I was reading Eric Rice's very interesting blog post about his concentric circle theory and starting thinking that this might be the time to bring up a topic I've been mulling in the nether reaches of my cluttered mind.

Zadi and I have been discussing the situation with comments on videoblogs. This discussion began in earnest when we got a racist comment toward Zadi on JETSET a few weeks ago. Then we watched the rather appalling comments on Amanda's ABC videos and I became convinced:

Comments are not a community.

For the longest time video bloggers have treated comments as one of the holy elements of video blogging. We've argued that it creates a conversation. I don't buy it. It can create a conversation, but it rarely does. Mostly it's an outlet for friends to say nice things about each other, and anonymous trolls to criticize without accountability.

No accountability = no community.

I love the idea of comments. I love that from time to time genuine discussions emerge, usually between people who already know each other. But I think as the volume of comments goes up, the threads of a conversation are totally lost. In fact, strictly linear comments such as those on most blogs and videoblogs are the exact antithesis of a true conversation. A conversation does not follow a straight line, it rides into peaks and valleys, it zigzags around telephone poles and crashes into trees. And sometimes it comes all the way back to where it started.

Popular alternatives come up short.

Two quick examples of alternatives: Digg uses threaded comments that users can bury if they are wack. Ze Frank uses a forum to manage the deluge of comments he gets daily. These solutions require a user to register and to post under a screen name (or names). So there's some accountability there, which is good.

But I don't think either of them works very well overall. Try clicking through page after page of text on a popular forum thread on Ze Frank's forums. In fact try finding the thread of posts about today's Ze Frank video. Then try clicking the buried comments on Digg to follow the conversation points that other people have decided are not worth your eyeballs. This stuff is not working.

Just because you CAN post your thoughts doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Let's face it, the tools we have to create online media, distribute it, and cultivate communities is equivalent to banging rocks together to make fire. But with all the harping about pre-roll ads (myself included), Creative Commons licenses, and broken RSS feeds, I don't see any kind of discussion around why comments suck so bad, and even fewer innovative solutions to the problems. At BEST we are seeing rehashes of different technologies cobbled together.

In my opinion, anonymous comments should go away. All users should be required to at least give themselves an identity and a viewable history of their comments by clicking on their profile names. Right there you remove 75% of the pointless, inane, insulting comments on popular videos. It doesn't do away with it, though -- just look at any popular YouTube video as an example.

I'm going to give this a bit more thought, because I see an opportunity for an enterprising developer to come up with a solution to shitty commenting systems. I'd like to hear what you think about this. Is it as big a problem as I'm making it out to be, or am I just shouting to hear my own voice?

UPDATE: Eric Rice made a good point about clarifying the people who I indicated have been championing comments as part of the holy elements of video blogging. Many of the soapbox standpoints over the years where I gleaned that reference occurred in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group as opposed to the thousands of videobloggers using services like YouTube who are blissfully unaware of the community that has generally claimed ownership of the video blog as a concept. To be fair, of course, the people in the Yahoo! group were doing what YouTubers are now doing two years ago, or more. So perhaps YouTubers will have this discussion in due time on their own.