Prevent the UNWASHED MASSES from sharing their stupidity on your top-tier Internet forum with this new insane life-saving trick that you owe it to yourself to know! Don’t hike in the wilderness without this one weird tip!!!

Background:

Online discussion forums often have posts that look like this:

Air pollution actually SAVES 10,000 lives per day worldwide

>109 Comments

[Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments]

Or:

Futuristic economic model allows Swedes to make $200,000 a year without having jobs

>274 Comments

[Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments]

The issue:

Crucially, the comment page is usually completely separate from the original article, so readers can post their gut reactions to the headline without reading the associated article (example headline in Figure 1).

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Fig. 1: An example Reddit-style headline. Better comment on it! In order to comment quickly, I’d better only read the text of the headline!

Proposal #1:

In order to be allowed to comment on an article, you have to show that you have actually read the article.

This works as follows:

  • The person who posted the original article also writes a couple of quiz questions that would be easily answered by anyone who had read the article.
  • In the comment box, the submit button is replaced by a question and several buttons with possible answers. (Figure 1.)
    • For example, “What country is the article about?”
      • With the possible response buttons:
        • “Submit comment: JAPAN”
        • and “Submit comment: INDIA.”
    • If you click the wrong button, your comment is sent to the server and appears (to you) as if it has been posted, but it doesn’t show up to anyone else (this is also referred to as “shadow banning”).

 

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Fig. 2: If you wanted to comment on the article in Figure 1, you’d need to click on one of the buttons here. If you click on the wrong one, your comment is deleted.

Proposal #2:

One problem with the first proposal is that it makes it slightly more annoying to post an article (since the original poster has to write a few quiz questions).

In proposal #2, the questions are generated automatically, and are extremely basic, like “What is the last word in the article?” or “What is the first word in the second paragraph of the article?”

(This is a method that was used in 1980s and 1990s computer game copy protection.)

Although this method would not prevent a user from just clicking the article, letting it load, finding the relevant word, and closing the article, it would probably increase the likelihood that the commenter would read at least a portion of the article, since it would have to at least be loaded in their browser.

Conclusion:

Figure 3 shows how the user interface might be implemented.

 

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Fig. 3: An example of how this might work in an actual Internet post.

PROS: Might improve the quality of Internet comments. Also a great way to annoy your users.

CONS: None! It’s the pinnacle of Internet commenting technology.