Just saw this comment thread in Facebook and I had to take a screenshot of it. It’s a good example of the trap some of the more successful websites have fallen into. When you attract the following of everyone, you attract all kinds of people to participate in your comments. This can be seen in the biggest medias of Finland for example. I don’t read the comments there to find anything new, it’s usually only to amuse myself. What this in turn does, it literally turns off the perhaps more contributing people from commenting to your content. You know, the kind of people that would add value to the original content in one form or another.

This is something I’ve also noted with ArcticStartup. While we don’t gather a lot of comments per article usually (and in about half of the articles – there aren’t any comments), but when there is a comment you almost certainly know that there’s a lot of value in it.

I think this whole phenomenon has allowed Quora, for example, to succeed in its early days. Will it stay like that? Hard to say, but I doubt it. The community will become broader and as the late adopters hop on board, the early community and culture will almost certainly fade away.

This is exactly what has happened in Y-Combinator News to a certain degree and they have stated this in their news about news:

Growth can’t keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down. We hope it will happen naturally—that we’ll simply run out of new people the site appeals to.

While its always great to grow – it comes with a price. Personally, I want ArcticStartup to flourish with active readers and contributors in the comments. However, I do want to keep working hard to keep the community relevant to the readers and cut back on non-contributing content. I don’t think we’re close to that point yet so we’ve got plenty of space to grow.

What makes this all very difficult is that the first commenter usually sets the tone to the discussion. I think this is something that’s also partly broken about the whole commenting of articles and content in general. Some sites like Y-Combinator have lots of comments and the comments usually take a life of their own (and thus are more interesting than the original content or link). But the way these are currently presented to the readers who are done with reading the article itself – is not very inviting to participate.

To be honest, I have no answers here and these are merely my own thoughts on this issue.

The thing that makes it bad is the sole reason why I believe that twitter is still no comparison for Jaiku, even though I prefer twitter these days for the community. The reason is of course the logic of a social object – there are no threads or logical ways in which to direct your tweet to a certain point. If you look at this from another point of view, it’s like trying to create hyperlinks that can only be applied to the domain and not the actual page where the information you are talking about resides on. You cannot create a healthy conversation around that.

I’ll write about this more today in my prognosis for the year 2009. I’ll also look back at the year 2008 in that post and to the two things I was pondering about that will become big in 2008 being video and lifestreams. There’s a lot around this issue, just look at Facebook what it did with its lifestream as you enter the service, it added comments to the individual updates as well as transformed the wall into your personal lifestream. This has also happened in other services such as LinkedIn. However, more on this later.

Nevertheless, I see US reinventing the wheel continuously with services such as Tweetree. They are incremental innovations and fail to disrupt the market in the way such as Jaiku did. However, acknowledging the community and network of the US West coast, they have a chance at becoming the game changer technology/service. It’s a harsh reality we, the rest of the world, have to live with until we create our own hubs that attract enough venture capital money and talent.

Update: Fred Wilson, from AVC, is commenting on the new UI of Twitter over here.

dave – you are right, tweetree is really excellent. i’ve seen the design work that twitter is doing for the next rev of its web app, and some of these ideas are in it but some are not.

as you know, i think its great that twitter supports third party clients, including web clients, and i’d actually be sort of bummed if they copied all of this because it would make a service like this redundant, and that wouldn’t be good.

thanks for pointing this out, it’s a real improvement and shows the way forward in a bunch of ways

What does this tell? Not much, but unfortunately I’m slightly worried about the development of twitter if they fail to see the importance of the social object in conversations.

Update 2: Michael Arrington picks this up at TechCrunch. I’m beginning to think he’s reading my blog as it’s exactly the same point I’m making here.