so. This was all public information.

That’s a quote from the Cult of Mac piece. And now I have a problem, because I’m not ignorant, apathetic, or lazy.

I’ve made a choice to participate publicly in the internet. I try to be careful about what I make accessible and what I share with everyone, and for the most part, I think I’ve found a balance that works pretty well for me. Have I slipped up? Sure. But, it’s important to me that I try out new tools and apps and that I understand how various social networks work, what features and functionality they have to offer. Some of that’s because I’m an information junkie, but mostly it’s because I’ve spent the past four years working in online community management and social media, so staying on top of this is pretty relevant to my career.

Now, I can understand why a lot of people don’t want to put any information out there about themselves, or why they only make it available to a select group of people. I also understand that you look at this app and the article and your first reaction is “Thank GOD he’s not talking about me.” I know when my friends and family reached out to me, it was only with the best intentions.

The whole tenor of this, however, has been that if you are in this app, if you have been posting information publicly, especially if you’re a woman, you’re doing something wrong. Shut it down, ladies—someone on the internet might see you. Kashmir Hill shares some good insight on this over at Forbes in her piece, “The Reaction to ‘Girls Around Me’ Was Far More Disturbing Than the ‘Creepy’ App Itself.”

This is where I get stuck. Checking in at your office, or a coffee shop, or The Independent (which is a great bar, by the way), whether publicly or not, doesn’t mean you’re “asking” to get stalked, or mugged, or anything else. People generally don’t ask for bad things to happen to them, and by and large, I don’t really believe anyone deserves to have something bad happen to them. At the same time, I don’t believe that most people are stalkers, or thieves, or otherwise out to do me harm, and the amount of mental energy necessary to view the world that way is quite simply more than I can spend.

Of course, I think it’s important to take precautions, to do what you need to do to feel safe when we live in a world that feels increasingly unsafe. But I also think it’s important to take a step back from time to time and think about what we’re actually saying. I couldn’t remove all the information about me on the internet if I wanted to, and it really wouldn’t be in my best interest to do that.

I don’t believe that having a public persona online needs to be a risky enterprise, and it seems like plenty of people are able to manage that without being attacked, stalked, or otherwise targeted. If we’re saying that’s only true for one half of the population, then I don’t think this is really a conversation about internet privacy as much as it’s a conversation about whether it’s safe to be a woman and live in public.

If the answer to that is “no,” then I think we’ve got bigger problems than Girls Around Me.

Yes, you can teach community management

The topic of training for community management has been coming up quite a bit lately, and after a #cmgrchat back in November, it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about.

As you likely already know, The Community Roundtable, WOMMA and ComBlu will begin offering training and certificates for three levels of community management later this month. (Full disclosure—I recently joined The Community Roundtable, and while I haven’t been involved in this project, it probably goes without saying that I wouldn’t be a member if I didn’t think they were providing a valuable resource to the field of community management.)

It seems as though reactions to the new training program have been fairly mixed, at least within our own little bubble. Jeremiah Owyang and Connie Benson (who’s an instructor in the program) have some good posts about why this program matters, and what it is or isn’t setting out to accomplish. Without belaboring the point, there are a few things I want to add to the conversation here:

First, don’t worry about the certificate

All due respect to everyone involved, but I think the certificate part of all this may end up being a bit of a red herring—what really matters is the training itself. Plus, I think certification implies a level of technical competence in a field that may not be as relevant for community management as it might be in other areas, especially on the web.

I also think fears that a certificate or some kind of formal certification will have a significant impact on the way community management positions get filled are probably unfounded - as anyone who’s hired a community manager can tell you, experience counts for a lot.

No really, you can teach empathy

I won’t pretend my English degree qualifies me to dive into the nature vs. nurture debate, but I really was surprised by the “you can’t teach empathy or compassion” reaction to the idea of preparing people for a career in community management.

I’m not trying to be glib, but I honestly can't think of that many people I would describe as completely devoid of empathy. Perhaps I’m grossly underestimating the number of sociopaths interested in a career in community management, but I think by and large, the first step to being a successful community manager is, you know, actually wanting to be a successful community manager. (Okay, maybe that was a little glib.) It’s by no means the only necessary skill or qualification, but it does strike me as a pretty important one.

In all seriousness, I think empathy is often a function of context, both in terms of setting and subject matter. Health is something I’m pretty passionate about, and I've spend a lot of time immersing myself in the world of patients and practitioners, attempting to understand the challenges they face here in the US, and around the world. That’s not something I knew anything about when I started working in this field as perfectly healthy 23 year old, but the more I learned about the challenges and obstacles people encountered in accessing and providing care, the easier it became to empathize with situations outside of my own personal experience.

So, yes, there is some basic kernel of empathy that you need to have in order to be able to say to yourself, “Wow, that must be hard,” but I’d like to believe that most of us do possess that, and if someone wants to activate it, and spends the time and energy identifying opportunities to exercise that skill, I really do think there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll succeed.

Why not help them learn how to identify those opportunities?

Speaking of which, let’s stop reinventing the wheel

When I first heard about this program, I thought, “I really wish this had been around four years ago.” Many (if not most) of us who have been doing this work for a little while are largely self-taught community managers. We learned from our experiences and our failures, and from whatever we could find out there on the web from other community managers. If you were lucky (and I was very, very lucky) you may have had an opportunity to learn from managers, coworkers and employees who all had some experience in the field as well.

Here’s the thing about experiential learning, though—it’s invaluable and hard won, but it is hard won. And honestly? Not everything needs to be hard. Let’s help make it easier for people trying to figure out things like what metrics they’ll want to track, or the basics of social listening tools, or how to put together an editorial calendar that’s appropriate for their organization.

When you have to figure out—and advocate for—all these things on your own, it takes a lot longer to get them done. That’s time not being spent on your someday list of to-dos and features.

Selfishly, I want to see more of what’s on that list for other community managers. In my mind, that’s the biggest potential for a program like the one The CR, WOMMA and ComBlu have put together: it can help all of us move forward as an industry. We all learn and benefit from innovative community solutions and creative implementation ideas—so let's get more of them.

What’s next?

Clearly I’m a fan of the idea of “community management training” generally, but it’s worth pointing out that the syllabus for the WOMMA Community Specialist level is pretty impressive—it looks like three weeks of solid fundamentals from people who really know what they're talking about.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see what's covered in the Community Manager and Community Strategist levels and where things go from there, but on the whole I think training is something we should all be talking and thinking more about. As our communities and organizations grow, our community teams will need to grow with them, and how we build our own teams and mentor those new to the field matters: the success of our industry depends on us doing it well.