The readers' editor on… the switch to a 'nesting' system on comment threads

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/23/switch-nesting-system-comment-threads

Version 0 of 1.

A newspaper's letters page has always been an important platform for both readers and journalists. For readers it is an opportunity to get their views across; for the journalists, the vibrancy of the letters page is an important test of the health of the newspaper.

And then along came everybody, to shamelessly purloin and paraphrase the title of the book by Clay Shirky about the way in which the web brings people together in new and innovative ways. In this case they came with the opening of comments on articles online, a move that has transformed the way readers interact with their newspapers. The Guardian website publishes around 600,000 comments a month, with 2,600 people posting more than 40 comments a month. As a way of expressing a view about the Guardian's journalism it is fast and often furious. But has it affected the flow of letters to the paper's print edition?

Nigel Willmott, the Guardian letters editor, said: "We did an exercise a few months after Comment is free was started to see if there had been any effect and there did seem to be a drop off of about 15% [in letters]. But as numbers go up and down over the year, depending on what issues are current, it is difficult to judge accurately. However, numbers seem to have held steady since then, subject to the usual fluctuations. Letters and comments on threads are very different types of response in how they are framed and written."

The Guardian still receives a healthy 200 to 300 letters a day and the letters page is read, according to a Guardian readership survey, by around 40% of readers most days. The audience online continues to grow, and that is reflected in the numbers of those commenting in the threads. On 18 October 2012 the Guardian began rolling out a new system for presenting the threads. The new system shows responses to a comment directly below that comment – known as "single-line threaded comments". Replies between posters are grouped together or "nested" in the stream of comments, so they can be read in one place and users can navigate conversations more easily. This "nesting" is not dissimilar to the way letters are grouped by subject on the letters page.

The report, reply and share buttons now appear when a reader hovers over them. The new system did not meet with the approval of many regular users of the old system. Here are just a few of the comments, off topic, under my last Open door column (The readers' editor on… appending notes to stories if errors may have been made, 17 December). Michael Bulley, who speculated that there had been 10,000 comments critical of the moves, said: "Some commenters have speculated that there are reasons for the change that have not yet been openly stated. I shall be interested to see whether you clear that up."

Edgeley: "I hope you won't pretend that we are all just being luddites or resisting something that we will like once we are used to it."

OutOfOptions: "Could you please include the results of all the research that was done which showed we all really wanted nesting. It would also be great if you could provide details of the thousands of new posters that have joined the site following the change."

I put these questions to colleagues responsible for the new system. First, they haven't counted all the critical comments but estimate there are hundreds rather than thousands. The decision to introduce nesting is part of a much wider change to the architecture of the site to allow comments by mobile users. It was also done to increase the number of people reading and commenting following a series of trials which showed that, while some dislike the new system, many others wanted it. The system was fully implemented across the site on 2 December and early figures suggest that comments are up by 7.5%.

Joanna Geary, the Guardian's digital development editor, said: "Threaded comments have been added as part of a suite to improve commenting in general. We introduced the new threading system following a number of trials and section by section. We did it because it's easier to read in a coherent long read of text. A lot of the complaints are from those who loved it for what it was. For them it's harder to read every single comment. But this makes a better read because people want a conversation."