At JamBase, we're all about allowing people to speak their mind. What is the live music experience without opinions, discussions, theories and general debate? This is why one year and ten months ago we enabled "comments" for the stories that are published on our site (which are also often submitted by fans). Be it a Featured Article, Interview, Show Review or Newswire, we wanted to give you a place to give 'feedback'.
Most of the time these comments supplement the stories with a general pulse of the community reaction and gives everyone a chance to chime in with their take. Every now and then certain individuals (who will remain nameless) get involved at a slighter higher volume, velocity and demeanor which tend to hijack the conversation and forces people to reply to their comment, usually with a higher degree of negativity than the original comment until the whole thing spirals into a match-up of wits, jokes and insults that depart completely from the original topic.
Occasionally we've had to go in and remove certain obscene or completely unacceptable comments, and on a very rare occasion resigned ourselves to removing the comments option from a story entirely. We hate doing this, as it undermines everything we've tried to build here at JamBase, especially around the participation of our community.
Today we're excited to roll out a new enhancement that allows you to vote on any comment.
If you like the comment, give it a thumb's up.
If you don't like it, give it a thumb's down.
If enough people vote the comment down it will be hidden from everyone. You can still "Show" hidden comments and vote on them yourself.
We're not silly enough to really think that this will completely solve the problem. What we hope this feature will do is give people a bit of incentive to be more thoughtful with their comments, as well as give fans a way to voice their discontent (and content!) with a commenter without resorting to negatively commenting themselves.
If all those reasons fail, we hope you'll agree that it's still a pretty cool feature!
Happy Commenting!
-JamBase
p.s. Thanks to
Digg,
Yahoo!,
Netscape and all the ajax developers out there who have come before us for the inspiration.
