Featured Comment Rating Sites
Oct 12th, 2009 by BoB
I have a keen interest in user dynamics. That’s why I’m building Comment Rating with a passion.
I’m also very curious about how others use Comment Rating. So I set up Google Alert to notify me when a Comment Rating site pops up. Here’s a few of them which I consider most intriguing. Hopefully this will help your brainstorm better ways to leverage your reader’s dynamics and create a popular site.
- CaptionWit.com. This is my own site created for the like-minded caption writers. It’s also where Comment Rating was born.
- www.spartanburgspark.com. The site owner Steve Shanafelt made most interesting observations, quoted here.
In an attempt to address a point raised by one of the site’s visitors, I’ve decided to try out an additional level of comment moderation. As most of you already know, the Spark isn’t really “moderated” in a traditional sense, and we’ll allow pretty much any comment that’s not SPAM or blatant hate speech.
The reason for this is twofold: First, one of the site’s main goals is to provide a place where locally relevant conversations that aren’t happening (generally because no one else is talking about them) can actually take place, and heavy moderation of people who only agree with each other doesn’t really further that goal. Second, reading every single post before it goes up would be a huge drain on my time, which is better spent writing content for the site itself.
But what about opening up a form of moderation to the users? One where you could decide what’s good, what’s bad, and what really needs to be shut down to prevent the actual conversation from derailing. Well, now you can.
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One thing to note: The intention of this plugin is to allow some user control over the other comments. In a very real way, voting “dislike” on certain posts is akin to shouting someone down in an argument. Use this power wisely.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that the author of the post on which the comment appears can’t be shouted down, nor can I as the site’s publisher (that’s right, you’re stuck with all of my comments).
- People of Walmart.com. This site has touched the hearts of a passionate crowd, a huge crowd. Alexa ranking is 3349, and the site was only registered on Sept 1, 2009! Users submit photos of scenes at Walmart. Other users put in creative comments and voted by all readers. Entirely automated by user-content and user moderation!
This list will grow. Come back for more inspirations.
Please feel free to submit your sites if you think you have something unique.
. If it works this would be exactly what...
The People of Walmart post on Michael Cera (the “Juno” actor) was friggin hilarious!! The highly active audience had 50-150 thumbs for each comment, but none was funnier than the king of thumbs up – when Michael Cera himself (?) posted on the blog to settle the debate over whether or not it was really him captured in the Wal Mart cell phone pic.
Now if there was just a way to filter the comments so one can skip straight to the highly ranked ones….
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BoB
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October 22nd, 2009 at 9:09 pm
I love that! Comment Rating is helping webmasters encourage user participation.
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CaptionWit.com doesn’t seem to have Comment Rating?
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BoB
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October 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
CaptionWit.com runs Comment Rating. It’s tightly integrated so it looks better.
If you still don’t believe me, look at the source html. Comment Rating’s inline style should be there.
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