Huffington Post Develops Plan to Manage 70+ Million Comments Per Year
By David Tobia
October 26, 2012
October 26, 2012
- The Huffington Post receives up to 25,000 reader comments per hour, and has handled a total of 70 million comments already this year. Justin Isaf, director of community for the news and opinion site, says that although the comments are great in number, they actually are insightful and typically part of conversations.
- Isaf says 70 percent of the comments on Huffington Post are replies to other posts, so even when an article reaches 100,000 comments, people are still having smaller conversations within the giant scope of comments.
- Isaf acknowledges that the largest problem with managing huge numbers of comments is that as conversations grow larger, the probability that someone begins to post inappropriate content increases.
- The other challenge, he says, is helping people navigate so many comments and be able to find the conversation they are most interested in.
- Huffington Post hopes to solve the first problem through “pre-moderation” to prevent people from posting negative comments. To solve the second problem, Isaf says the site helps readers with a “fan” network where individuals can see what their friends are posting and find their conversations. Then, by finding their friends and engaging in their conversations, people will find new friends, and the commenter network grows.
- To manage the sheer scale of comments Huffington Post receives each day, the site employs 30 full time moderators who work in six hour shifts to sift through hundreds of comments per hour.
- The moderators are assisted by an artificial intelligence program called Julia, which knows multiple languages and can learn over time.
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