Regular commenting below articles has always been a frequently-used engagement feature on DER SPIEGEL. In fact, Product Manager Laura Badura shared that at the peak 1.7M comments were left in a month… too much for AI and human moderation to manage and too much for users to read .
Not only this, but conversations on a single topic were happening in multiple places across the site, diluting the potential value of this feature. Debates on the US elections for instance took place in the comments section of several articles covering the topic a day.
So, when the time came to review the feature and evaluate tools used, Laura and the DER SPIEGEL product team decided to run some user research to understand the popularity of comment sections, why users turned to DER SPIEGEL for debating instead of X or Reddit, and find ways of improving the feature.
> DER SPIEGEL peaked at 1.7 million comments a month, beyond what moderation could handle or readers could read, with the same argument scattered across several articles a day > Research found only 5% comment regularly, and that non-participants, women especially, wanted a safe space. So dislikes were dropped and real names were not required, though accounts are verified > The Times went the other way, moving real-name commenting from 37% to 98%. Toxicity fell, attacks on writers dropped 25%, and comment volume rose. Two credible publishers, opposite conclusions > Reading a debate needs only a free account. Commenting, reacting, seeing the vote split before it closes and proposing topics are all subscriber-only, so participation itself is the paid product > Ten thousand people logged in within seven hours of launch. The first year brought 900 debates, three million votes and 400,000 comments, with the comment acceptance rate rising slightly
A lot of research later…
