My personal opinion has long been that being very good at anything creative and public (both of which journalism certainly is) tends to involve both a large ego and a well of insecurity. Going out in public and proclaiming that what you’re doing is worth someone’s time and attention – that your work is important – requires a certain brash self-confidence. But being ambitious and driven more often than not means being terrified that one day what you do won’t be worthy – and that means a constant anxiety and need to prove yourself, sometimes at the expense of niceties. The combination makes for fascinating, creative people who combine often seemingly incompatible traits – thick skin and vulnerability to criticism – with deep insight, blinding intelligence, common sense, a work ethic that would make an oxen blush and myriad other laudable traits. Sometimes that means a bit of dickishness, too.

1. Whatever you do, don’t listen to the loudest voices in preference to the rest
2. You can’t avoid conflict in the community, and even splits, no matter how had you try to control who joins
3. Calming voices are invaluable
4. Controlling voices are deadly
5. Conversations that drift off topic and into running jokes are the sign of a good community developing – but if it goes too far, it alienates newcomers…

Read them all – they’re short, well-phrased and insightful, and every single one also applies equally well to communities offline. People are people all over, whether they’re communicating in text or in person, and the same dramas, difficulties, successes and failures play out online as they do in meatspace.

Of course, children born today have no idea what a rotary telephone is, or a vinyl record. That’s not a hard thing to understand. What’s startling is realising that most 12-year-olds now have no idea what the save icon in Microsoft Word is meant to look like. Floppy disks are gone. We’ve gone through so much tech so fast.

But we’re not done with those changes. Not even the network changes are over, never mind the hardware and the social effects from those things. We have got so many more years of this to come – magical devices emerging from big conferences that change the way your whole life works; new ways of having conversations and sharing things and spreading information virally that come out of tiny startups with no cash. Things we can’t imagine yet, but that will seem inevitable as soon as they exist.

We don’t get to stop yet. In fact, we probably aren’t going to stop in my lifetime. I’ve made my peace with the idea that every solution I work on, every innovation I’m part of and every exciting development I eagerly enjoy is a step on the way somewhere else. Everything we are currently doing is temporary.

It’s pointless trying to adapt to survive the current conditions and then stopping. By the time you’ve adapted the current conditions will be old news. In three years’ time your nice, completed adaptation will be obsolete.

That doesn’t mean we get to stop doing it. It means that – in the news business especially – we need to get a move on doing it now. We need buckets of innovation now, in chunks that we can test and deploy and iterate on and learn from, so that in six months’ time we can be doing the next thing. And then the thing after that. And then the next thing. Because standing still would be monumentally, suicidally stupid.

This post was brought to you by @currybet on innovation, @adders on disruption, and @yelvington on Kodak.

The stories we tell about the future are no longer hopeful, excited tales of technology and human spirit revealing new vistas of experience and exploration. Toby Barnes talked about this in his excellent post wrapping up Playful 2011: “Our visions now seem to be so close to home.” Not just in science fiction, in the stories we write and the movies we see, but in other areas of culture too, we go around in circles exploring the past. The New Boring aesthetic is everywhere, in our television, our clothes, our music, our interior decoration. Even cupcakes and cake stands are back.

It’s a little like the UK has collectively mislaid the cultural ability to imagine beyond the horizon, and started looking backwards over its shoulder instead. Not lost, because that implies it won’t come back, when the world stops changing so fast and people have jobs and can afford to eat and pay bills comfortably again (assuming that happens). But we have shifted our focus away from the shiny bright realm of limitless possibility to the scary possibilities of the present. While in some parts of the world 2011 has been about imagining revolution and embracing hope, in others the realm of the future has become a place where ends are easier to envisage than evolutions.

The same is true of the news industry. In a year when a British newspaper was unceremoniously killed by its owners, the end of a national newspaper suddenly changed from something hard to picture into something easy to recall. It’s much easier to envisage the end of the newsprint business than to conceive of its evolution. It’s harder to imagine what the news business in general will look like in 2031 than it is to imagine that there simply won’t be one. The apocalypse is a much easier story than the sci-fi future, these days.

I hope, in 2012, that changes. I hope we get our hopeful visions back.

It used to be that “reading the paper” was a single activity, physically and mentally, bounded by the single physical experience of picking up a newspaper and then, well, reading it. Not all of it, probably. Not even necessarily very much of it. Not everyone starts in the same place or cares about the same articles. But even if you read completely different bits of completely different newspapers to everyone else in your office, or even if you just looked at page 3 and the punny headlines and then called it a day, you still called it “reading the paper”. And that’s how it turns up in the story of your day. (What have you done at work so far? Not much, just read the paper and answered some calls.)

It also used to be bounded by the covers of the paper, not by the subjects you pick within it. Which paper do you read? Your identity is to some extent bound up in that brand choice, in the UK at least – people have made good satire about this, and there’s a wider point. Your newspaper said something about you. It featured in the story you told yourself about yourself, as well as the one you told other people. Reading the paper isn’t just learning about the news or the sport or the arts coverage; it’s also an element of your identity, a piece of your personal puzzle. A Guardian reader is not the same thing as a Daily Mail reader. Most people only get one.

Except that’s all gone out the window, now. The Mail Online has god-knows-how-many million readers; the Guardian has a smaller but still reasonably mind-bending number. Both numbers are too big to imagine and you have to resort to comparisons like the population of London. And of course those audiences overlap. They’re both much bigger online than in print, and they both require much smaller commitments in terms of reading – a single article, not a whole paper (whatever a whole paper used to mean, anyway). But also, and this is important, because reading one or two or twenty articles from a single news source doesn’t make me a “reader” in the way that it would if I “read” the paper. Not in the story I tell myself about myself, and not in the story I tell other people.

Which wouldn’t be so hard to manage, if it wasn’t for the first problem. Because actually it’s really easy to miss that you read an article from a newspaper, if what you’re doing is browsing the net or chatting on Facebook or catching up on Twitter. You click a link from the thing you’re doing, you read the link, you click “back”, you carry on. You can do that dozens of times, clicking all over the place, and still it doesn’t turn up in your story of the day as “reading the news”. What are you doing? Just checking Facebook. Or wherever.

Apps take you back to that activity of reading the paper, reading the news, within the nice neat cozy boundaries of a virtual cover even if not a real one. They require certain physical activity, too. It took a while for that to click with me, but I think I get now why print people are comfortable in app space.

But people that actually go to the front pages of news sites online are pretty few and far between, compared to the numbers that just turn up on article pages when they’re in the middle of doing other stuff. So obviously that raises huge issues about making sure that every article page is a good front page, a good gateway into your site, good enough to maybe persuade a couple of those people not to click “back” but to stick around and change what they’re doing. But also it raises issues about the visibility of what news organisations are doing. Because if your readers don’t consciously realise they’re your readers, that has to change the way your brand works.

We’re rapidly creating a world in which the wide web of connections between people are functionally replacing the vertical connections between news outlets and people. Everyone is better informed, not necessarily because they know more but because the information is readily available, should they wish to discover something. The ambient information that anchor journalists and live reporters use to fuel their work is readily available to everyone with an interest; the new ease of publishing isn’t limited to finished stories or to eyewitness accounts, but extends to curation, information filtering and all that other juicy stuff we journos pride ourselves on.

This is fascinating.

Running through the day were several threads that I want to come back to at some point – most notably for me the blurrings of boundaries between art and technology, between physical and digital things, and between creation and consumption. But the dominating theme was nostalgia – nostalgia for a vision of the future that was born in the 1970s with big-budget sci-fi epics, and that simply doesn’t exist now.

To put it another way: where’s my fucking jetpack?

It’ll come as no surprise, if you saw me live tweeting, that this future-past nostalgia doesn’t resonate with me. I think there are a couple of reasons for this, one personal and one much more general and more interesting.

First up: the personal. The touchstones of the nostalgic middle-aged man don’t reflect me. This isn’t just an age thing – I watched Logan’s Run and Star Wars, albeit a few years late – it’s a gender and a sexuality thing too. My present, as a not-entirely-straight woman, is a hell of a lot more interesting and self-controlled and autonomous than any 1970s sci-fi vision of that life (Alien dutifully excepted). I could be an astronaut, or a prime minister. I can control my fertility (isn’t it weird how few people who talk about humans as cyborgs ever mention that?) and I don’t have to sleep with everyone I meet as a result. I am the star of my own movie, not a sidekick. It’s not perfect, and others have it worse – this future like all others is unevenly distributed – but it’s getting better.

So I like this future, where I don’t have a jetpack but also I don’t have to wear a silver breastplate or high-legged leotard or gold bikini. Nostalgia for those images makes no sense to me.

The other thing – and this is the less personal one – is that trends in technology aren’t actually about the tech. Trends in anything aren’t about what’s technically possible so much as they’re about what matters to people. Trends are about us, about humans and what we want and need from our world. This is true for toys and games and news and jetpacks and flying cars. So one big reason we don’t have flying cars is that the desire for flying cars was never actually a need for flying cars. It was a problem (get places fast, avoiding congestion) that could be solved by flying cars, but also in other ways. Like telecommuting.

It’s the internet’s fault that you don’t have a flying car.

We don’t always think of the web as bridging physical space problems, but it does – so smoothly that we don’t notice. I have my work colleagues in my pocket and a window to my work space in my bag. Now, why do I need a flying car?

(Yes, there are also technological and logistical reasons why flying cars are difficult. The internet isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. But it’s not bad, for an unevenly distributed future. And if it didn’t solve the problem pretty well, I reckon we’d find a way to make flying cars work. We’re clever little monkeys, and we’re good at solving problems.)

What else is in my pocket? I have the biggest encyclopaedia there has ever been, and a satellite view of the entire globe, and a personally curated collection of interesting writing by clever people that expands every day beyond my ability to read and absorb it. I have a direct, fast, simple line out to millions of people, and tools I can use to collaborate with them on any number of exciting projects or toys or games. Oh, and the news, too. All of it.

Something else that ran through many of the Playful talks was a focus on play as an event that happens between an individual and a machine. It struck a peculiar note for me, operating in a space with Zombie where all play is collaborative between humans, and a space at the Guardian where news gathering and consumption are going the same way.

The risk here is that by focusing on the toy at the expense of the needs of the player – the shiny tech, the jetpack, the iPad (it’s the future of news, you know) – we lose sight of what’s actually happening. New toys are solving old problems. We are collaborating more and more, in incredible ways. We are capable of incredible endeavours, playful and serious, because we are connected. The key vision of the next generation isn’t a baby playing with a magazine as though it’s an iPad. It’s social networking on Moshi Monsters and multi-player collaborative world-building in Minecraft.

Sci-fi has always been good at identifying problems and imagining solutions – but usually it’s much better at predicting the needs than the resolutions. Jetpacks, incidentally, have been around since about the 1940s. They didn’t really solve much.

Nostalgia for the promise of a different future doesn’t make sense to me in a world where I can already see the solutions to those problems in the flesh. Why get misty-eyed over the promise of a flying car or newspapers with moving pictures, when we can see the whole world from the sky on Google Earth and join in with news happening at the tips of our fingers on Twitter and live blogs and YouTube?

I would rather get on with playing.

—

News websites have a problem.

Well, OK, they have a lot of problems. The one I want to talk about is the comments. Generally, the standard of discourse on news websites is pretty low. It’s become almost an industry standard to have all manner of unpleasantness below the line on news stories.

Really, this isn’t limited to news comments. All over the web, people are discovering a new ability to speak without constraints, with far fewer consequences than speech acts offline, and to explore and colonise new spaces in which to converse.

Anonymity isn’t the issue

It’s sometimes argued that many of the problems in overly aggressive commenting spaces stem from the anonymity of the participants. But (despite what Google would like you to believe) anonymity is not the root cause. People are anonymous constantly offline – on the train, for instance – but don’t resort to offensive behaviour. The issue is one of consequences.

Speech without consequences is easily regarded as inconsequential. And in many news comment spaces, there are no consequences for the types of speech we want to prevent – and no positive reinforcement or leading examples of “good” speech either. The issues are tone, civility, subject matter.

These issues don’t disappear when someone uses their offline name as an identity marker. People stop being rude:

• when they care about the people they are speaking to and about
• when there is an expectation for them not to be rude
• when there are clear, accepted, enforced rules about what is acceptable
• when there are strong examples of positive behaviour to follow
• and when someone respects the space they are in.

Community is in individual comment threads

Every comment thread on every news site is an individual space. Every page on a website is a front page; every article is a landing page; every comment thread is its own individual conversation. It’s like booths in a restaurant, or rooms in a hotel – separate spaces, separate conversations, but linked by virtue of proximity, similar furniture and a shared environment.

This means that if your commenting policy is hosted away from your comment threads, it will not be read by most people who want to comment. If your pages do not provide your users with guidance, with cues to the standards of behaviour expected of them, then your users will not behave in the ways you would like. They will speak however they see fit.

Online, in your comment threads, they will have opinions messily, misphrase things, start fights, goad each other, show kindness, express joy, share stories, ask questions. The same way they would in spaces without rules offline. If you don’t set examples of good behaviour, or reward them, or empower the regular visitors to police their community by telling them the rules, your community will make its own rules, and chances are you won’t like them.

Set good examples

On guardian.co.uk there is an incredible team of community maintainers (not the same as the moderators), who spend time speaking with readers below the line. There are many reporters, contributors and long-time commenters who do the same – leading the conversation and demonstrating the rules of the space. They turn our live blogs and comment pieces into rooms with rules. They lead by example. They coordinate and communicate.

The system isn’t perfect. No system on this scale, right now, is perfect. They can’t be everywhere – time is finite, and the approach is still evolving – but they do a great deal. When users point out typos or ask tricky questions, they reply. When users contribute something valuable, they say thank you. And they are the voice of our readers inside the building too – commenter advocates who share moments of wonderful serendipity and fantastic human kindness from our threads. (I used to do something similar, clumsily, at Citywire, which is where many of these opinions come from.)

Listen to your users

A lot of news organisations don’t have these people, or they have far too few, or they don’t give these people the power or the technology they need. Without these people, comment threads are a little like throwing open the doors to your hotel and then not having any staff. There’s no room service, no bar staff and no cleaning, but there’s also no security and no penalty for misbehaviour. No wonder comments on news articles are often unpleasant to read – sadly, in a space without rules or consequences, groups of human beings tend not to be terribly nice.

In a space where no one in authority is listening, there will be a lot of attention-seeking behaviour. People like to test boundaries. If your user is genuinely trying to help – asking questions, pointing out problems, offering something of value – and you ignore them, because no one is even bothering to read the comments on your stories or because no one has the power to respond, then you are insulting their efforts to add something to your community.

Let people make friends

Interlude: go look at MoneySavingExpert’s forums. They’re not pretty, or particularly user-friendly, but they’re driven by community, and they are huge. They don’t just focus on saving money, though it is a key part of the conversation – they also discuss news, debate issues, and chat – generally pretty pleasantly. The space they are in has rules, which are enforced by real people, who are mostly unpaid community moderators. Their work trickles down to other community members so that the wider community polices itself. And they are allowed – encouraged – by the technology of the site to create and maintain relationships with other real people. They make friends.

This is why Facebook comments are effective, when you install them on a site that has no community to speak of. What you do, when you do this, is bulldoze the existing ecology of your comment section in favour of using Facebook’s instead. It’s a double-edged sword. The fact that Facebook comments are also posted on people’s profiles means that you are relying on the rules of their self-created space on Facebook to keep them civil, pleasant and on-topic. That’s fine, if the rules of your own space don’t already do that, and if you’re happy handing over the social side of your site to a competitor.

Facebook comments also provide a simple, clear way for people who meet on your site to maintain a relationship and build a friendship. They can make persistent connections, something that comment systems as a rule often don’t allow but which can be vital to forming a stable community. And although different people have different rules when it comes to what they will or won’t say on Facebook, the general result is a space which now has boundaries, where actions have consequences. Of course the standard of debate is raised, if you had no standards at all beforehand.

But by doing this, you miss out on the wonderful things that are already happening on your site, and you push out the people who are already commenting there – people who care enough about your news to want to talk about it. If you’ve got open comments, chances are that somewhere within them, people are being nice to each other in ways you want to encourage. People as a group might often be quite unpleasant – but individual people are often very lovely.

If you want to bulldoze that rather than nurturing it, that’s fine – and for some sites that may well make sense, because of the sheer scale of the job. But it is a little like laying Astroturf over an unkempt, unmaintained garden because you don’t like the colour of the wildflowers.

Chasing pageviews

In its simplest form: more comments => more pageviews => more ad impressions. But community is more complex than that – a thriving community where people feel welcome, where they have ties to others, where they have friends, is a place they will return to unbidden.That’s the allure of Facebook and Twitter.

A community with a strong group identity, where people feel part of something larger, is a place they will come to for more than just news. Look at Reddit, Digg in the old days, even 4chan. The strongest, most coherent, most successful communities online have elements of both – Mumsnet is a perfect example.

The temptation for news organisations is to chase pageviews at the expense of everything else – but a close, tight-knit community of loyal users might well bring more revenue, long term, than a free-for-all rabble, even if the rabble is making more noise. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, not just mouse clicks.

Gamified comments

That’s something that seems to be forgotten in many new, gamified systems of news commenting. I had a rant last week about a Nieman Lab article on this subject; since then, Mathew Ingram at GigaOm published a piece on gamification as a solution to anonymity, which prompted me (in part) to write this post. The main issue I see with these particular systems is that they are mistaking the map for the field.

In successful games and communities, points and badges and leaderboards are not themselves valuable. They are feedback; they are measurements. Having many points is not success, unless those points represent something real.

Trust, helpfulness to the community, insight and so on are not measurable, but gamified systems provide a way of estimating those qualities – as long as those qualities exist. If gamified systems are built on top of existing communities, geared around encouraging the sorts of behaviour that the community values, then yes, they can work – Reddit and Stackoverflow are great examples of this. The incentive, though, is not to get points for the sake of getting points – it’s to gain the trust, respect and sense of belonging to the community that points represent.

Points are extrinsic rewards, not intrinsic motivators, and need to be tied to intrinsic value. Without an existing community, gamified comment systems are empty signifiers. Feedback systems that measure nothing mean nothing.

Talk to your users

The answer is not automation. The news industry can’t simply automate away its duty to respond to users. Small publishers and bloggers for the most part understand this, and – more crucially – so do our users. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, talking in our spaces, and we need to start treating them that way.

As an industry, we are terrible at this. We want people to comment but we don’t want them to say anything we don’t like. We don’t offer sensible commenting guidelines, and we don’t lead by example. Rather than stepping in and talking to people when they harass or abuse other users, we try to automate their behaviour away. We mistake attention-seeking behaviour for abuse; we mistake problems of civility for problems of identity. We don’t listen to readers when they try to talk to us. And then we complain that they won’t behave.

If you don’t want to talk to people, turn your comments off.

—

Important to note: this is my personal blog, and these views do not represent the Guardian’s organisational views. At least, as far as I know. Though I hope they agree with me about the brilliant work of our community team.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the resources that this thinking is based on.

• Poynter’s 5-minute framework for better conversations in comment sections
• Andy Oram’s treatise Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between
• Richard Millington’s FeverBee blog
• The Managing Communities blog
• Martin Belam’s observations on not being a dick, and the comments below
• The Play The Past blog
• Steve Yelvington’s tips for building online community
• Amy Kim’s Smart Gamification slides
• van de Saande’s On Crowds

Honestly, articles like this make me tremendously sad. Points and badges are not the same thing as long-term engagement or monetisation, as Foursquare has already amply demonstrated. Gamified activities are not the same thing as play. And if all we have to offer our readers in return for their actions are empty, meaningless “rewards” instead of genuine value, they will – long term – leave. I’ve talked before about the overjustification effect – it applies particularly to news organisations, where we want people to value the activities they do on our websites because they are genuinely enjoyable, useful, interesting, engaging, in their own rights. Blogging, commenting, discussing, sharing, reading, viewing – these things should not be chores. (And “paying contributors with points” is not paying contributors at all, and is intellectually dishonest as well as potentially exploitative.) As Kathy Sierra says in the comments:

I say “may” because the potential demotivating side effects of extrinsic rewards do not apply to areas that have no intrinsically rewarding aspect. In other words, using extrinsic rewards to help me get through something tedious, rote, mundane, painful, etc. — things I would never ordinarily find pleasurable *without* the rewards — is an excellent use of gamification with mostly all upside. But to use gamification in areas like education, civic engagement, or even just participating on a website or forum, we should proceed with extreme caution and thought. Because after the short-term spike in engagement, we may create a permanent motivation deficit. We may end up worse than we were before.

I always feel like articles like this miss the point somewhat. By focussing on gamification and assuming that’s all there is to game dynamics, news organisations are genuinely missing out on real opportunities to innovatively use games for journalism. Indie games companies are already doing this sort of thing. Things like Sweatshop, the many Wikileaks games, the Osama bin Laden Counter Strike map, and innovative data journalism experiments in Minecraft (this year’s Young Rewired State best in show winners) – they all have problems, but they all exist, and this field will get larger as game design tools are simplified and as more people have greater access to the tools for digital game creation. News organisations risk missing the boat.

But the most depressing thing is that by taking to automated systems to assign value, news organisations miss out on opportunities to actually talk to people, to build genuine community. Some gamification systems can work, especially for getting people to do things they don’t already want to do, but automating away reader interaction seems a little like an admission that a news organisation sees little intrinsic value in its readers comments, and expects its readers to comment out of duty or out of competitiveness rather than desire.

If people appreciate the community, feel they belong and want to contribute, why do you need to give them points? If people like your content and want to share it, why would points make a difference? Conversely, if they don’t, aren’t you just incentivising spam? If people feel their news tips are valued and appreciated, why would points make a difference to that? If you want your users to do something, why is gamification the answer? Surely, changing the activity into something they actually want to do would be a better, more effective option?

Sex, lies and instant messenger – Alec Muffett

How digital journalism destroyed the news cycle, and what we can do about it – Martin Belam