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We're Getting Rid of Comments on VICE.com(vice.com)
almost 7 years ago from Sam Solomon, Staff Product Designer at Salesloft
Philip Weber, almost 7 years ago
Of the people that you communicate with on Slack, messenger, iMessage, and Hangouts, how many have you not met in person? I would guess very few. Even if you talk to coworkers on Slack that you have never met in person, you have an ongoing relationship with them.
Comment threads are public discourse, mostly between strangers. You may think that you view everyone you talk to online as human, but you don't. No one does. You can't read a thread with tens or hundreds of participants and consider the nature of their existence.
My opinion (for now) is that there are problematic issues with comments. The discussion we are having right now, though both of us have made it slightly uncivil at times, is interesting to me, and I've learned something from it, so, hey, I guess I'm not against them. However, more often than not, I regret participation.
Seems like almost every piece of communication software we use today is in disagreement with that idea though (slack, messenger, iMessage, hangout, etc etc). People are obviously capable of communicating online via text just fine.
I think the issue you are inadvertently pointing to though is maturity.
Maybe I'm weird here but I don't think about other people online as "not-human" (including you Philip - I imagine you are a person, living your life, are real/have feelings, etc). I don't think meeting in person is a requirement to get along in a digital age. In fact, I think it's a requirement to learn TO get along and ignore those who don't play by the same societal rules we apply to real life. In VICE's case here, this would be like sewing everyone's mouthes shut vs just ignoring people or leaving the scene or whatever.