“It's nice”, “Good one”, “great job”, “fantastic”, “congrats” and other similar appreciative comments currently form the majority of the comments on the web. Appreciation is a great way to encourage people. These comments give feedback to the concerned person so play a vital role in the talent recognition ecosystem. But when appreciations just flood a website and drown other useful information then it is an injustice to the website users (including the same appreciative people) because other useful comments got buried under 'good job' comments.
Possible Solution: An app (or a browser add-in/plugin) can be created for filtering comments. The app can process all the comments on a webpage and filter them into 4 major buckets namely appreciation, critique, 'related info', and spam. The appreciation bucket can club all the congratulatory comments; the critique bucket will contain critics’ comments; the spam bucket will club junk comments and totally unrelated info, and the 'related info' bucket (the most important bucket) can contain comments where other users have added their own opinion and extended the discussion to a higher level or some user commented other contextual useful info.
Let’s give people whatever they are looking for. In today’s world when people don’t want to waste even a single second in scanning non-useful information and searching even for the smallest thing, comments should also be filtered to let people read whichever bucket they are interested in.
Once we started filtering comments this will impact the comments writing behavior as well. People interested in the real discussion will feel encouraged and will participate more as they will know that their opinion will not be mobbed.
PS: This post was originally posted on hoodasaurabh.blogspot.com