On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side.
The site’s creator, Bertrand, uses Yahoo Pipes to retrieve comments from the most recent posts on both sites and displays them on one page, which is updated every hour or so.
Here’s how a poster from each site expresses disagreement:
Metafilter:
And here’s where we diverge, as we have from the get-go …
YouTube:
yeah you’re dumb you expect me to shut up because you tell me to? ha yeah sure
And as a comparison, the Huffington Post (no membership fee to comment):
… I forgive your comments, because it is based on ignorance. Here are the facts.
Bertrand’s comparisons leave him wondering what drives the quality of a Web site’s comments: is it the membership fee, the age or demographics of the posters, or the level of comment moderation? (YouTube has virtually none, while MetaFilter has very little.)
Maybe the answer lies in what motivates readers to comment in the first place.
(Hat tip: Paul K.)
and 
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I think it has to be due, at least partially, to the age of the poster. In the YouTube comment, it is apparent that the poster is younger (pre-teen or teen) because of their lack of concern for proper grammar. Quite frankly, I’m surprised they said “ha” instead of “lol.”
On the other hand, how many pre-teen/teens read the Huffington Post? For MetaFilter, how many teens have access do a credit card to pony up the $5 fee? Not that the $5 is much, just that they do not have access to it.
Gauging quality based on conformity to grammar and punctuation standards may generate a high “false positive” rate. (Yes, I read the ‘medicine and stats’ blog post prior to this one.)
A $5 commenting fee will eliminate:
- the douchebags without money
- the good commenters without money
I guess then it is up to each site to determine if the loss of the good commenters without money is > or
For MetaFilter, how many teens have access do a credit card to pony up the $5 fee? Not that the $5 is much, just that they do not have access to it.
It’s a reasonable point. We do have some teenagers on the site, and plenty of college-age users, but the age range probably (we don’t do any formal demo tracking on the site) peaks in the twenties-thirties area, though with a pretty healthy tail on upwards after that.
Of course, there’s the question of getting permission from sympathetic parents, or having a paypal account set up by same for controlled spending without a credit card of your own. Or just plain asking nicely over email—we let someone pay with a physical fiver every now and then if they want, teenager or otherwise. So in part it comes back to the idea that a fee is more of a speedbump than a literal age/credit issue: folks who want in enough to try get in.
And most of the problems we have with users aren’t (anecdotal/gut take, here) with young folks so much as with adults with selfish motivations for joining (self-promotion of one sort of another, generally).
Perhaps the $5 filters people much the same way slashdot’s karma system filters comments
$5 is a proxy variable. Add comments from Flickr, BoingBoing, moderated site comments from /. (and read only +4 insightful/informative), and so on — I think you’ll find that sites where your reputation as a thoughtful netizen also get better comment quality regardless of fees.
I think it’s different contexts, ahead of motivation – the same people may behave differently w/in different platforms for example.
HAHA YOU GUISE ARE DUMB!1111!! THIS ARTICLE IS ST00PID! LULZ!
… you had to see it coming.
Seriously, though; it’s all about demographic. The average youtube viewer and commenter is likely to be a kid under the age of 19, who has grown up in a world devoid of personal responsibility on the Internet because there is little to none of it.