Civil Comments

 Civil Comments  was a service that brought real-world social cues to comments sections via crowd-sourced moderation and community management tools. It was specifically designed to improve the way people treat each other online.

It was originally available at https://civilcomments.com/.

Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post  something  nasty  online. Friction-positive design  can  help  here,  too. Civil Comments  was  an  app  you  could  apply  to  your  comments  section  that  forced  commenters  to  rate  three other comments before posting their own. This did a few incredible things. One, it forced users to acknowledge that there was such a thing as good or bad comments. Two, it forced them to apply their own standards to what that is. This is  powerful  because  we  will  adhere  to  our  own  standards  far  more  readily  than  we  will  to  anyone  else’s. So when a commenter gives someone else’s comment a low rating and then sees the same problem with their own comment, they have to go back and change it because the cognitive dissonance of  not  living  up  to  their  own  internalized  standard  becomes  too great. Finally, they know that if they’re rating other people’s com-ments someone else will probably end up rating theirs, so they feel compelled to up their game. All of these elements conspired to make  many  commenters  who  used  the  Civil  Comments  system  go  back  and  change  their  comments  after  rating  oth-ers’ comments. &mdash;David Dylan Thomas, Design for Cognitive Bias (A Book Apart, 2020)

Plugins & Modules

 * module for Drupal
 * plugin for WordPress

Artices