Prop 8 Trial Tracker

Housekeeping: Creating Quick Hits for Prop8TrialTracker.com

October 26, 2011

By Adam Bink

In reading user feedback on our survey (which you should take if you haven’t!) and thinking about the site, there’s one problem that we’re looking to correct: good content being stuck in comment threads.

Here’s the current situation: Many of you post comments on different blog posts, but our traffic shows that a large percentage of people who come to the site don’t read comments. I know lots of people who don’t, including myself — I regularly read Paul Krugman’s blog over at the NYTimes, but almost never read comments. Sometimes it’s a time issue for people. Sometimes you’re only interested in what a blogger has to say. Sometimes you just aren’t into comments.

Whatever the reason, it leads to good content being left out in the virtual wilderness, so to speak. Folks like Sagesse, Ronnie and others post wonderful links, videos and more in thread after thread, but some days it gets so little traffic. This was noted by a number of people who responded in the survey.

So, I looked at a possible remedy. Back in a former blogger life, when I was a co-editor at OpenLeft.com, we created a system called “Quick Hits.” The idea is simple: a place to post these quick links, headlines, videos, or tidbits of information that people could read and respond to… but on the front page instead of in the comments section. The result? The Quick Hits get almost as many eyeballs as the front page posts (“main articles”) that I, Jeremy, Karen Ocamb, Rick and so many other folks write here. For an example of this, head on over to OpenLeft.com and take a look on the right (I copied the screenshot and pasted it on the right for an example).

Though we stopped publishing new content in February of this year, you can see that the Quick Hits were a vibrant place, sometimes even more so than front-page posts. Like diaries at DailyKos, but less involved — just “quick hits” of news items or video. People could comment on news items just as they did in comment sections. It also helped comment sections stay relevant to the blog post topic, which occasionally increased comment reads when people knew what discussions they were delving into if they read the comments. Also, we found some people wanted to post information but felt bad about creating “OT” (off-topic) comments on a post about, say, Prop 8, so they didn’t have a place to put it. Quick Hits became that place. In other words, a tool that helped improve the community in many different ways.

So, our Prop8TrialTracker.com technical team has been hard at work the last few days kicking the tires on a Quick Hits system for P8TT, and they’re installing it this week (we may get it up as early as this morning). I’m letting everyone know for two reasons:

(1) As with server migration, there may be a few extra bugs (though none on the scale of the server migration, oy vey). If there are, just drop a line to prop8trial at couragecampaign dot org and one of us will see it.

(2) To let you know what the new section is on the right when it goes up.

If you want to be a Contributor to Quick Hits, drop me a line at prop8trial at couragecampaign dot org. I just have to upgrade a permission for your account (you have to be registered) and then post away. You really don’t do much different — you’d post pretty much the same way you’d post a comment — just in a different place with some more attention. If you don’t want to, don’t. And it won’t interfere in any way with the user experience in general here for people who don’t post comments, people who post comments, and everyone in between. It’s just a tool to get more attention to the great content that’s sometimes buried in comments.

Last, of course, we welcome improvements and feedback on Quick Hits. This is an experiment, and the more people who kick the tires and give feedback, the better. Thanks!

Filed under: Community/Meta

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