In my new role as the Globe’s “communities editor” (you can find more details on that in this post), I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about comments — that is, reader comments on news stories, columns, blog posts, etc. The Globe and Mail was the first major newspaper in North America to allow comments on every news story when it launched the feature in 2005, and judging by the ever-increasing numbers of people who use them, they are hugely popular. On some major news stories, we can sometimes get as many as 500 comments.

Comments aren’t popular with everyone, however. Some readers (and even some Globe and Mail staffers, to be honest) complain that too often our comment threads are filled with what might charitably be called “noise” — everything from bad spelling and grammar all the way up to partisan political in-fighting, ad hominem attacks and all-around rude and boorish behaviour. Some say they don’t really care what most people think about a topic, and don’t see the value in having public comments on stories at all.

This view isn’t confined to Globe readers, by any means: in a column in the National Post, author George Jonas said that the Web is like “an elegant restaurant with garbage on the menu,” and that “a huge blackboard on which anyone can write anything doesn’t mean much for those with nothing to say, i.e., most people.” Similar feelings have been expressed by various writers about comments on blogs, and some prominent Web writers have turned theirs off completely. Even the director of BBC News said in a recent speech that while she values comments, they are the work of a “vocal minority” and therefore shouldn’t carry too much weight.

Just for the record, my view — one that I believe the Globe shares — is that the ability to comment on a news story or a column or a blog is a fundamental requirement of any modern media entity. In the past, reader feedback was limited to a handful of letters to the editor or perhaps a phone call or a comment to an editor or writer at a cocktail party or coffee shop. The Web allows us to open that ability up to virtually anyone, and I believe that doing so, on balance, has a lot more positive results than negative ones – not just for us, but for society in general. Yes, we get nasty comments; but we also get many others that are smart, insightful, touching and useful.

In that sense, comments are a little like democracy: messy and often flawed in practice, but still important in principle. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible means of government – except for all the others.

Do comments on stories sometimes degenerate into name-calling and schoolyard insults? Sure they do. And we do our best to remove any that cross the boundaries described in our comment policy, and occasionally even block commenters outright if they misbehave. We don’t want a free-for-all or a zoo — we want as many thoughtful (if passionate) responses as possible. And we need you to help, by flagging comments that cross the line; the volume of comments we receive on an average day is far too high for us to be able to monitor them all individually.

We are working on some new comment enhancements that should make it easier to highlight comments that add something to the conversation, and smother those that detract from it, including a recommendation system. We’d like to find ways to give commenters who consistently add something to the debate a higher profile on our site, as some other newspapers have. How we are going to do all of that remains to be seen. But I want you to know that we are working on it, and that we value your input — not just about comments, but about every other aspect of what we do.

Update:

Joshua Benton, writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog, makes a similar point in a piece about ProPublica’s response to a critical post by Portfolio finance blogger Felix Salmon. As Josh puts it, media outlets have to engage with readers whether they want to or not:

“The audience has the power to talk back in a way it never had before. And news organizations will, increasingly, have to become part of that conversation if they want to be successful. There was a time, not that long ago, when a news organization’s credibility was boosted by its voice-of-God tone, the sense of solidity in its stories and the distance it kept from its audience. All that played into its status as a Respected Institution. Those days, I think, are over. Now you gain credibility through transparency, openness, and a willingness to engage with smart people who have questions.”

As Darren Barefoot notes in the comments here, The Tyee — an independently published online magazine based in Vancouver — has had similar issues with comments, and revamped its policies. A discussion of that is here (and Darren also wrote about it on his blog). Slate has dealt with the topic as well, and the Washington Post had a much-publicized incident in which it decided to close comments on a public blog altogether because of the number of personal attacks. The paper described its response here.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing wrote about “trolls” and how to deal with them at InformationWeek. And Chuq Von Raspach has some thoughts about what a half-decent reputation system would look like for blogs or any other Web service.

In his blog post and in comments made to Mashable’s Adam Ostrow about the deal, Daniel is very diplomatic about the acquisition, saying it was a good move for Automattic and Intense Debate, and that “I think Disqus (and others in the space) will continue to work harder on offerings for users of WordPress and the many other platforms.” One of the main financial backers behind Disqus — Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures — took the same line in comments to me via Twitter. “Its great for the 3rd party comment system market,” he said. “It validates the category.”

All that said, however, there’s little doubt that this is going to put some pressure on Disqus. Wordpress is undoubtedly going to integrate Intense Debate into its platform in a pretty major way, and will also push it to all of the millions of bloggers who use either Wordpress.com or hosted Wordpress (as I do). That’s going to have an effect on adoption rates, there’s no question. Fred said in his message that he hopes there is a level playing field: “I hope WP doesn’t play favorites,” he said. “Bloggers need choice.”

For my part, I remain a satisfied user of Disqus.

In one short story he wrote, called Good Old Neon, the narrator — a well-liked, high-school sports star turned advertising executive — recalls feeling like a fraud all of his life and eventually kills himself (you can read some of it through Google Books). Wallace described the story as his attempt to understand a high-school classmate of his, a well-liked sports hero who later committed suicide. Wallace himself was a sports star of sorts in high school, a competitive junior tennis player. Tennis forms one of the backdrops for Infinite Jest, probably his best-known work, a sprawling 1,000-page novel about (among many other things) the life of a young man living at an exclusive tennis training academy.

For me, Infinite Jest — which took me months to get through, not because it was hard to read, but because it was so enjoyable and the writing was so dense and rich and multi-layered (something Shane Richmond mentions as well in his post about Wallace’s death) — was up there in the top 10 novels of the past few decades, almost on par with David Eggers’ incredible book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers and Wallace were very similar, and as more than one person has noted their writing was a lot like hypertext, except instead of Web links there were multiple footnotes.

Both Wallace and Eggers got early acclaim, much like Jay McInerney did with his novel Bright Lights, Big City in the 1980s. Eggers has continued to write and publish — including the excellent McSweeney’s, which is also a quarterly literary journal — and founded a non-profit writing school. Wallace has written for places like Harper’s and the New York Times (including a profile of tennis ace Roger Federer that my friend Paul Kedrosky singled out) and was a teacher at a private college in Claremont. Did he hit his 40s and start to wonder whether he would ever recapture that early glory? McInerney continued to write, but never got the acclaim he did in his 20s, and spent years on the New York party circuit, had several divorces and is now the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine.

Before he turned to writing, Wallace got a degree in philosophy from Amherst College, where his specialty was an arcane subset of logic known as modal logic, which he described as being a form of mathematics (there’s video of an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1997). I think he probably would have made a great programmer, and in many ways he was a geek’s writer, with that intense focus on detail and description and getting things exactly right. Was he tortured by that kind of obsession? We will never know. But I think a world without him in it, writing (and thinking) the way he did, is definitely a poorer place.

Further reading:

There are links and a lot more about David Foster Wallace at a fan site called The Howling Fantods, including a link to an excellent Metafilter thread. I highly recommend reading a piece Wallace wrote for The Atlantic in 2005 if you get a chance (the Atlantic has even helpfully turned the footnotes into hyperlinks), and there’s an interesting look at him and some of his recent work in a Salon profile in 1999. Meanwhile, a colleague at Pomona College remembers his friendship with Wallace, and McSweeney’s has a collection of reminiscences as well.

– Our national bird is tastier than yours.

– We know the secret to feeling rich — turn all your currency into gold-coloured coins!

– Our national flag is a leaf and two bars — something you can find in any town we have, too.

– We have more trees than we have McDonalds. And more hockey rinks than Wal-Marts. And more donuts than cops.

Nice job, Meg. And the other piece was a guest column in the National Post by a U.S. executive named Dave Burwick, who is leaving his tour of duty in Canada to head back to the U.S. and came up with his own list of things he loves about this country, including some thoughts about how hockey is a metaphor for our culture (and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Don Cherry, thank God). Some selections:

– Hockey Night in Canada: One of the last communal TV events left anywhere.

– Eating a peameal sandwich every Saturday at 7 a. m. during my son’s hockey practice.

– Raising a family right in the middle of the city, and knowing they’re safe.

– Surviving a minus-30-degree day in downtown Winnipeg, and how it made me feel more alive.

I took a bike ride this afternoon through the Rouge River valley and into Pickering, out to Frenchman’s Bay — where some people were sunbathing, some were kite-surfing in the shadow of the giant Pickering nuclear plant, and some were sailing or kayaking — and along the way I saw hundreds of people walking, biking, picnicking, playing football, throwing a Frisbee, and just generally having a great time on a beautiful day. They were many different shades, from pale white to off-white to various shades of brown and black; some were wearing shorts, some dresses, some salwar kameez and some the hijab and chador and even burqa. And they were all Canadian. Happy Canada Day.

Would a dual-class share structure have been a good idea for Yahoo? Yes. If Yahoo did have a dual-class share structure, Yahoo’s cofounders would have been much better situated to block Microsoft from attempting a takeover. You can bet that this is being noticed by the founders of every technology company that might go public from here on out.

Marc points out that Google has a dual-class share structure, which gives the founders multiple votes (Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt have shares with 10 votes each), the implication being that this is the way other technology companies should go as well. As much as I respect Marc’s point of view, however, I’m going to disagree. I think having multiple-voting shares — or any class of special voting shares that gives a small group of insiders control over the fate of the company — is a bad idea. And not just for investors, but for the company itself.

I think Marc is looking at this issue as a founder and CEO, which is fair enough — and from a founder’s perspective, multiple or special-voting shares seem like the Holy Grail: they allow you to raise money, but don’t require you to give up control. Unfortunately, they also cement control within a small group and make that group virtually impervious to hostile takeovers or any other form of shareholder activism. It’s a little like a dictatorship: a benevolent dictatorship is one of the best forms of government — but also very rare.

For every founder who uses his voting powers wisely, there is another who plunders the company and distorts the business in virtually every way imaginable. Canada has had a love affair of sorts with multiple-voting stock — in part because of a desire to protect broadcasting and media companies, but also because much of the foundation of corporate Canada consists of family-owned entities that pass control on from generation to generation (don’t get me started on Frank Stronach and Magna Corp.). For every example of a company that has been successful with such a share structure, there are a dozen of contrary examples.

For me, dual-class shares are an attempt to get around Darwin’s Law as it applies to the marketplace. Multiple-voting shares protect incompetent, complacent or simply unsuccessful companies that should be taken over and either remade or dismantled. If your company is agile enough and creative enough, it shouldn’t need them.