Google Quietly Kills Off Its Commentary Feature For News
from the time-to-try-something-different dept
Back in 2007, Google released a feature for its News service that let folks comment on news stories. However, there were some weird quirks to it (eg. you had to be somehow involved in the news articles in order to add your comments to them), so it's not really surprising that it didn't really get much use. It was an interesting idea, though, and the feature isn't devoid of merit. But there were other (and, ahem, better) ways for people to respond to the news, and the benefit of commenting via Google News didn't really solidify. So, as Google is wont to do recently, it shut down its news commentary feature, saying that the experiment had ended.But what is the real lesson here for content platforms? Obviously, businesses shouldn't continue projects that are not generating enough interest. But besides that, this seems to be a case of assuming that "build-it-and-they-will-come" should work for a high traffic site like Google News. However, even when Google actively tried to get people to comment, people still didn't participate for the most part. The problem likely wasn't that people didn't want to comment on news items, but that they wanted to comment and respond in their own way -- on their own site, on their own terms. And Google News didn't really allow that -- and even made it difficult by requiring a step to verify the submitted comments. So it seems that the takeaway for other content platforms is to make it easy to create content (or commentary, in this case), but also, don't try to control or restrict users' content. Lessons that Google should probably have already learned from YouTube and Blogger?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
wow
[ link to this | view in thread ]
sorry
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
I'm certain that ACs present other problems, but it's a cost/benefit issue. Quite a few times I've read a news article of which I had first hand knowledge of the subject and could clarify on what was reported with some degree of insight. Those comments never get posted because of hoops I have to jump through.
[ link to this | view in thread ]