Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.
I think the main issue is that most comments (about npr news) are happening off nor properties and the only ones left commenting on their properties are a core not representative of their general audience.
Left leaning sure, but i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times. If you listen to them regularly you would see that. The problem with most on the right is they hear one news outlet say something negative about the right and they turn off the channel and assume they are all on a right wing bashing spree. NPR is not this way in the least bit. This is coming from a republican.
"i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times"
I used to listen to NPR religiously (>4 hrs a week) before my apostasy from the Left. I could probably count on one hand the times they came down on someone on the Left e.g. bringing up to Coates his threat to assault his teacher and even in that case it was kind of a lob with no follow-up mean to allow self-exoneration (no push back in the absence of a mea culpa either).
With NPR it's entirely possibly that your commute in the morning is different content than mine. I can't possibly listen to them all day but I know one thing for sure. In general, they have positions on topics and they run that INTO the ground basically assuming everyone must agree with it. Then it becomes part of their narrative. They are very picky when to put on dissenting voices. Often times when they are needed, you get none. And NPR is horrible to Trump when they'd get respect if they'd buck the trend of the rest of media.
I'm pretty sure the trolls are still human, albeit employed by organizations. With that in mind, I wonder if it's possible to create sites that are nothing but trollbait (i.e. articles supporting/critical of Russia) to soak up and waste the trolls' time.
Depends if you take Russian Olgino as example (based on how things appear to be). Profile creation is automated, some of the content posting seams to be identical texts being posted by multiple profiles. None-automated content is posted by different people for identical profiles working in shifts. I would guess they have something like monstrous SMM marketing platform some posts are automated some manual.
The same can be said of HackerNews comments. I'd imagine that it's a given that Reddit is gamed via comments and submissions, but is it a given that HN comments have similar value?
It's certainly happening on major news sites and Reddit, but I don't know how far it goes into smaller communities. But... Consider how many comments you could post if you built the tools to manage accounts, did a little automated comment generation, and had a few dozen writers employed cranking them out.
Or perhaps they just realized that comments sections are awful places for discussion, and that the kind of vitriolic discourse that happens there might actually be harming the reader's experience instead of enhancing it?
You don't need to be broadcasting lies or bad journalism to be broadcasting a political slant. It can show up in something as mundane as story selection or one-off comments on shows that are not hard news.
There was an interesting study[1] from 2011 where NPR's Twitter social graph correlates with what you'd expect a person with left-leaning political tendencies to have. Probably a bit too broad to draw general conclusions from, but interesting as a data point still.
Journalism is rarely (if ever) objective. Good journalism should, however, be factually-correct and analytical. In other words, the product you're paying for is along the lines of informed opinion.
The claim, as I understood it, was that NPR was making factually incorrect claims (i.e.: reporting things contrary to reality). Either the OP has a confused understanding of journalistic function (evident in the implication that NPR isn't objective, or somehow politically-slanted), or he's making a demonstrably false claim (NPR systematically lies and/or misrepresents truth).
They've done that in the past too, but citing sources is hard because usually it's the right leaning media calling out the left leaning media (and vice versa- c.f. Media Matters against Fox), and it lends itself well to people shooting the messenger by way of "that's just a $slant-ist site" rather than actually evaluating the claims.
An NPR reporter misrepresenting a Dutch report on the downing of MH317 as evidence of Russia firing the missile (while the report only says the missile was Russian-made).
NPR aside, I reject the notion that journalism can't be objective. Well, not completely, sure, in the same way that we can never completely reach the speed of light.
Does that mean we stop trying? No! Does that mean we lower our standards? Hell no! My issue is, I see this concept used more often to excuse misconduct and lazy reporting. "We can't do it, so why try?"
If someone claims to be unbiased, they should be held to their own standard, and when bias is pointed out, expected to change their ways, or else acknowledge that their statement about being unbiased was a lie.
I'm not sure the GP would agree with your sentiments, however, NPR pretty clearly slants to the left. All their hosts lean to the left and the composition of their multi-guest panels usually include a balance of viewpoints that lean more to the left.
Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.
This was a great comment 10 years ago. Then a lot of us watching the daily show grew up became conservative and learned that Colbert is full of baloney, hence his terrible ratings on network TV.
I don't think that's exactly what's going on here. As it happens, I agree that the mainstream media tend to be uncritically accepting of anything that seems to fit a neoliberal narrative, and that this is a big problem. However, in this case the comment being criticized, came across as a rather aggressive and jarring pivot in what had been a pleasantly - even surprisingly - balanced discussion, and I think that's the main reason it got so many downvotes.
News articles involve editorial intent, discretion, and several rounds of "filters". Comments sections largely do not, which is why they generally devolve into just arguments. Only with heavily-moderated communities that impose those filters (like Hacker News, or the NYTimes, as the article mentions) can you have any substantive commentary.
It's easy to hitch an underrepresented and specifically suppressed view (like white nationalism, anti-semitism, sexism) into the comments section as a means of piggy-backing off the visibility of the main article. Given that some people go out of their way to ignore the actual content as a means of furthering their underrepresented message means that the comments section is being used to short-circuit the moderation loop most journalistic publications go through.
I'm not trying to bait, I am genuinely curious. I think it's possible to recognize bias in NPR and also recognize bias in Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe they can recommend a news outlet that they view as more impartial, even if not perfect.
Thanks for demonstrating better than I possibly could, exactly why this is a positive change for NPR. Their online comments were only a detraction from their stories.
Because you agree with their presentation of opinions. When you don't, you want to call them out, then and there. And they should hear it. They are after all paid in tax money and supposed to represent listeners and readers.
I've been meaning to write a "Dark Souls"-style comment/annotation system for the web, via browser extensions, for some time now. What better use of the web is there than annotating a site like "goatse.cx" with the message "Be wary of but hole"?
Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)
Yeah, it's more insidious than that. I've been a heavy Reddit user for 7 years. The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail. They just do it after the comments appear, giving the impression that free discussion is still happening. Which comments and threads are allowed to persist is becoming very obviously narrower over time, all over the site. There is daily consternation among users over it.
Agree or disagree with the politics otherwise rampant therein, subreddits like /r/KotakuInAction seem to do a good job of cataloging some instances of this (ex. [1][2] and basically anything else in their [CENSORSHIP] tag/flair). Granted, this is likely not the best source, due to the fairly political nature of such subreddits, as well as that I haven't checked many of these to verify the accuracy of them; I just occasionally like to see what different sides of the debate(s) are up to.
You still need people to moderate the comments (at minimum, to remove spam). That doesn't scale at all without an absurd number of volunteers (e.g Reddit).
It feels like the quality of online discussion is related to the narrowness of the topic/community.
For example: I find the comments that make it to Reddit's homepage humorous, but not really that helpful/insightful/smart. Most of the subreddits I frequent offer much better discussion, assuming the source topic is interesting. I.e., I don't expect much from r/cats. Although, even r/cats has much better comment that the homepage...
HR is a great aggregator, but still fairly narrow compared to NPR, CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, etc. And most of the commenters on those sites don't have any direct experience or insight to offer to those discussions. Until that problem is solved, the comments aren't valuable.
Communities have some commonality, something shared, something that unites them and then because of that encourages some decency standards. People that live in the same space, people that have the same hobbies, people that work in software related businesses and startups in the case of HN.
So you could build a community out of something and then have a general news discussion, that seems possible. Generally though, the vast vast majority of commenters have nothing original to add and they simply create noise. Perhaps those few nuggets of gold are worth the effort, it's hard to say, at least with HN we all have that common bond and then the actual topics tend to be related to it. Go scan the comments on a couple random foxnews.com articles and a couple random msnbc.com articles and tell me, if the article on foxnews is about the president or a non-white, I will bet you a nickle that you'll see a racist comment in the first batch or two. That's what you'd be working with..
Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation.
The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.
They readily acknowledge that cost is a major factor in the decision:
> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.
The argument that it is a very small minority of users who are commenting on the site itself, seems correct. I've visited npr.org fairly frequently over the years and I've read the comments every so often over the years. while I've not taken a statistically rigorous sample, the comments invariably had a lot of the same users and were generally poor quality.
> Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter...
Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.
I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a public square is lazy and lacks vision.
Given that the column notes that only 0.6% of visitors comment, but that the costs can run to twice what is budgeted, they seem to explicitly and transparently acting on that you mistakenly claim are being hidden by "bogus" arguments.
I suppose the charitable assumption would be that the parent is a subtle meta comment, designed to call into question the notion that discussion is valuable.
That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.
> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.
If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on them. People reading the comments should count too.
Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles.
No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?
Some comment service providers like Disqus only load the comments if the user scrolls to them, while others only load if the user clicks on a button. If these services' analytics tools don't track this, they should. I'm much more interested in how many people interact with the comments section. This includes posting, lurking, voting, and flagging.
Anecdata: a few years ago I did a road trip through NV, UT, and CO, and for large swathes of that trip, the only radio station that wasn't glassy-eyed christian pap ("if we make 20k donations, it can ONLY by god's will!" and similar) was NPR. If I lived in the area, it would be the only sane choice for radio...
I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise.
Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.
Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for the most part.
I know someone running a company that aims to solve exactly this problem, and they were attempting to sell to NPR, too. Last I talked to them about it, they said NPR seemed interested but has the typical years-long enterprise buying cycle. So, this news is really too bad.
What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right. This seems to solve part of the problem by setting an established, if not mostly-objective, standard for comment quality: journalistic publication standards.
As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation!
Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand.
To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?
I think that incentive idea is great, and is a smart move to build a community, particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. I like how some of the Ask<X> reddits do it, by flagging people with verified advanced degrees. People think that news sites are afraid of conflicting opinions, but in my experience that's nonsense, it just has to be well thought out and not "DEATH TO <ISRAEL/ARABS/SUNNI/TURKS/AMERICA>", which is the vast majority.
It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried.
I'll err on the side of caution with revealing employee counts, but in my experience many of the FP/Atlantic/Mother Jones/Weekly Standard/Pick your midrange site are running on a single digit to low double-digit number of web production staff, many of whom are also trying to make a writing, article layout, or fact-checking quota. The suggestion that these magazines can either get those staffers to moderate tens of thousands of comments per day, or quadruple their web staff just to improve the comments ignores the business reality.
User moderation in the normal HN/Reddit way doesn't work well on news sites, it's too easy to game or brigade, and news sites can't or won't give add unpaid moderators to be gatekeepers.
That's what's hard; creating comments is scalable, filtering them is not. Leaving them unfiltered doesn't work either.
>I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts.
You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters, and short, simple points are often more percussive.
Vetting credentials is a very good option IMHO for certain forums but not for others. Reddit's /r/askscience is an example of a forum in which it works well.
>It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried.
I wonder if this problem can't be solved through the use of machine-learning to classify comments into high-versus-low quality by grammatical and semantic analysis. This kind of first-pass filtering could, at the very least, help throw out the obvious trash and pre-select candidates for recognition.
Such a system can be tuned to minimize false-alarms (shitpost getting flagged as good), which I think represent the most problematic of classification errors. This is a nice problem-space for ML because the increase in misses implied by a bias against false-alarms doesn't degrade the service much: not having one's comment select for re-publication is unexceptional.
RE:Machine learning: I think there are two problems with that approach, one cultural and one technological.
The cultural issue is that many news orgs are still run by people for whom the idea that technology could accidentally censor a valid criticism or ban a decent voice is just too risky. I think this is changing, and many newsrooms today a little more fluid than when I really cared about the problem 4 years ago.
The tech issue is a little bit of a cop out on my part. An ML approach is super attractive to me as a techie. Google (youtube), facebook, NYT, WaPO, and tons of other billion dollar orgs have this problem, and could loads of money by being seen as better communities.
On the more guerrilla side, hundreds of subreddits have automoderaters written by savvy, caring moderators.
They have terabytes of training data, already tagged, and world class ML experts on staff. If it was a tractable problem with business value, why wouldn't they have fixed it? I'm guessing it's the sort of thing that looks doable from the surface, but you get buried in the details.
Again, cop out answer, so please go prove me wrong!!
I understand, and I think that's probably the most difficult problem of the two. I'd just like to point out -- in the interest of discussion -- three things:
1. Pre-filtering for moderators is different (much safer) than auto-banning by a bot
2. It's valid both to filter informed opinions that are poorly expressed, and for a publisher to have a preferred "voice", i.e. a style of writing that it favors.
3. The argument can be made that machines are no more biased than human editors, and that in many cases, the biases of the former are known. As a corollary to this point, there exist certain ML techniques (e.g. randomized forrest classifiers) for which the decision process of an individual case can be retraced after the fact.
How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points?
>technical problem
Counter-cop-out: someone has to be the first!
Somewhat-less-cop-outy-counter-cop-out: by your own admission, certain sites (e.g. Reddit) have high-quality automoderators.
I would argue that the problem is "approximately solved" and that this is sufficient for the purposes of moderating an internet news publisher. Again, I would make the signal-detection-theoretic point of my previous comment: I can selectively bias my automoderators in favor of reducing either false-alarms or misses. Of course, this brings us back to the cultural problem you mentioned.
By this I conclude that the bottleneck is cultural, which brings me to a follow-up question: what do you think is driving the increased tolerance towards accidentally censoring a "decent voice"? Is it the understanding that it doesn't matter so long as a critical mass of decent voices are promoted?
omginternets we're starting to run into HN flame-war restrictions, and I'm working so apologies if responses come slowly.
> How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points?
In my experience 1 and 2 are fine, but 3 is actually a _net negative_ to some of them. People who by and large have come up through 10+ years of paying dues in a 'The patrician editor is always right' culture _hate_ giving up control, even when it makes their jobs easier.
Editors I've seen have balked at things like Taboola and outbrain, despite them being test-ably better than human recommendations, and saving staffers work. It's a fair argument that picking which stories to promote is a core part of the editorial job more so than comment moderation, but the attitude match is there. Editors at one DC media org I didn't work for shot down A/B testing any new features in the first place, because there was an assumption that the tech staff would rig it!
I don't want to paint 'editors' with too broad a brush, but there's definitely a cultural reluctance at the high level to automated decision making.
> What do you think is driving the increased tolerance towards accidentally censoring a "decent voice"? Is it the understanding that it doesn't matter so long as a critical mass of decent voices are promoted?
It doesn't matter to you and me. We think like HN'ers, where there are trillions of internet packets flowing around every day, and a few will get lost. They think like hometown newspaper editors parsing letters. When you take on the responsibility of being a gatekeeper, screwing it up is a big problem, every time.
I think increased tolerance is coming from more exposure to the sheer volume (Every week at FP the website gets more visits than people who have ever read the magazine in it's 50 years of existence combined), and a bit of throwing the hands up and saying "who knows"
Again, I'm speaking for a pretty specific niche of old-school newspapers and magazine people turned editors of major web properties, because those are where my friends work. Things are probably different at HuffPo or Gawker or internet native places, but clearly not that different because their communities are still toxic.
> I would argue that the problem is "approximately solved"
So I disagree here, but don't have evidence to back it up, other than years-old experience with Livefyre's bozo filter, which we didn't put enough work into tuning to give it a super fair shake.
Taking spam comments as mostly solved, I think there are 3 core groups of 'noise' internet comments:
1. People who don't have the 'does this add to the discussion' mindset to use HN's words. cloudjacker and michaelbuddy 's comments below demonstrate this pretty well. I'd lump cheapshot reddit jokes in here as well. They're not always poor writers, or even negative -- "Great article! love, grandma". Which falls back into the ethics of filtering them.
I suspect that this is 80%+ solveable.
2. The 'bored youth' and 'trolls' group. This is actually the worst group I think, because these are the people I suspect that make death threats and engage in doxxing and swatting. Filters will catch some of these people, but they're persistent, and many of them are tech-savvy and reasonably well educated. They can sometimes be hard to tell from honest extremists. A commenter from group 1 who is personally affronted can fall into this group, at which point they become a massive time suck. Hard to solve, but verified accounts help here in the US case.
3. Sponsored Astroturfing. Russia, Turkey, (pro/anti) Israel, China, Trump (presumably the DNC?) all have a large paid network of people just criss crossing the internet all day trying to make their support base look larger than it is. Especially in the US politics case, they often speak good english, and are familiar ...
Taboola and Outbrain's recommendations are so pathetically insulting, and the tracking so obvious, that I've both blocked their domains (router DNS server) and specifically set "display:none;" properties on any CSS classes/IDs matching their names or substrings.
It's pathetic bottom-feeder crap.
Maybe if I fed the beast through tracking, I'd see higher quality recommendations, but I won't, and I don't. They only serve to tell me just how precariously miserable the current state of advertising, tracking, surveillance-supported media is. I'm hoping it will crash and burn, not because I want present media organisations to die, but until they do, we don't seem to stand any chance of something better.
(What better, you ask? Information as a public good, supported by an income-indexed tax.)
I was referring specifically to their paid same-site recommendation engines. So you drop it into an article, and it recommends other articles from your site. In my experience it's decent to good, depending on what metadata you provide it.
I agree that the '10 weight loss secrets' promoted junk to third party sites is bottom scraping.
I really disagree.
Yes, taboola maybe is promoting literally ANY content- even spam. So yes- I blocked them but currently Outbrain is really operating as a content discovery- I didn't find any content the abuses me as a reader. Not Yet. I know that they have strict guidelines as well for their advertisers.
Reading the other reply thread with slowerest gave me another possible solution, too.
Perhaps the comments sections for journalistic pieces from organizations like Ars, NPR, NYT, local news, etc could be more of a competition (like Slashdot). Top 300 comments get preserved, leave it open for a month with no comment limit and some light moderation, and let the conversation go wild (I like Reddit's system for this), then delete all but the top 300 at the end.
Adjust "300" and "top" to fit your organization's needs, just make sure they're clearly defined. Would also help limit the scope for an ML-based solution, too. :)
For news sites with a paid component, they could allow comments only from subscribers / donors. Having a gate which involves money will improve the conversation somewhat. I'd even go a step further and make comments invisible except for subscribers. People creating trial paid accounts could see the comments but not comment themselves. This latter step would prevent astroturfing from firms willing to pay $10 for a trial but not $100 for an annual subscription.
Moderators would still be needed but their workload would be reduced. And there would be money available for them since many would subscribe / donate just to be part of the community, which would make moderation less of a drain and more of the core profit-making.
A podcast I frequent does this sort of thing. If your comment is read on the podcast (and they read one a day) then you get sent a .NET Rocks coffee mug. Which is kinda neat.
The podcast is .NET Rocks and their comments seem to be pretty good overall.
> What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right.
I don't think you're correctly identifying the problem. In my experience, the problem with comments, especially on news sites, is a glut of bad comments, rather than a lack of good comments. This solution doesn't disincentivize bad comments.
The slashdot system for categorising comments seemed to work really well at making the highest quality comments stand out, I wonder why other sites haven't tried something similar, I don't think I've seen it used elsewhere.
slashdot nailed moderation, no one has attempted something similar. most systems are simple up/down vote or like/report
i am also starting to wonder if the agegroup being hired to implement "social" for websites is now young enough to have missed slashdot in it s prime.
the fact that people are still brainstorming from scratch instead of talking about how to improve slashdots model reeks of reinventing the wheel because they never heard of it.
> i am also starting to wonder if the agegroup being hired to implement "social" for websites is now young enough to have missed slashdot in it s prime.
That's me! Can you explain the Slashdot model and why it worked? Or point to a good write up about it somewhere else?
Slashdot's method of scoring comments was overly complicated and probably did not produce any better results than reddit-style voting. However, Slashdot's killer feature was that the reader could filter by comment score and thus only read the 'good' comments, and not have to wade through hundreds of replies.
correct, they were better than reddit because they let the user sort based on their preference. slashdot generated a ton of metadata that described their content, and then gave you the power to intelligently utilize that metadata.
Slashdot's model was perhaps a little overcomplicated, but my favourite feature was the ability to tag up/down votes with flavours. +1 Informative was different to +1 Funny, and "Factually incorrect" was a different downvote to "Off-topic spam" (whatever they were called).
Other quirks off the top of my head: it capped at +5 and ... -1, I think? The score represented a thing closer to the up/down ratio than "Facebook likes". There was a dedicated -1 Overrated moderation for "I don't disagree that it's interesting, just not +5 interesting".
Also, logged in users got a fixed number of moderation points at random intervals, and you couldn't moderate in a story that you commented in. I'd like to believe this discouraged "throwing away" points on low-effort joke comments, but I'm not sure the facts of Slashdot comments entirely bears that out.
Slashdot's moderation system was vaguely effective. Complete crap rarely rose to the top.
A great deal of high-quality commentary was buried, however, often the best and most informative. That's fairliy much par for the course.
Much the early vibe on the site came from the fact that it was simply where intelligent people were commenting online -- especially the early Free Software crowd (well, early in terms of Web 1.0 -- there was the whole 1980s and early 1990s contingent as well).
ESR (before he went fully whackjob mode), Ted T'so, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, Rasterman, and others.
Much that group seems split amongst HN, LKML, LWN, and Google+ these days, along with some blogs.
The solution to bad comments is deleting them before they are even visible to other users. Deleting aggressively, as is done in certain subreddits (r/science) may seem offensive towards naive users who just want to add their "2 c" to the discussion, but it's the only effective AND honest strategy: if your comment adds little of interest, it's worth nothing. The bar should be very high, the more popular the website the higher the required quality. But in the end I think NPR are making the right choice. Comments on websites are not a constitutional right, after all.
The aggressive moderation in /r/science is quite honest compared to other subreddits, which is partly why its moderators attract less controversy when compared to others such as /r/news.
When I was delivering newspapers as a small child many aeons ago, the best page of The Guardian was 'letters to the editor'. The rest of the paper was pretty good back then, there was no email, so anything printed in the 'letters to the editor' had to be posted in, to appear some time after the events in question.
Needless to say an event happened and was reported the next day, so it could be a whole week between the Trump-of-the-day saying something and comment appearing about it. All of this would be filtered by the 'editor', however you did have frequent letters by the likes of Keith Flett, who somehow got his letters published more often than the other 3-5 million readers (as it was back then, just UK sales with poor distribution in places like Birmingham).
There were no 'likes' back then so you had to have something to say to bother writing in.
How do we get a digital equivalent? I don't buy the dead-tree paper these days so no idea if 'letters to the editor' still exists, but, back then it was good, very good.
Its interesting that simply restricting immediate commenting might at least deter useless comments. People who are commenting in order to elicit a response, i suppose, probably have less important things to say. Or maybe they wouldn't say them if they are not granted the immediate satisfaction.
I assume it would kill some collaboration/innovation like on HN or a meaningful subreddit, but maybe no one really ever has anything meaningful to say when reacting to general news...
I guess it would also produce duplication from many people not knowing something was said already (however, the duplicate reactions could be monetized later down the line maybe...)
"When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise."
Aside from [bot] spam, I agree with the statement of Those were your users.
What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.
Assuming you're trolling, but at the risk of feeding:
Someone who posts "Sir your magazine and Hillary Clinton are tools of Israel and should be killed by Hamas, God willing", on all every story about the State Department, or "Oh $WRITER I see you live in DC and went to $COLLEGE, maybe I'll come pay a visit to the next alumni event and teach you some respect for $COUNTRY" isn't the target user for a major American publication. It doesn't want those kind of abhorrent sentiments to live alongside its brand on its website, and is under no obligation to give voice to their ideas.
They're an exceedingly small percent of total readers (when they're even real readers), but a much larger percent of online commenters, hence the problem in the first place.
Even in the non-bot non-astroturfing case, the people who make those comments may be actual readers (although they're exceedingly unlikely to be paying subscribers), but they definitely fall into the bucket of 'can be filtered out, to no appreciable loss'.
They're users in the sense that the website is free, and anybody can be a user, but not in the sense that the publication has a duty to them, in exchange for their money or attention.
While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric.
It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it.
If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.
Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content.
HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.
Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting.
Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches.
On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible.
Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something like:
1) Ugh, another one. Let's check the comments..
2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article..
3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? Flag.
Just because you want to argue about politics with people doesn't mean that people want to argue about politics with you! Maybe they do, sometimes, in some contexts, but if the social cues (i.e., downvotes) indicate otherwise, then maybe not at that time and place. There's nothing wrong with people not talking about stuff they don't want to talk about.
Also, internet forums have learned over multiple decades that otherwise interesting discussions can easily get derailed by people screaming at each other over unresolvable issues. If the community doesn't keep a lid on it to a degree, the quality of discourse goes into a downward spiral that it can never recover from. It attracts people who just want to argue about stuff and it drives away people who want to have interesting discussions. This has been seen time and time again, in newsgroup after newsgroup, mailing list after mailing list, web forum after web forum.
Holding back that inevitable decline is like fighting against entropy- if it stays popular, HN is almost guaranteed to decline, and become more and more like Slashdot circa 2010, right before it poofs out of existence and/or relevance. But if users actively push back against the tides of forum entropy (i.e., discussion getting drowned out by arguments), a forum can at least have a nice long run before that happens.
I think what people want to avoid on HN is the sort of discussions where people are just asserting hot takes back and forth to no other end than the act of publicly asserting hot takes. This was never fun to watch on Crossfire or First Take or whatever, it's not fun at awkward drunken family gatherings, and it doesn't fit in with the vibe of HN. It's invigorating to the participants but much less interesting to read, and for every poster there are hundreds or thousands of readers.
That applies to online forums just as much as it does to real life, some forums are just more focused than others (just like some households are way louder, more chaotic, and have more drama than others). Almost every place other than HN thrives on arguments, so at least there are plenty of places to have them.
Of the article isn't interesting, the article wouldn't have been voted up.
Marking down the comments indicates a desire by some to to enforce groupthink. Why? Because many people use votes to indicate agree-disagree instead of a quality metric.
I think it's harder to agree/disagree with the typical headlines featured on HN. Most articles on HN appear to be straight.
But let's say that two articles were in the queue, one pro-X, the other anti-X and the pro-X forces were dominant. Sure the pro-X article would hit the FP, but the anti-X forces would still comment on it and be down voted.
Also the bias is only visible in the comment section because down voted comments remain visible, whereas a down voted article gets flushed down the memory hole.
It's far easier to manipulate systems than it is to accurately reflect either your typical reader viewpoint, or an intelligent and informed viewpoint. This is a classic failing of any democratic system, election balloting included.
Early "democratic" systems were often anything but -- about 14% of Athens' citizens could vote, and about 6% of the US at the time of George Washington's election. There are arguments for a broader electorate, but they come with distinct problems.
Vote brigading in particular is a standing issue on almost all online moderation systems. Some sort of trust cascade might help. It's what, say, the US electoral college was meant to provide initially, though how much of that function remains (and how it might manifest) is rather in question.
As for Snowden, a counterpoint is that some people see this as an issue which requires constant reminding. Advertising and propaganda both work through repitition, and sometimes the truth gets a chance for that as well. There's certainly enough repeat traffic on other topics at HN. (Though yes, many of those get beat down in the submission queue.)
Unfortunately, not much interesting happens outside of politics. CRISPR and exoplanets spring to mind as exceptions, but software field definitely stalled.
Politics seems to be the force that can bury any amount of advancements in other fields, hence interest.
I don't know enough about Disqus to render an opinion, but I do find it entertaining that the sample comments shown in the animation on their front page are entirely noise, in that they contain nothing more than a "Yay!" sentiment.
How has disqus figured out comment moderation? As far as I know, they don't make a big effort to create great comment communities. Do you have any extra details?
HN has far better comments than any disqus comment feed, on average, in my opinion.
Unfortunately at least 90% of internet comments are trolling, vitriolic, ignorant, generally useless, poorly written, unhelpful, add nothing to the topic, and basically serve as web pollution.
> "these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges"
But suggesting people engage instead on Facebook brings a whole new set of ethical concerns. (1) Facebook manipulates users. (2) Facebook reorders feed. (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. And lets not forget that Facebook is probably outsourcing moderation anyway. Plus, Facebook commenters can be just as bad as regular site commenters.
Yup. It's basically saying "we can't afford this, so we'll make it not our problem."
FWIW FP briefly used an embedded facebook widget, and a nonzero percent of their livefyre users logged in via FB.
It did little to nothing to stop abusive comments. The HN crowd cares a lot about what sort of history follows around our names and our handles. Many others, both in the western world and abroad, do not.
> (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites.
I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in...
Of course no one ever asks why he wanted to pick a controversial site to highlight instead of say a boring straight forward wires service report like the AP.
Of course the story still appears, and the Brietbart could appear in slots 2-N by the personalized ranking algorithm, so it's not like it surpressed. He just wanted to shove it into the I personalized slot 1 where everyone would see it.
Sadly I feel that this is one of those cases where it's impossible for the correction to ever overcome the initial misinformation. On average, People do not accept new info when it refutes their existing knowledge base. This is doubly so in tribal areas like politics.
There's a german blog that used to be popular (blog.fefe.de) without comment function. So some people built a website that offers the same blog just with a comment function.
They built in a captcha function, that fails with a the probability that your comment is a troll comment.
Yes, I think using FB login pretty much solves the problem as it is today. Take a look at civilbeat.com a regional news site by Pierre Omidyar (The Intercept). I'm fairly certain they only allowed comments via FB login for years. It meant a lot fewer comments than they would have gotten but they were all legit. Now it looks like they allow FB, Twitter, or local auth. But the comments are still mostly ok. Maybe they are looking for more activity by easing the requirements and believe they've built a culture of good commenting?
I'm not sold on it because a lot of newspaper web sites use facebook comments and any topic about politics, race, or gender seem to be full of people making hateful comments.
Seems like it was quite "better" than the alternative (basically anonymous user logins making comments) for my home towns recent transition to fb comments, for what it's worth...
The one place I've actually found awesome comments was "the economist" (well, HN isn't bad either), and the ny times is kind of OK. Everywhere else feels pretty iffy...
I think describing FB login as "solving" the problem is definitely overstating it by a lot. I've seen plenty of dumpster-fire comment sections that allowed only FB users to comment.
It solves the problem for me, I guess. I won't be commenting anywhere you have to log in to facebook because I don't want them tracking me all over the web.
While a facebook account gives some legitimacy, I also like sites where you can post anonymously or at least pseudonymously.
If you are using Tor Browser in Tails over a coffee shop wifi while you are laying down under a blanket in the back of a truck driven by a stateless hobo with no fingerprints who you intend to murder later in a country with a healthy democracy, you are probably still not anonymous. If you are not doing those things, you are definitely not anonymous.
Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system?
Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_.
That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the highest quality comments of their userbase at the time.
Slashdot's moderation still had some problems - which might be inevitable, I don't know.
There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50.
And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.
> That community had one of the highest quality comments.
One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak.
This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.
Don't have time to elaborate - but moderation tools actually link to many other deeper problems in meat space, and IMO lead to the kind of tools which-should-not-be-made.
You don't agree with it, so it's nonsense. Anything the left doesn't like has to be painted as absurdist. Better downvote him as well, so he can't downvote anyone with leftist views, keep that point distribution strong.
I wasn't referring to the OPs opinion, I was referring to the fact that all their comment contained was a generic and useless complaint that we've all heard about 10 million times about "the media."
If you or anyone actually wants to post a comment that has a substantiative content to it, feel free. I'm sure if it's so obvious as to how NPR is slanted that there's plenty of objective resources you can draw on to enlighten us all...
1) Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point.
What facts can't they take? What's the narrative that NPR is trying to weave? As others have already mentioned, their coverage is often not favorable to the left. NPR syndicates content from hundreds of independent public radio stations, including other public and for-profit sources such as American Public Media, AP, Reuters, ITN, etc. Are they all conspirators in this narrative?
2) The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover.
Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1.
3) They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service.
They are already offloading comments to Disqus. The problem is not technical but managing and moderating the vast deluge of spam, trolls and other bad actors.
4) Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.
As others have already mentioned, their coverage is often not favorable to the left.
And often is, up to and including misleading and misrepresenting facts. I gave two examples earlier, and was unable to find a retraction of either.
Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1.
Mass uncoordinated action does not imply conspiracy.
Are they all conspirators in this narrative?
As I just said, "conspiracy" is a fundamental misunderstanding. But now that it's on the table, for things that make you go "hmm", look who the major media (news) companies make their political donations to. You'll find an interesting pattern. NPR excluded for obvious financial reasons, but still, there's a pattern.
This is just hyperbole.
I am not so sure. Comment sections serve an important purpose of allowing bullshit in the article to be called out, "trolling" and "bad actors" be damned. I also find it interesting how often those labels are trotted out dismissively against people who disagree with the point trying to be made, and how this "civility" canard is held up as an excuse to silence all discussion.
I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting as a president is one of "Fuck you, gov still pays me". They do not need to adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding
Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.
NPR gets about 90% of its funding from members, grants, foundations, etc. If you have ever listened to NPR, you know how frequently they solicit donations during funding drives.
Only about 5% of individual NPR station funding comes from federal resources, and around 10% of CPB funding.
Partially funded by gov according to their own stats[1]. 11% from the corporation for public broadcasting, and another 5% from local governments.
And on a side note, the trend away from open forums in the name of "civility" bothers me on a pretty deep level, but I don't see the connection between that and 16% of their funds.
Were NPR engaging in "mass censorship" before they introduced online comments in 2008? They are just returning to the status quo of the rest of their 38 year history. You are still free to comment on their stories in alternative venues, exactly as you are doing here.
"They do not need to provide anything above and beyond". I find it fascinating how polarizing this thread will be. Ill have you know I love many of their shows but I should respect people to only respond to what triggers them
NPR's mission statement doesn't include "a open forum where the users can speak to one another" though, and removing the comment section doesn't constitute censorship.
The web and many social media services are available for people to publicly and freely speak their mind, unlike some other governments, where censorship does in fact exist. Ultimately, I think moves like this are good for promoting a more decentralized version of the web where people host and manage their own content, e.g.
"Above and beyond" are the key words here. If this was a 100% private sector I would be fine with it because its about the companies choice. But the fact it is associated to the gov opens up many questions.
- how do gov programs want to accept feedback?
- does the government want open forums and discusion places?
- how much anonymity does the gov want to provide in such discussions?
- what types of contracts forve a company by law to abide by government principles of discussion?
We have laws of what you cant do. We also have laws such as "you can not deny a person water" in arizona [0]. Is the internet to be placed under similar laws or can I run a non-profit with my own agenda in mind with no interest in handling feedback from the taxpayers funding it?
Thats an interesting point actually. Their customer oriented subdomain doesnt accept comments in either. Also is pretty inactive. Perhaps this has been a long time coming and is only now happening to the bigger names
Those seem like interesting questions, but is a comment section attached to an NPR article any good for those? Users typically comment on the content of the story, at an unfortunately low signal-to-noise ratio.
I think it's also worth considering the vast number of organizations receiving federal funding directly (and indirectly through tax breaks, subsidies, etc) and how practical a mandated per-organization discussion mechanism would be.
They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social networks to compare with though.
Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.
>There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting
Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.
Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.
Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.
I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging.
On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.
>On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
Facebook Comments (e.g. TechCrunch comments) are a secondary product for them, with even fewer features for publisher control and worse spam detection than Disqus.
Posting with your real identity does surprisingly nothing to stop trolls/flame wars; it arguably makes it worse as now there is a target.
Facebook isn't the only social option. Twitter replies are an opportunity for anonymous or semi-anonymous commentary. But, also an opportunity for garbage.
Twitter does not allow for conversations in the same page of the article, which is part of the appeal. (And Twitter's recent changes make it hard to track conversations even on the website)
> the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it. People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's not just an anecdotal feeling anymore: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...
Thank you for the link providing non-anecdotal evidence that a real-name policy does nothing to discourage aggressive trolls. I run a Facebook page with a moderate number of likes (~75K), and the fact that the trolling was, if anything, louder and nastier than in a comparably sized community on reddit, was one of the first things I learned.
It's interesting to see that real name policies can actually make trolls behave more aggressively. On the other side of the spectrum, I anecdotally find that they actually prevent me from posting constructive things. I frequently refrain from leaving reviews for restaurants and stores on Google because I don't want them associated with my real name. It's not that I would otherwise be leaving low quality or bitter reviews, I'm just not particularly interested in anybody who knows my name having access to information about where I shop, what I eat, etc (even though I would be happy to share this information anonymously to help other people make informed decisions). I feel similarly about commenting on news articles, blogs, and apps that I use. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant factor in how real name policies affect overall comment quality.
I imagine it's because those trolls still have no consequences to their actions. If people would make more public the comments of those who are the most toxic (death/rape/other violence threats, etc), by, say, sending those comments to the person's mother/grandmother, their boss, etc, and they actually had consequences for those actions, then it might taper off.*
* Of course, this kind of action can have some far reaching consequences, and is quite ripe for abuse. I don't know if there is a way to fix that. And myself, not being the target of such abuse online, I'm not really that invested in trying it.
I wonder if there's a way to allocate names that are pseudonymous but not disposable.
That is: you can have an alter ego (or 5) that aren't easily linked to your real identity, but new identities are hard enough to come by that getting banned isn't trivially bypassed by a new identity.
This would be a major step for email/messaging spam too.
SomethingAwful handles this by charging for accounts, so if you get banned it costs 5 or 10 dollars to get a new identity.
Urbit handles this in a decentralized way by intentionally limiting the namespace, so that once it runs out you have to buy a name/address from someone who's selling.
Metafilter has a $5 dollar entry fee, but will waive it in cases of hardship. Seems like a decent solution as long as the community is small enough to have responsive management / moderation like Metafilter.
Site using Facebook for comments usually end up full of horrible spam. Facebook isn't a good solution either.
IT's interesting to see how a lot of big websites moved from Discuss to livefyre, I wonder what's wrong with Discuss, livefyre looks like it has fewer features and options.
95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.
The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.
Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read.
We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide. I believe HN is good because it serves a specific trade purpose and caters to a specific high-end niche audience. HN's participants are willing to cross a significant participation threshold to be part of the community here. I believe that kind of structure needs to be in place to get good community participation. I guess I'd summarize it with these points:
1. require significant investment from the userbase to participate successfully
2. promise to assist the userbase with something that is critically valuable to them in exchange
3. regularly deliver on 2 to keep 1 worthwhile
4. provide reputation tracking and management utilities so that the user can cultivate a profile that reflects the investments made in point 1
5. for recurring participation, provide variable rewards that trigger the brain's hooks for surprise, which translates to enjoyment.
HN hits those points, but blogs definitely don't and don't want to. They want to bring in barely-interested readers from search, from anywhere on the web. Many of these readers won't even make it into the comment section. Thus, a good community tacked on to the bottom of their articles seems unlikely.
If those principles are required to cultivate a worthwhile community, the community should always occur external to the publication of the article. The community needs to be the centerpiece, not the article. I use HN this way; the discussion is the primary thing, the articles are the subjects submitted for the community's discussion.
The other caveat is that it's difficult to provide points 3 and 5 when you're just starting out. From what I've seen, it practically always has to be artificial until the momentum becomes self-driving (if there is a physical community that uses the online forum for spillover, this may not be applicable; this is basically what happened with HN). We need better solutions there.
Since individual blog posts have certain quantities of Google juice, comment sections will be overrun with spa--err, "SEO professionals". Other participants are often low-effort drive-bys. If the community isn't the principal focus, participation will be spotty and it will be hard to develop elements fundamental to meaningful community engagement.
Facebook and Twitter are normal people making normal comments on random stuff they see. These people generally feel a compulsion to let their feelings out and Facebook/Twitter provide it. I believe this is probably what was originally intended for blog comments, but because Facebook/Twitter are real, stable communities, the participants are inclined to leave comments there instead of on the target article itself. These comments are often loose and instinctive, which is not necessarily to say they're invalid or worthless, but a community won't form around individual postings because there's no common unifying dictum (point 2 is unfulfilled, and point 1 is minimal on random FB/Twitter posts).
Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in.
It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
> It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.
As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit.
I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.
I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping.
Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.
I've always appreciated the NYT's approach to flag their "Picks" as not just the ones receiving the most upvotes/recommendations, but those that represent a wide variety of opinions.
Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard.
Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.
The German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ / http://www.faz.net) also has thoughtful comments. I used to think it was something about the community but at this point it seems more related to moderation. You don't see a lot of trolls on the site.
Given that it's FAZ, I suspect all they need is a check that the comment is correctly punctuated, uses the subjunctive, and consists of 3 paragraphs written in 2 sentences :)
The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.
i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens.
as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.
"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.
But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."
I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.
The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.
neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and replying by asking you to look around and find anywhere on the web that has a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different conclusion...
anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example:
Holy Hell, you are right. I actually have the distinguished privilege of having one of my NYTimes comments be a "Times Pick", meaning the ed. board actually read it and recommended it for insight, I suppose.
My comment was mostly meta, calling out people for missing the point of an op-ed. The op-ed was from a privacy/civil liberties person about why a "no buy" list for guns would be a bad idea. He wasn't arguing on the merits for or against gun ownership, just that these secret lists on which LEO acts are dangerous.
Every comment was something along the lines of "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!" - I tried to point this myopic view out, and every reply to my comment was "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!".
As a smallish-government liberal (Public services are well and good but government should be kept in check by a powerful and vigilant population) I get torn up whenever I defend gun rights or spending reductions on that website.
Metafilter does moderation well. They have a team of paid moderators. It costs a token $5 to join, which means it's expensive to generate sock puppets and anyway the moderators keep your credit card on file so they can permaban you if they need to.
I think it's more than that; it's a psychological thing. You're not likely to shell out five bucks to spew an epithet at someone - you have to think about it. You have to get your payment info together. You have to think about your budget, even a bit in passing.
well some one's trash is another person's insightful comment. that isn't to say there isn't hate and trivial comments but far too many will simply dismiss any comment as ignorant that they don't agree with. This is most likely to occur with political or religious discussions.
I propose the following system for commenting on news sites:
-comment period open for 3 days after publication
-comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once
-you can submit 1 comment per article only
After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam
This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.
Why can I only downvote some comments here? I don't downvote much, but any time I see a comment such as "I like it" it really deserves a downvote for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained.
I really like this. When I think about the most interesting comments, they are the ones where a reader adds something to the article, whether an anecdote, a correction, an educated opinion, etc. This system preserves that and removes the mud slinging. It also preserves the page views, as people are encouraged to return and read--perhaps with some "remind-me" mechanism.
I could see other permutations of his idea as well: you can only reply to the article, once you view the comments, it no longer accepts a comment from you; keep comments open but delay comments by one or two days--allows slow back and forth, not flame wars. Or allow replies, but only one comment per user. There are a lot of mechanisms to explore here.
I like it the idea of an interval between publication and comment! However I don't think back-and-forth is necessarily bad. I'd modify your proposal to include two or three rounds of rebuttal, each at a 3-day interval. You'd have to be seriously invested in the discussion to participate, and there's very little room for a flamewar to develop.
I would imagine such a system would be mostly equivalent to no comment system at all. I'm not going to bother commenting if nobody can even see it, and 3 days later when they can I won't even remember that I commented.
Nope, don't like that idea. I enjoy reading replies to comments - that's usually where discussion gets interesting. A static list of "letters to the editor" can be interesting, but there's no life or action happening there. More spice and counter-arguments are found in someone's reply to a comment. Sure this increases odds of domination by few users... so perhaps limiting people to 3 comments per article would be an idea.
We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them.
It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments.
What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.
They're full of people who just have to get things off their chest, but at least they don't have cheerleaders encouraging them to be even more asshole than they already are.
Depends on what boards you go to. The topic boards are mostly good for serious discussion. Just avoid /v/ (neckbeards), /mu/ (circlejerk), and /pol/ (racists).
The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc.
Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable.
I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.
All the time. For many websites, the very first comment is a succinct and correct refutation of the article or blogpost itself. And that is why comment sections are disappearing. People really don't mind "trolls" or whatever all that much. They do mind being proven wrong.
Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much smaller percent.)
>But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not that fake accounts don't get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on).
I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.
462 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadI used to listen to NPR religiously (>4 hrs a week) before my apostasy from the Left. I could probably count on one hand the times they came down on someone on the Left e.g. bringing up to Coates his threat to assault his teacher and even in that case it was kind of a lob with no follow-up mean to allow self-exoneration (no push back in the absence of a mea culpa either).
So, no. I think this statement is disingenuous.
I admit that the comment you're replying to is flippant, but NPR does check its facts quite well.
There was an interesting study[1] from 2011 where NPR's Twitter social graph correlates with what you'd expect a person with left-leaning political tendencies to have. Probably a bit too broad to draw general conclusions from, but interesting as a data point still.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/03/22/science...
Journalism is rarely (if ever) objective. Good journalism should, however, be factually-correct and analytical. In other words, the product you're paying for is along the lines of informed opinion.
The claim, as I understood it, was that NPR was making factually incorrect claims (i.e.: reporting things contrary to reality). Either the OP has a confused understanding of journalistic function (evident in the implication that NPR isn't objective, or somehow politically-slanted), or he's making a demonstrably false claim (NPR systematically lies and/or misrepresents truth).
Random search example: https://community.aarp.org/t5/Medicare-Insurance/NPR-Contine...
Factually true, but misleading in context claims about Medicare.
Another, worse example: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/14/nprs-distortions-abou...
An NPR reporter misrepresenting a Dutch report on the downing of MH317 as evidence of Russia firing the missile (while the report only says the missile was Russian-made).
NPR aside, I reject the notion that journalism can't be objective. Well, not completely, sure, in the same way that we can never completely reach the speed of light.
Does that mean we stop trying? No! Does that mean we lower our standards? Hell no! My issue is, I see this concept used more often to excuse misconduct and lazy reporting. "We can't do it, so why try?"
If someone claims to be unbiased, they should be held to their own standard, and when bias is pointed out, expected to change their ways, or else acknowledge that their statement about being unbiased was a lie.
Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.
It's easy to hitch an underrepresented and specifically suppressed view (like white nationalism, anti-semitism, sexism) into the comments section as a means of piggy-backing off the visibility of the main article. Given that some people go out of their way to ignore the actual content as a means of furthering their underrepresented message means that the comments section is being used to short-circuit the moderation loop most journalistic publications go through.
You ARE aware that discussion of an article can happen on a different forum, right? Like, say, Hacker News.
But then, I work at a news source, so what do I know.
>I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"
... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.
Genius sort of does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotat...
Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)
[0]: via mousehole http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh... / http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...
Uhh... do you have a source for this?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_jo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/390bni/user...
It feels like the quality of online discussion is related to the narrowness of the topic/community.
For example: I find the comments that make it to Reddit's homepage humorous, but not really that helpful/insightful/smart. Most of the subreddits I frequent offer much better discussion, assuming the source topic is interesting. I.e., I don't expect much from r/cats. Although, even r/cats has much better comment that the homepage...
HR is a great aggregator, but still fairly narrow compared to NPR, CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, etc. And most of the commenters on those sites don't have any direct experience or insight to offer to those discussions. Until that problem is solved, the comments aren't valuable.
Where each niche gets it own page, with posts and comments?
Might catch on. We can those pages subreddits...
I'm still researching how important is it for companies to have control over their own site.
So you could build a community out of something and then have a general news discussion, that seems possible. Generally though, the vast vast majority of commenters have nothing original to add and they simply create noise. Perhaps those few nuggets of gold are worth the effort, it's hard to say, at least with HN we all have that common bond and then the actual topics tend to be related to it. Go scan the comments on a couple random foxnews.com articles and a couple random msnbc.com articles and tell me, if the article on foxnews is about the president or a non-white, I will bet you a nickle that you'll see a racist comment in the first batch or two. That's what you'd be working with..
The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.
> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.
Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.
[1] http://idaretolisten.org
I suppose the charitable assumption would be that the parent is a subtle meta comment, designed to call into question the notion that discussion is valuable.
That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.
P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!
If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on them. People reading the comments should count too.
No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?
~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.
http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.
Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for the most part.
As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation!
Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand.
To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?
It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried.
I'll err on the side of caution with revealing employee counts, but in my experience many of the FP/Atlantic/Mother Jones/Weekly Standard/Pick your midrange site are running on a single digit to low double-digit number of web production staff, many of whom are also trying to make a writing, article layout, or fact-checking quota. The suggestion that these magazines can either get those staffers to moderate tens of thousands of comments per day, or quadruple their web staff just to improve the comments ignores the business reality.
User moderation in the normal HN/Reddit way doesn't work well on news sites, it's too easy to game or brigade, and news sites can't or won't give add unpaid moderators to be gatekeepers.
That's what's hard; creating comments is scalable, filtering them is not. Leaving them unfiltered doesn't work either.
>I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts.
You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters, and short, simple points are often more percussive.
Vetting credentials is a very good option IMHO for certain forums but not for others. Reddit's /r/askscience is an example of a forum in which it works well.
>It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried.
I wonder if this problem can't be solved through the use of machine-learning to classify comments into high-versus-low quality by grammatical and semantic analysis. This kind of first-pass filtering could, at the very least, help throw out the obvious trash and pre-select candidates for recognition.
Such a system can be tuned to minimize false-alarms (shitpost getting flagged as good), which I think represent the most problematic of classification errors. This is a nice problem-space for ML because the increase in misses implied by a bias against false-alarms doesn't degrade the service much: not having one's comment select for re-publication is unexceptional.
Thoughts?
The cultural issue is that many news orgs are still run by people for whom the idea that technology could accidentally censor a valid criticism or ban a decent voice is just too risky. I think this is changing, and many newsrooms today a little more fluid than when I really cared about the problem 4 years ago.
The tech issue is a little bit of a cop out on my part. An ML approach is super attractive to me as a techie. Google (youtube), facebook, NYT, WaPO, and tons of other billion dollar orgs have this problem, and could loads of money by being seen as better communities.
On the more guerrilla side, hundreds of subreddits have automoderaters written by savvy, caring moderators.
They have terabytes of training data, already tagged, and world class ML experts on staff. If it was a tractable problem with business value, why wouldn't they have fixed it? I'm guessing it's the sort of thing that looks doable from the surface, but you get buried in the details.
Again, cop out answer, so please go prove me wrong!!
I understand, and I think that's probably the most difficult problem of the two. I'd just like to point out -- in the interest of discussion -- three things:
1. Pre-filtering for moderators is different (much safer) than auto-banning by a bot
2. It's valid both to filter informed opinions that are poorly expressed, and for a publisher to have a preferred "voice", i.e. a style of writing that it favors.
3. The argument can be made that machines are no more biased than human editors, and that in many cases, the biases of the former are known. As a corollary to this point, there exist certain ML techniques (e.g. randomized forrest classifiers) for which the decision process of an individual case can be retraced after the fact.
How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points?
>technical problem
Counter-cop-out: someone has to be the first!
Somewhat-less-cop-outy-counter-cop-out: by your own admission, certain sites (e.g. Reddit) have high-quality automoderators.
I would argue that the problem is "approximately solved" and that this is sufficient for the purposes of moderating an internet news publisher. Again, I would make the signal-detection-theoretic point of my previous comment: I can selectively bias my automoderators in favor of reducing either false-alarms or misses. Of course, this brings us back to the cultural problem you mentioned.
By this I conclude that the bottleneck is cultural, which brings me to a follow-up question: what do you think is driving the increased tolerance towards accidentally censoring a "decent voice"? Is it the understanding that it doesn't matter so long as a critical mass of decent voices are promoted?
> How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points? In my experience 1 and 2 are fine, but 3 is actually a _net negative_ to some of them. People who by and large have come up through 10+ years of paying dues in a 'The patrician editor is always right' culture _hate_ giving up control, even when it makes their jobs easier.
Editors I've seen have balked at things like Taboola and outbrain, despite them being test-ably better than human recommendations, and saving staffers work. It's a fair argument that picking which stories to promote is a core part of the editorial job more so than comment moderation, but the attitude match is there. Editors at one DC media org I didn't work for shot down A/B testing any new features in the first place, because there was an assumption that the tech staff would rig it!
I don't want to paint 'editors' with too broad a brush, but there's definitely a cultural reluctance at the high level to automated decision making.
> What do you think is driving the increased tolerance towards accidentally censoring a "decent voice"? Is it the understanding that it doesn't matter so long as a critical mass of decent voices are promoted?
It doesn't matter to you and me. We think like HN'ers, where there are trillions of internet packets flowing around every day, and a few will get lost. They think like hometown newspaper editors parsing letters. When you take on the responsibility of being a gatekeeper, screwing it up is a big problem, every time.
I think increased tolerance is coming from more exposure to the sheer volume (Every week at FP the website gets more visits than people who have ever read the magazine in it's 50 years of existence combined), and a bit of throwing the hands up and saying "who knows"
Again, I'm speaking for a pretty specific niche of old-school newspapers and magazine people turned editors of major web properties, because those are where my friends work. Things are probably different at HuffPo or Gawker or internet native places, but clearly not that different because their communities are still toxic.
> I would argue that the problem is "approximately solved" So I disagree here, but don't have evidence to back it up, other than years-old experience with Livefyre's bozo filter, which we didn't put enough work into tuning to give it a super fair shake.
Taking spam comments as mostly solved, I think there are 3 core groups of 'noise' internet comments:
1. People who don't have the 'does this add to the discussion' mindset to use HN's words. cloudjacker and michaelbuddy 's comments below demonstrate this pretty well. I'd lump cheapshot reddit jokes in here as well. They're not always poor writers, or even negative -- "Great article! love, grandma". Which falls back into the ethics of filtering them. I suspect that this is 80%+ solveable.
2. The 'bored youth' and 'trolls' group. This is actually the worst group I think, because these are the people I suspect that make death threats and engage in doxxing and swatting. Filters will catch some of these people, but they're persistent, and many of them are tech-savvy and reasonably well educated. They can sometimes be hard to tell from honest extremists. A commenter from group 1 who is personally affronted can fall into this group, at which point they become a massive time suck. Hard to solve, but verified accounts help here in the US case.
3. Sponsored Astroturfing. Russia, Turkey, (pro/anti) Israel, China, Trump (presumably the DNC?) all have a large paid network of people just criss crossing the internet all day trying to make their support base look larger than it is. Especially in the US politics case, they often speak good english, and are familiar ...
It's pathetic bottom-feeder crap.
Maybe if I fed the beast through tracking, I'd see higher quality recommendations, but I won't, and I don't. They only serve to tell me just how precariously miserable the current state of advertising, tracking, surveillance-supported media is. I'm hoping it will crash and burn, not because I want present media organisations to die, but until they do, we don't seem to stand any chance of something better.
(What better, you ask? Information as a public good, supported by an income-indexed tax.)
I agree that the '10 weight loss secrets' promoted junk to third party sites is bottom scraping.
Sufficiently that the in-site referrals fail for technical reasons.
Perhaps the comments sections for journalistic pieces from organizations like Ars, NPR, NYT, local news, etc could be more of a competition (like Slashdot). Top 300 comments get preserved, leave it open for a month with no comment limit and some light moderation, and let the conversation go wild (I like Reddit's system for this), then delete all but the top 300 at the end.
Adjust "300" and "top" to fit your organization's needs, just make sure they're clearly defined. Would also help limit the scope for an ML-based solution, too. :)
Moderators would still be needed but their workload would be reduced. And there would be money available for them since many would subscribe / donate just to be part of the community, which would make moderation less of a drain and more of the core profit-making.
The podcast is .NET Rocks and their comments seem to be pretty good overall.
I don't think you're correctly identifying the problem. In my experience, the problem with comments, especially on news sites, is a glut of bad comments, rather than a lack of good comments. This solution doesn't disincentivize bad comments.
slashdot nailed moderation, no one has attempted something similar. most systems are simple up/down vote or like/report
i am also starting to wonder if the agegroup being hired to implement "social" for websites is now young enough to have missed slashdot in it s prime.
the fact that people are still brainstorming from scratch instead of talking about how to improve slashdots model reeks of reinventing the wheel because they never heard of it.
That's me! Can you explain the Slashdot model and why it worked? Or point to a good write up about it somewhere else?
Slashdot's model was perhaps a little overcomplicated, but my favourite feature was the ability to tag up/down votes with flavours. +1 Informative was different to +1 Funny, and "Factually incorrect" was a different downvote to "Off-topic spam" (whatever they were called).
Other quirks off the top of my head: it capped at +5 and ... -1, I think? The score represented a thing closer to the up/down ratio than "Facebook likes". There was a dedicated -1 Overrated moderation for "I don't disagree that it's interesting, just not +5 interesting".
Also, logged in users got a fixed number of moderation points at random intervals, and you couldn't moderate in a story that you commented in. I'd like to believe this discouraged "throwing away" points on low-effort joke comments, but I'm not sure the facts of Slashdot comments entirely bears that out.
EDIT: And then there was meta-moderation...
https://slashdot.org/faq
especially all the Moderation, metamoderation, and Karma sections!!
A great deal of high-quality commentary was buried, however, often the best and most informative. That's fairliy much par for the course.
Much the early vibe on the site came from the fact that it was simply where intelligent people were commenting online -- especially the early Free Software crowd (well, early in terms of Web 1.0 -- there was the whole 1980s and early 1990s contingent as well).
ESR (before he went fully whackjob mode), Ted T'so, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, Rasterman, and others.
Much that group seems split amongst HN, LKML, LWN, and Google+ these days, along with some blogs.
I'm about ready to blackhole that domain.
Needless to say an event happened and was reported the next day, so it could be a whole week between the Trump-of-the-day saying something and comment appearing about it. All of this would be filtered by the 'editor', however you did have frequent letters by the likes of Keith Flett, who somehow got his letters published more often than the other 3-5 million readers (as it was back then, just UK sales with poor distribution in places like Birmingham).
There were no 'likes' back then so you had to have something to say to bother writing in.
How do we get a digital equivalent? I don't buy the dead-tree paper these days so no idea if 'letters to the editor' still exists, but, back then it was good, very good.
I assume it would kill some collaboration/innovation like on HN or a meaningful subreddit, but maybe no one really ever has anything meaningful to say when reacting to general news...
I guess it would also produce duplication from many people not knowing something was said already (however, the duplicate reactions could be monetized later down the line maybe...)
Those were your users.
What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.
Someone who posts "Sir your magazine and Hillary Clinton are tools of Israel and should be killed by Hamas, God willing", on all every story about the State Department, or "Oh $WRITER I see you live in DC and went to $COLLEGE, maybe I'll come pay a visit to the next alumni event and teach you some respect for $COUNTRY" isn't the target user for a major American publication. It doesn't want those kind of abhorrent sentiments to live alongside its brand on its website, and is under no obligation to give voice to their ideas.
They're an exceedingly small percent of total readers (when they're even real readers), but a much larger percent of online commenters, hence the problem in the first place.
Even in the non-bot non-astroturfing case, the people who make those comments may be actual readers (although they're exceedingly unlikely to be paying subscribers), but they definitely fall into the bucket of 'can be filtered out, to no appreciable loss'.
They're users in the sense that the website is free, and anybody can be a user, but not in the sense that the publication has a duty to them, in exchange for their money or attention.
It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it.
If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.
HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.
Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches.
On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible.
Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something like:
1) Ugh, another one. Let's check the comments..
2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article..
3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? Flag.
"Who voted this up?" is the community rift.
And you'll note I said "online".
We live online.
Also, internet forums have learned over multiple decades that otherwise interesting discussions can easily get derailed by people screaming at each other over unresolvable issues. If the community doesn't keep a lid on it to a degree, the quality of discourse goes into a downward spiral that it can never recover from. It attracts people who just want to argue about stuff and it drives away people who want to have interesting discussions. This has been seen time and time again, in newsgroup after newsgroup, mailing list after mailing list, web forum after web forum.
Holding back that inevitable decline is like fighting against entropy- if it stays popular, HN is almost guaranteed to decline, and become more and more like Slashdot circa 2010, right before it poofs out of existence and/or relevance. But if users actively push back against the tides of forum entropy (i.e., discussion getting drowned out by arguments), a forum can at least have a nice long run before that happens.
I think what people want to avoid on HN is the sort of discussions where people are just asserting hot takes back and forth to no other end than the act of publicly asserting hot takes. This was never fun to watch on Crossfire or First Take or whatever, it's not fun at awkward drunken family gatherings, and it doesn't fit in with the vibe of HN. It's invigorating to the participants but much less interesting to read, and for every poster there are hundreds or thousands of readers.
That applies to online forums just as much as it does to real life, some forums are just more focused than others (just like some households are way louder, more chaotic, and have more drama than others). Almost every place other than HN thrives on arguments, so at least there are plenty of places to have them.
Marking down the comments indicates a desire by some to to enforce groupthink. Why? Because many people use votes to indicate agree-disagree instead of a quality metric.
And given what I've seen of the algorithm here, page positioning is a lot more complicated than vote count weighted by time.
But let's say that two articles were in the queue, one pro-X, the other anti-X and the pro-X forces were dominant. Sure the pro-X article would hit the FP, but the anti-X forces would still comment on it and be down voted.
Also the bias is only visible in the comment section because down voted comments remain visible, whereas a down voted article gets flushed down the memory hole.
Early "democratic" systems were often anything but -- about 14% of Athens' citizens could vote, and about 6% of the US at the time of George Washington's election. There are arguments for a broader electorate, but they come with distinct problems.
Vote brigading in particular is a standing issue on almost all online moderation systems. Some sort of trust cascade might help. It's what, say, the US electoral college was meant to provide initially, though how much of that function remains (and how it might manifest) is rather in question.
As for Snowden, a counterpoint is that some people see this as an issue which requires constant reminding. Advertising and propaganda both work through repitition, and sometimes the truth gets a chance for that as well. There's certainly enough repeat traffic on other topics at HN. (Though yes, many of those get beat down in the submission queue.)
Often justified. Sometimes not.
Politics seems to be the force that can bury any amount of advancements in other fields, hence interest.
HN has far better comments than any disqus comment feed, on average, in my opinion.
HN used to have far better comments, now it feels like a battlefield.
Unfortunately at least 90% of internet comments are trolling, vitriolic, ignorant, generally useless, poorly written, unhelpful, add nothing to the topic, and basically serve as web pollution.
But suggesting people engage instead on Facebook brings a whole new set of ethical concerns. (1) Facebook manipulates users. (2) Facebook reorders feed. (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. And lets not forget that Facebook is probably outsourcing moderation anyway. Plus, Facebook commenters can be just as bad as regular site commenters.
FWIW FP briefly used an embedded facebook widget, and a nonzero percent of their livefyre users logged in via FB.
It did little to nothing to stop abusive comments. The HN crowd cares a lot about what sort of history follows around our names and our handles. Many others, both in the western world and abroad, do not.
I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in... Of course no one ever asks why he wanted to pick a controversial site to highlight instead of say a boring straight forward wires service report like the AP.
Of course the story still appears, and the Brietbart could appear in slots 2-N by the personalized ranking algorithm, so it's not like it surpressed. He just wanted to shove it into the I personalized slot 1 where everyone would see it.
Here's the talk about it (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA
http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/
- a chrome extension
For every post you made, you had to enter a captcha.
Then, if your comment had words that were likely to be hateful, it’d show your comment again to you, and force you to enter the captcha again.
The worse the likely quality of your comment, the more captchas you’d have to enter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA
The one place I've actually found awesome comments was "the economist" (well, HN isn't bad either), and the ny times is kind of OK. Everywhere else feels pretty iffy...
While a facebook account gives some legitimacy, I also like sites where you can post anonymously or at least pseudonymously.
Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_.
That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the highest quality comments of their userbase at the time.
At one point I actually helped design something somewhat better (which was implemented in part). I've had further ideas since.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50.
And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.
One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak.
This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.
If you or anyone actually wants to post a comment that has a substantiative content to it, feel free. I'm sure if it's so obvious as to how NPR is slanted that there's plenty of objective resources you can draw on to enlighten us all...
Is the OP correct or are they not? If we want to have a discussion, let's start there.
No.
1) Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point.
What facts can't they take? What's the narrative that NPR is trying to weave? As others have already mentioned, their coverage is often not favorable to the left. NPR syndicates content from hundreds of independent public radio stations, including other public and for-profit sources such as American Public Media, AP, Reuters, ITN, etc. Are they all conspirators in this narrative?
2) The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover.
Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1.
3) They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service.
They are already offloading comments to Disqus. The problem is not technical but managing and moderating the vast deluge of spam, trolls and other bad actors.
4) Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.
This is just hyperbole.
And often is, up to and including misleading and misrepresenting facts. I gave two examples earlier, and was unable to find a retraction of either.
Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1.
Mass uncoordinated action does not imply conspiracy.
Are they all conspirators in this narrative?
As I just said, "conspiracy" is a fundamental misunderstanding. But now that it's on the table, for things that make you go "hmm", look who the major media (news) companies make their political donations to. You'll find an interesting pattern. NPR excluded for obvious financial reasons, but still, there's a pattern.
This is just hyperbole.
I am not so sure. Comment sections serve an important purpose of allowing bullshit in the article to be called out, "trolling" and "bad actors" be damned. I also find it interesting how often those labels are trotted out dismissively against people who disagree with the point trying to be made, and how this "civility" canard is held up as an excuse to silence all discussion.
Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.
Only about 5% of individual NPR station funding comes from federal resources, and around 10% of CPB funding.
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_abo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
And on a side note, the trend away from open forums in the name of "civility" bothers me on a pretty deep level, but I don't see the connection between that and 16% of their funds.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
Alternate sources:
1. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_abo... It contains some handy pie charts for both Public Radio stations and NPR.
[2] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/13/taxpayers-provide... An analyst claims that 25% of NPR's funding is from taxpayer sources. This claim is disputed by NPR's public relations spokesperson.
The web and many social media services are available for people to publicly and freely speak their mind, unlike some other governments, where censorship does in fact exist. Ultimately, I think moves like this are good for promoting a more decentralized version of the web where people host and manage their own content, e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creato...
- how do gov programs want to accept feedback?
- does the government want open forums and discusion places?
- how much anonymity does the gov want to provide in such discussions?
- what types of contracts forve a company by law to abide by government principles of discussion?
We have laws of what you cant do. We also have laws such as "you can not deny a person water" in arizona [0]. Is the internet to be placed under similar laws or can I run a non-profit with my own agenda in mind with no interest in handling feedback from the taxpayers funding it?
[0] http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked-answered/201...
http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta-blog
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c
Edit : Fbi alo doesnt accept comments
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted-federal-a...
I think it's also worth considering the vast number of organizations receiving federal funding directly (and indirectly through tax breaks, subsidies, etc) and how practical a mandated per-organization discussion mechanism would be.
Still a incredibly stupid decision though.
Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-...
Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.
I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging.
On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.
When was the last time you used Facebook?
Posting with your real identity does surprisingly nothing to stop trolls/flame wars; it arguably makes it worse as now there is a target.
This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it. People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's not just an anecdotal feeling anymore: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...
* Of course, this kind of action can have some far reaching consequences, and is quite ripe for abuse. I don't know if there is a way to fix that. And myself, not being the target of such abuse online, I'm not really that invested in trying it.
That is: you can have an alter ego (or 5) that aren't easily linked to your real identity, but new identities are hard enough to come by that getting banned isn't trivially bypassed by a new identity.
This would be a major step for email/messaging spam too.
Urbit handles this in a decentralized way by intentionally limiting the namespace, so that once it runs out you have to buy a name/address from someone who's selling.
I wonder if there's a way around this.
Your Imaginary Internet Points on HN, for example.
IT's interesting to see how a lot of big websites moved from Discuss to livefyre, I wonder what's wrong with Discuss, livefyre looks like it has fewer features and options.
What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?
The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.
Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...
On the volume vs. time-to-assimilate basis, nobody can read more than a minuscule fraction of online content.
1. require significant investment from the userbase to participate successfully
2. promise to assist the userbase with something that is critically valuable to them in exchange
3. regularly deliver on 2 to keep 1 worthwhile
4. provide reputation tracking and management utilities so that the user can cultivate a profile that reflects the investments made in point 1
5. for recurring participation, provide variable rewards that trigger the brain's hooks for surprise, which translates to enjoyment.
HN hits those points, but blogs definitely don't and don't want to. They want to bring in barely-interested readers from search, from anywhere on the web. Many of these readers won't even make it into the comment section. Thus, a good community tacked on to the bottom of their articles seems unlikely.
If those principles are required to cultivate a worthwhile community, the community should always occur external to the publication of the article. The community needs to be the centerpiece, not the article. I use HN this way; the discussion is the primary thing, the articles are the subjects submitted for the community's discussion.
The other caveat is that it's difficult to provide points 3 and 5 when you're just starting out. From what I've seen, it practically always has to be artificial until the momentum becomes self-driving (if there is a physical community that uses the online forum for spillover, this may not be applicable; this is basically what happened with HN). We need better solutions there.
Since individual blog posts have certain quantities of Google juice, comment sections will be overrun with spa--err, "SEO professionals". Other participants are often low-effort drive-bys. If the community isn't the principal focus, participation will be spotty and it will be hard to develop elements fundamental to meaningful community engagement.
Facebook and Twitter are normal people making normal comments on random stuff they see. These people generally feel a compulsion to let their feelings out and Facebook/Twitter provide it. I believe this is probably what was originally intended for blog comments, but because Facebook/Twitter are real, stable communities, the participants are inclined to leave comments there instead of on the target article itself. These comments are often loose and instinctive, which is not necessarily to say they're invalid or worthless, but a community won't form around individual postings because there's no common unifying dictum (point 2 is unfulfilled, and point 1 is minimal on random FB/Twitter posts).
When done well, comments on the article form a discussion, debate, or some other meaningful exchange of knowledge.
But with the modern web and social media, it's usually all bile and trolling.
It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.
I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.
Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.
Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard.
Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.
this comment articulates it well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...
"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.
But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."
The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.
anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example:
http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html
My comment was mostly meta, calling out people for missing the point of an op-ed. The op-ed was from a privacy/civil liberties person about why a "no buy" list for guns would be a bad idea. He wasn't arguing on the merits for or against gun ownership, just that these secret lists on which LEO acts are dangerous.
Every comment was something along the lines of "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!" - I tried to point this myopic view out, and every reply to my comment was "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!".
As a smallish-government liberal (Public services are well and good but government should be kept in check by a powerful and vigilant population) I get torn up whenever I defend gun rights or spending reductions on that website.
There's the token payment. It doesn't cost much to post, but it does cost to be an asshat.
It's tiny. The userbase and total content volume are a small fraction of other social networks. Which I've objectively measured.
The S/N is amazingly high. Better than all but the best paid-contribution (e.g., professional media) sites.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I've found just the opposite. Coincidentally, I all the subs I'm subscribed to have less than 40k subscribers.
-comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only
After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam
This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.
I could see other permutations of his idea as well: you can only reply to the article, once you view the comments, it no longer accepts a comment from you; keep comments open but delay comments by one or two days--allows slow back and forth, not flame wars. Or allow replies, but only one comment per user. There are a lot of mechanisms to explore here.
I'd hope that my comments mean something, even after three days.
So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with Disqus.
https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data...
At least for the WordPress plugin, the default functionality is to sync the comments in the database with those on Disqus servers.
It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments.
What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.
Isn't reddit a forum site? Confused.
Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable.
In short, allowing comments != community.
Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-r....
I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.