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Ask HN: What is the logic behind closing comments after certain period

26 points by kodisha ↗ HN
I see this becoming a trend on some major sites, but it just feels wrong. Actually, in my experience, I was able to get information many times after posting on a old thread, because, things change, and people get new knowledge / perspective on the subject.

31 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 78.9 ms ] thread
iwalton3
Comment threads likely close because they are archiving the data into some format that is harder to modify but easier to serve. (For instance, rendering the thread to HTML and saving that.) It doesn't make sense to store comments in unarchived form after people are done talking about the topic.
corobo
The more threads you have the more resources are required for moderation. If comments were enabled for every single thread on an old enough site they'd need entire teams just to keep the spammy comments out.

When threads are closed you have a lot less moderation work to do to keep the site from being infested with spammy outbound links

It's unfortunate but the value of the odd one or two people commenting on an old post isn't great enough to outweigh the need to easily keep the site spam free for many sites

stefantalpalaru
You need to automate most spam filtering, instead of relying on humans for all of it. Something like bogofilter works very well after some training.
codingdave
And then spammers beat the automation and you need to update again... playing that game takes effort, too. Much easier to just close comments.
krapp
Easier still to have old threads auto-delete after a certain length, time or time since last comment, similar to the way they do on imageboards.
scholia
Spam isn't really the problem on big news sites. The mods are policing flame wars, hate speech (racism, sexism, homophobia), insults and libels, trolling, and off-topic comments, among other things.

In this context, the Guardian's "Community standards and participation guidelines" page is a good read.

http://www.theguardian.com/community-standards

hollerith
That reasoning does not apply when the person (or the automated system) watching for spam has an O(1) way to get a notification of the next new comment, such as for example refreshing https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments.
maxerickson
Why not? If closing old discussions outright eliminates some significant portion of new comments, it seems it must be reducing the resources requires to inspect new comments by some similar amount.
hollerith
Well, sure, and sabotaging the button for submitting a comment so that half the time it does not do anything works the same way. The point is that for a given volume or rate of new comments, the moderation burden of a comment is the same regardless of the age of its parent -- provided, again, that the moderator's method for finding out about the next new comment is O(1).

Note that I'm not claiming that old comment sections should always stay open forever, just that great grandparent is not on its own a good argument for closing them.

So here is a second argument: maybe the site's moderation process relies on flagging by ordinary users, and maybe the modal ordinary user cannot be coaxed into using any method for finding out about new comments except for scanning individual comment sections.

I jumped into this conversation because I suspect that it is worthwhile to try to keep comment sections open as long as practical, so if I were in charge of a discussion site where the assumptions of the second argument were valid, I'd try to avoid the conclusion: for example, I might give users a way to subscribe or express an interest in getting a notification (by, e.g., email) whenever a new comment appears in a particular comment section; then I'd keep a section open for new comments as long as it has subscribers; and then I'd wait to see whether the subscribers flag enough of the new spam in the section to keep rate of spam in the section to an acceptable level.

dplgk
But the user will probably open a new thread asking the same question, fragmenting the answers (between new and old thread) and still create content that needs to be moderated.
hamhamed
It also feels wrong on an SEO level. Google likes fresh content, and whenever a thread gets bumped (new comment) Google ranks it better.

Here's the trap though: What happens if someone bumps an old thread from 2011? A lot of ppl assume that this is fresh content on the frontpage and will skip reading the date and might be misinformed. The probability that information will be current staggers in time.

A simple UX fix can warn the user that the thread is from 2011 or the thread has been "bumped".

mei0Iesh
News only lasts 24 hours before it's replaced with the next topic. Most activity occurs on the front page items, as you can see by clicking "new" at the top of this site.

But that's people. Spam bots scan sites for open comment forms, and having them on every old page increases the attack surface. Usually the only comments on old pages are tons of spam gibberish.

One method sites rely on for anti-spam detection are user reports. But since the humans only pay attention to the new content, the spam is hidden on the old pages, where web spiders index it, and then consider the entire site as spam.

So sites will close old comment forms to prevent spam bots from flooding old pages nobody looks at anymore.

There are a few other reasons people might do that, like on some sites people get into a heated back-and-forth that lasts beyond the 24 hours, where although nobody else visits that page anymore, 2 people are replying to each other for days or weeks later. By closing it, they're preventing people from doing that.

frou_dh
If people get entrenched in long-term comment exchanges then they have less need to keep a-checkin' the publication's new output for sustenance (and so won't be looking at what the editors would prefer them to look at).
pheroden
An ad eyeball is an ad eyeball. I'd need to see some very solid metrics showing that eyeballs on old pages aren't as good as new.
frou_dh
Say we limit this to juicy "native advertising". Then you actually have to read new articles to be advertised to because ads come your way dressed as articles.
rocky1138
It's anti-user but pro moderator as it takes less effort to moderate a smaller number of open threads.

The most egregious form of this I've seen is Chromium bugs being left open but people being advised to create a new one if the existing one is too old.

kazinator
Replying to old threads is so unwanted, it has an ugly name: "necroposting". It's such a nuisance that every viable online forum has configuration to prevent it.

When any thread can be resurrected, it's like a Hydra that can grow a new head out of its ass, not just recently chopped neck!

:)

Trolls and spammers love to necropost. Trolls do it to annoy. Spammers do it because they are finding postings automatically based on keywords, and don't care about the date of what they are following up.

The quality of necro-postings is almost invariably very, very low.

Even when it is done honestly by a non-trolling user, someone who replies without looking at the date of what they are replying to demonstrates low intelligence, which raises the probability that they are going to post something of low quality.

DanBC
A useful trolling technique is to find a heated thread from a year ago. The day and month date stamp will be the same. You post something to bump the thread, and watch as people don't bother to read the timestamp and get sucked into fresh arguments.
iends
That's kind of a weak argument because the inverse can be said about good technical discussions.
brudgers
StackOverflow avoids this by not being a "discussion". To a first approximation, anyone can edit any question or answer to make corrections. It works because there is a [reasonably] clear set of standards and a close alignment between content and user interests...so long as those interests are not "I want to talk about X".

It also works because of strong community moderation and a well thought out structure, e.g. bespoke software.

j45
Maybe a certain level of karma would let one comment to increasingly older posts.
kyriakos
I recently noticed that a lot of large sites have comments hidden by default, needing the user to click on a button for them to appear. Is there any reason for that other than mobile friendliness? Feels bad for SEO to me.
Mandatum
The comments are still captured by search engines for popular frameworks like Wordpress, however sites that don't use those technologies aren't subject to the same advantage. Google will only make allowances where the tech used it popular enough, or the dev community is loud enough to warrant changes to their crawler.
tedmiston
Performance too - they can make it less obvious to the user that comments are deferred to an async request instead of being present on load.
gonyea
- Spammers, I mean "SEO consultants," can't dig up old content with no eyeballs and have their way with it. (#1)

- It's much harder to keep a community engaged on what's happening now if they feel like they have to patrol comment threads for articles that mean a lot to them.

- Either it's worth saying now or it's not worth saying.

tangled_zans
How long does it take for comments in an HN thread to become closed?
s3b
It could be for performance reasons - maybe there's an in-memory cache with only the recent threads kept in it. Commenting on an old discussion would involve loading the thread from disk which would be expensive. Hence comments on old threads are disabled.