I believe the future is curated discussion like Branch, but I know people like Jordan may feel a bit differently.

I think the best discussion happens when you remove ego from the equation. Comments on blogs are ego driven by the publisher as well as the individual commenter. I get the sense that most publishers don't really want to encourage discussion, but rather, drive engagement or vanity metrics. In a similar sense, I think individual contributers want to sound smart and that's why they contribute.

The deeper a discussion gets on Branch, I feel like the less ego is apparent. People are there to discuss or debate, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with an individual caring whether or not they seem as smart or clever – just a solid contributor to drive the discussion forward.

I agree with Matt - especially about publisher vanity metrics. How many comments you get doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the discussion.

Much of the discussion I see...anywhere, really, is shallow at best, showing no real understanding of the content being talked about. I know I'm being general here, but over the years "comments" has developed into a bad word for me. Comments = shouting, spam, finger-pointing.

With a managed system like Branch, the discussion seems to gravitate to people with something of value to add, and at the same time, there is a bit more control, which helps to eliminate some of the noise.

Maybe it's my bias against "traditional" comments though? Maybe we just need better commenting systems?

I think some comment-type things work really well — like forums on enthusiast sites. MacRumors is a good example of this. But overall, there's a fundamental problem with comments — which isn't as much about comments, but rather human nature: most people, when given someone else's stage, are complete and total asshats to try and use that spotlight to draw attention to themselves (Matt sort of hits on this above).

Generally, this is made even worse if you can comment anonymously, but often times it doesn't matter — jackasses gonna jackass.

If someone really has something important to say, I find that they're going to use their own stage to say it. Not necessarily their own blog, but maybe Twitter, or Facebook, etc.

I like this bit that MG hits on here – using your own stage vs. someone else's. That's why Tumblr's Reblog mechanism is so very interesting to me. That's how comments have played out via Tumblr. When I Reblog something and add my commentary, I'm doing that in my own voice and on my own stage.

In other words, what we seem to have now with blog comments are people who use the "spotlight" to draw attention to themselves either by trolling (attempting to get others to respond) or by being funny, but not serious. Serious comments often get passed over and they're less plentiful because again, if someone really has something important to say on the topic, many now do it on a forum that's more under their "brand". Maybe that changes with some new tech, but I doubt it. It just keeps getting worse.

Yes, Fred Wilson's blog is a counter-example. But from my understanding, that's quite a bit of work, curating and responding, etc. It's the exception, not the rule, sadly.

Is A VC really a good counter-example though? Do you think the comment quality would be high if Fred merely moderated and didn't participate? Of course not. So saying, "but comments work when you have a prolific figure spending tons of time engaging and moderating" isn't a very compelling defense of the medium.

Forums (and email groups), on the other hand, are a great example of online discussions that work (most of the time).

I'm curious, what do you guys think about the quality of "comments" on Twitter?

(p.s. thanks so much for the kind words about Branch. you made my day, it really means a lot!)

Josh - re: Twitter. I think that's a hard one. I think lightweight discussion works fairly well, but it seems there is a breaking point. We saw it today with this conversation; at some point it becomes to involved or too many people are participating to be easy to follow and it's nice to have a place, like Branch, to jump to.

So what differences do you see between Branch and a solution like comment systems that require approval for a new user's first post?

The obvious one I see is separation of content and commentary (your original post lives as a distinct entity on Svbtle, with discussion pushed to a separate space), but are there other differences you feel are important?

Josh -

Putting aside the character limit issue (which becomes worse as more @handles are crammed into each tweet), my main difficulty with Twitter comments/discussions is that @replies by their nature complicate conversation on Twitter.

An exchange between a group of people who all follow one another is relatively straightforward, but as soon as someone outside that group gets involved, any given reply may be responding to a statement or question that I didn't see, because I don't follow the person who made it.

It's horribly easy for an interesting conversation on Twitter to become fragmented, with each participant only having partial information about the discussion as a whole.

A lot of people point to Fred Wilson's blog as an example of great comments. But even there you get ~200 comments and, as a result, 40-50 individual conversations. That's super chaotic and hard to follow. So one thing Branch does is separates those ~40-50 conversations into threads of their own, giving them the space that they deserve. That was partially the inspiration for "branching" – conversations can (and should) be related, but that doesn't mean we need to try and cram them all into one page.

This LiveFyre announcement is an example of why comments don't work. Lot's of mentions of why "publishers" are gonna love it, no mention of the user.

Josh -

Devil's advocate time: explicit "branching" may be a nice answer to the problem, but do you think that users understand what the branching functionality is for, and are using it?

My sense as a user is that it's currently more common for those multiple threads of a discussion to coexist in a single branch. A bunch of likely factors there:

- "Branching" concept still unfamiliar.
- Users don't know when to branch vs. respond in-branch.
- Subtle visual cue for "branch this" vs. prominent "respond".
- User fear of losing audience when they branch.

It's an interesting problem: perhaps I even should have put this into its own branch rather than responding here?

@Josh: I'm not sure Livefyre updating their product says anything about why comments don't work. I know that Jordan and co. are highly motivated by their users, having sat and brainstormed with them a couple of times in the past. They're always attacking problems for both commenters and publishers. And when your product depends on publishers actually implementing something, it makes sense to push new features to them first.

I mean, you and I were just talking about embedding Branches on the Svbtle network. You asked Dustin to chat about it, so does that mean your primary customer is the publisher or blog network? I doubt you'd say yes.

Agreed, Cap. Probably overstepped the line. Branch builds for users first, publishers second. We asked Dustin to chat about integration because you, the user, asked for it. LiveFyre seems to put publishers first, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Whitney, we've both been blown away but the use of branching (~15% of all branches) and know we can do a lot better job of explaining the feature ("it's like Github's Forking" isn't very approachable). We're also going to work on making the UX more seamless. It was a proof of concept to see if users were receptive to the use case and it seems like they are. I think giving individual threads – even if they're truly sub-threads – their own real estate is important.

P.S. sorry those weren't the most coherent posts, it's 1:30 am here and it's been a long day :)