Hackday: online commenting re-imagined

At the Global Editors Network (GEN) hackday held at the Guardian HQ, the task was to “re-imagine commenting”. We had a very different challenge compared to the other teams from organisations such as the BBC, Metro, and The Times.

Our challenge

The Brand Republic sites tend to receive less than 5 comments per article, meanwhile on twitter there is a lot of conversation where readers are discussing the articles, and sharing opinions about them.

We re-imagined commenting by proposing a solution which would bring the interactions back to the site as a form of trackback.

Displaying the twitter comments directly on the article, and using a similar style to the one that medium have created where users can comment directly on particular sections of an article. But also allowing the user to send these comments to twitter, linkedin, or facebook, whilst editing the comment for each medium.