A week or so ago, Rick Edmonds wrote a piece on The Biz Blog at Poynter Online entitled, Freewheeling Comments, Traditional Owners Create Paradox of Topix where he looked at Topix and particularly the ongoing battle between Hartford’s Mayor, Eddie Perez and the Hartford Courant’s use of Topix.

A few days later, Heather Brandon tweeted, “@luiscotto was wondering if Courant and Perez admin came up w agreement about serious investigative articles not allowing for comments”. I responded to Heather by noting that people can still post comments elsewhere and noting that the New Haven Register had changed it’s policy to require registration. That makes a lot of sense to me. Dropping comments altogether doesn’t.

This caught the attention of Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, who sent me a tweet pointing me to a Topix blog post last January entitled, Anonymous Comments – By The Numbers.

Let me start off by giving Chris major props for being on Twitter. I believe that a lot of organizations would be much better off if their leaders had their ears a little closer to the ground, and could hear rumblings like the discussion about comments in Hartford.

Yet I found the blog post to be a bit lacking. The gist of the blog post was that Topix analyzed around 83,000 comments and found that 6.7% of those submitted by unregistered posters were rejected and 4.4% of those submitted by registered posters were rejected. Yet the 50% higher rejection rate was justified because anonymous posters submitted three times the content.

So, where do I think the problems are with this study? It is hard to choose where to start. First, it isn’t comparing a system that doesn’t require registration with one that does. It is comparing people who chose to register versus those who don’t on a system that doesn’t require registration. There is an untested assumption that the number of comments would decrease if registration were required. That might be true. Even if it is, the question remains, to what extent.

Perhaps the bigger issue, as Howard Owen put it in a response to Chris Tolles on his blog, “I think there is a difference between ‘acceptable’ and ‘accepted’.” A person identifying themselves as ‘Jason’ pushes this further with “Why is it that ‘acceptable’ or even ‘accepted’ are now the standard as opposed to excellent or exceptional?” There is a lot of content on Topix that may be accepted, but isn’t particularly acceptable, and is very far from being exceptional.

Another person addressed my first concern by noting that one organization he was at actually saw an increase in participation when the forums switched to requiring registration.

It could be that anonymous comments promotes traffic, which is good for the business side of things, and Rick Edmonds notes that Tolles expects Topix to become cashflow positive in 2009, but the bigger question is, is it promoting better discourse and citizenship.

I responded to Tolles via Twitter noting my concerns about his methodology and assumptions. He responded saying, “if you have a better study, happy to read it. :-) implementation is the only truth”.

I have even bigger concerns here. Tolles’ Topix makes its money off of user-generated content, for which he does not compensate the writers. It may work with people who aren’t willing to put their name to their words, but I’m not doing gratis research for Mr. Tolles. Nor am I inclined to follow him down a solipsistic rabbit whole believing that “implementation is the only truth”.

So, I don’t have any research to respond with. Instead, I would like people to consider a different angle. To the extent that we wish forums at newspapers to extend the public sphere, which I recognized is an assumption Tolles may not in his case be willing to grant, then it might be beneficial to look at other aspects of the public sphere.

Newspapers still publish letters to the editor, and most newspapers that I know of require writers to positively identify themselves, not only by name, but usually by location. To the extent that the writer has any particular ax to grind the newspaper likes to provide that information as well. Is there some reason for the vast difference between what newspapers consider acceptable for letters to the editors and what they consider acceptable for comments on their forums?

Then, let’s look at public hearings; at most public hearings, you need to be identifiable. Many of them require that you sign in and identify yourself before you are allowed to speak. Finally, the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics calls on journalists to “Identify sources whenever feasible”. Registration systems for comments are very feasible.

This does recognize that there are times that it might be beneficial to the identity of a commenter hidden. Here, I think about whistleblowing. Yet a whistleblower should know better than posting a comment on an online forum and responsible journalists that deal with whistleblowers need to make sure that whistleblowers don’t do things to endanger themselves. It is far to easy to track the Internet address where the comment came from.

If anything, anonymous comments might best be viewed as another form of user generated content in the public sphere, graffiti. Granted, there is some graffiti that is masterfully done. There is some graffiti where the artists identifying themselves, in terms of some pseudonymous signature or style, but much graffiti is anonymous and does little to further public discourse.

Topix has an interesting potential for the future. It could become a profitable venue for distributing digital graffiti, or it could fight a harder and more nobler battle to become a profitable venue which expands the public sphere. I hope they will consider the latter. Until then, I’ll probably save most of my commentary for my blog.