Why the ACM is stuck in academe

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) is a professional organization. Its main web page claims it is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession". In 2000, it recognized that it was focussed exclusively on the academic world, and it also recognized that it had to expand. It has struggled with that expansion for the past two decades.

I recently found an example of its failure.

The flagship publication, "Communications of the ACM", is available on paper or on-line. (So far, so good.) It is available to all comers, with only some articles locked behind a paywall. (Also good.)

But the presentation is bland, almost stifling.

The Communications web site follows a standard, "C-clamp" layout with content and in the center and links and administrative items wrapped around it on the top, left, and bottom. An issue's table of contents has titles (links) with descriptions to the individual articles of the magazine. This is a reasonable arrangement.

Individual articles are presented with header and footer, but without the left-side links. They are not using the C-clamp layout. (Also good.)

The fonts and colors are appealing, and they conform to accessibility standards.

But the problem that shows how ACM fails to "get it" is with the comments. Their articles still have comments (which is good) but very few people comment. So few that many articles have no comments. How does ACM present an article with no comments? How do they convey this to the reader? With a single, mechanical phrase under the article text:

No entries found

That's it. Simply the text "no entries found". It doesn't even have a header describing the section as a comments section. (There is a horizontal rule between the article and this phrase, so the reader has some inkling that "no entries found" is somewhat distinctive from the article. But nothing indicating that the phrase refers to comments.)

Immediately under the title at the top of the page there is a link to comments (labelled "Comments") which is a simple intrapage link to the empty, unlabelled comments section.

I find phrase "no entries found" somewhat embarrassing. In the year 2018, we have the technology to provide text such as "no comments found" or "no comments" or perhaps "be the first to comment on this article". Yet the ACM, the self-proclaimed organization that "delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession" cannot bring itself to use any of those phrases. Instead, it allows the underlying CMS driving its web site to bleed out to the user.

A darker thought is that the ACM cares little for comments. It knows that it has to have them, to satisfy some need for "user engagement", but it doesn't really want them. That philosophy is consistent with the academic mindset of "publish and cite", in which citations to earlier publications are valued, but comments from random readers are not.

Yet the rest of the world (that is, people outside of academe) care little for citations and references. They care about opinions and information (ad profits). Comments are an ongoing problem for web sites; few are informative and many are insulting, and many web sites have abandoned comments.

ACM hasn't disabled its comments, but it hasn't encouraged them either. It sits in the middle.

This is why the ACM struggles with its outreach to the non-academic world.