I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.
Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things.
Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.
FWIW, a move towards automated assistance is what motivated that article in the first place: "The New York Times is partnering with Google Jigsaw to create a new moderation system that will help us review incoming comments based on decisions our moderators have made in the past. Our moderators will continue to protect these discussions, but once this new system is launched, we will have robot helpers."
I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).
I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage).
You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.
I think that is in part because they are highly moderated, both by their internal team and user votes. Such moderation is costly, but I tend to think it is worth it for the good of the community.
But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls.
I very much disagree with that.
Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.
CBC comments show you how horrible some people can be. It makes me think that we leave discussion to the discussions sites. Reddit, HN, etc. and just let the news tell the news.
I've used the "block element" feature of uBlock Origin to completely remove the comments from CBC.ca. Frankly, the possibility that I may miss the one insightful comment posted every twenty thousand or so (before it's pushed into "show more" territory) doesn't seem like much of a loss.
The article that appeared below the OP article was about an internet feud between Nikki minaj and Meek Mill. So you're right, I am surprised but not in a good way.
These days The Economist and Teen Vogue have more in common than most are prepared to admit.
It's disappointing that the only publications willing to tackle heavy issues are things like Vogue, The Rolling Stone and Vice Magazine. The rest seem content to sit back and take a more academic approach if they take one at all.
One story, all credibility, huh? You must live in a world where nobody is credible.
The New York Times has suffered hits to its credibility, fake photographers, plagiarism and such, but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work done by their talented staff. There's still good work being done there despite those setbacks. It's a fallacy to instantly discount everything as without merit, putting it on the same level as Breitbart.
Like always you need to regard things with a critical eye.
I would highly recommend checking out the Columbia school of journalism's analysis.[0]
While other publications have had lapses in journalistic integrity, rolling stones case is especially egregious. Along every step of the way, the writer and her editors violated the basics of journalistic integrity, like not fact checking and trusting one side.
> Here we go. Tell me what's wrong with Breitbart?
Every story they run on climate change is a pile of innumerate, scientifically illiterate crap? Those are the only stories I see from them as they get quoted for amusement value sometimes on the Sea Ice forums.
But maybe their sports coverage is good or something. Who knows.
You, apparently, since you talked of "the same level as Breitbart", though don't apparently know what that is.
Also, if you have specific knowledge of a subject area, you might be inclined to a kind of reversal of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: judging a publication on you area of expertise alone, when publications may differ in their relative strengths.
but you could get rid of that, couldn't you? Switch to "moderate first if user does not have a high enough reputation" for a while. Idiot commenters want their posts to be seen, they thrive on the chaos. Take that away from them and they will move on.
Yes, you need a few people willing to go through the filth, but you will get a better online presence out of it.
Or don't waste your time and kill comments entirely.
Demonstrate the cost/benefit advantage of having to police these garbage piles and maybe I'll buy it. But I don't believe that most people read the Times or CBC or WaPo for the comment section. More likely they read those outlets despite them.
I agree with Vice. Leave the discussion to dedicated services like Reddit, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and focus on core competencies: producing top notch content.
I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0].
Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to.
Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users.
The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.
Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.
> The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.
As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.
MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.
This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.
I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)
It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.
That's giving too much credit to the journalists for the comment streams being terrible. Most of the terrible comments are not because people read the article and are angry about how good it was, I'd say a very very small number are.
And the NPR comments section wasn't generally terrible, either. At least not on the articles I usually read. Still, I'd rather the money/time/energy required to properly maintain a comments section for NPR be spent on pursuits closer to their core purpose.
Considering how much of the media was shocked SHOCKED by Brexit, the election of Trump, Sarkozy's loss, the fall of Merkel, and the rise of Le Pen, maybe they should pay more attention to the comments..
Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions.
Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump).
> Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.
I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.
And the polls, markets and experts were all wrong. Apparently they aren't so scientific, liquid or expert after all.
Actually, a few journalists who spent serious time hitting the streets outside London concluded that Brexit would win or at least was quite likely, just by talking to people. They were largely ignored because they weren't "experts", just people talking to other people. John Harris being an example of that.
Scientific polls have participation and subjectivity flaws, 'expert' opinion begs the question.
No one addresses the obvious weaknesses, they just say "this is the best we have", but then act with confidence in the predictions, rather than admit we don't know.
>Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions.
Those were not shocking events. People wanted a prediction with more confidence than those sources of prediction were able to provide. Faced with the hard limitations of existing predictive tools, people that should damn well know better started listening when they found someone to tell them "Nate Silver has Trump at 25%" really meant "Hillary will win."
It would not have been irresponsible to account for the possibility of the less likely but still possible outcome. In fact it would be irresponsible to NOT be prepared for it.
>Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.
We're never going to be able to predict the future with total accuracy. The question is how we want to face them limitations of that accuracy. People who don't take "no" for an answer will read too much into unreliable predictions and attempt to rebuild systems for more predictable results regardless of externalities. The question should be how we adapt to that reality.
As much as I would normally support this kind of cynicism, in the particular case of Trump's election, the media were as genuinely shocked as everyone else. Opponents and supporters, informed and not.
Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.
Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.
I really haven't seen much evidence that media professionals expressing shock at, for example, Brexit and Trump's election are engaged in some strong form of deception. There's a reasonable set of critiques about media incentives and behavior here, but I think this is a case where cynicism of this kind can obscure observable reality: The majority of people really didn't expect these outcomes.
That is absolutely a true thing you can say about the media and the election. They came to believe that Trump would not win the election, by being in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.
But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.
OK, that's fair. I think that most of the media believed that Clinton would win. It was actually quite creepy seeing all the glowing tributes to her life, and upcoming presidency. I still have a special commemorative edition of Newsweek from November 8, 2016, celebrating "Hillary Clinton's Historic Journey to the White House." I think I am going to keep this for a while.
This just isn't true. Every site I've ever seen get above a certain threshold of popularity has its comments site turn to utter garbage, if it wasn't terrible already.
The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.
HN, Slashdot and Reddit frequently have thousands of posts on a single story and many of the posts are excellent.
The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.
You can write something completely reasonable and still attract absolute dickheads - the internet is pretty special like that. I think a more realistic position is about how your commenting system motivates better comments, not to avoid criticism but to create a better product for your audience.
e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content.
My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.
I would recommend you read "The Internet of Garbage" by Sarah Jeong, which tackles this argument in a lot of depth. It's also very cheap for an e-book!
Nonsense. Literally any comment section on any news website will be filled with people spouting off their random insanity because it's simply a platform. The actual content of the article rarely even matters to these people.
We can easily discern, with statistics, which political ideology is providing all the insane comments. But in places like HN, people will scream at you for being partisan if you mention it.
I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.
That's the thing about reddit - it's so big that you can find whatever you want. Whether you want polite discussion about woodworking, erotic fan-fiction, or examples of horrible racism and misogyny so you can write an article for HuffPoabout how horrible Reddit is, you will find what you're looking for.
But I'm pretty sure that was true of the internet before Reddit came along, too. And I don't see how combining all of those discussion groups under the same domain made the world any worse than back when they were three separate message boards.
Interesting to look back on this. Reddit seems to be doing fine now - it's put the line in a clear and simple place, and while there are occasional paranoid grumblings that certain subreddits are getting away with brigading it's mostly working out. Whereas Twitter - which seemed to follow a line closer to the one being advocated there - is a disaster area.
I work in one of the most controversial crypo fields out there - Bitcoin - and other than blocking dozens of people my experience on twitter is fine. Or put another way, the blocking/filtering tools work and let me focus on people worth talking too.
It's open discussion forums like reddit where my experience sucks; /r/btc is a trash fire.
Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016 reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity.
Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by far outstripped its prosocial functions.
The model of Reddit as a multistory building with a basement is flawed from the outset. It's more like a building in n-dimensional hyperspace. No matter what room you're in, the doors that lead to every other room, as well as to the street outside, are never more than a footstep away.
The same is true of the Web as a whole, at least until we allow governments and other special interests to start nailing various doors shut.
This does not actually seem to describe the state of the internet generally. I gravitate more and more towards little pocket-universe parts of the network that are essentially invisible, but (apropos of the article) things like comment sections are quite often the functional equivalent of a giant neon ASSHOLES WELCOME sign above the door.
The problem with generalizing about Reddit is not its size, it's that Reddit is made up of a bunch of separate forums with separate mods and rules and users and so forth. It's just a place where discussion boards live. Reddit : forums :: Blogspot : blogs.
I used to make more or less this same argument, by analogy to Usenet, phpBB forums, etc.
My take now is that this falls apart in that the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system, moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture. While it's true that userbase and culture are differentiated between subreddits, they aren't really isolated enough, and maybe more importantly, things like GamerGate and /r/The_Donald keep happening.
It doesn't work to assume that every space or interaction on reddit is terrible, but at this point in history it works pretty well for me to treat reddit itself as a terrible meta-space: It routinely and actively produces systems that damage society, out of all proportion to its positive effects.
(Edit: I should add that I was on reddit pretty early in its lifecycle, probably owe my career to proggit in some very important sense, and sincerely feel for the people who have to _run_ the damn thing. It's been a pretty amazing platform in many ways, and it still feels kind of bad to write it off.)
> the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system, moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture.
I don't buy this, not a whit. I think /r/the_donald and /r/woodworking are as different as any two phpbb messageboards on the pre-reddit internet ever were. What is the same between them (the voting, mod tools, etc) are not opinionated enough to affect the culture, they are the bare minimum necessary to make the site work.
I don't think Reddit has changed as much as you think it has. It had its share of racists and trolls back in the halcyon days you remember, and it dealt with them (or didn't) pretty much the same way back then as it does now. If anything it is doing better on that score. But I do agree that something has changed, and I have a theory on what that is, which I will now share with you (and the one or two people who ever read HN comment threads more than a day old):
I think that what's changed is the, shall we say, meta-conversation about Reddit in the larger media. For the past 2-3 years or so, the question, "Is Reddit racist/sexist/etc?" has been a newsworthy one. Like any newsworthy topic, it has generated commentary: pro- and con- essays, nuanced opinions and dumb ones, insightful well-researched articles and misleading clickbait journalism, blog posts, FB comments, etc, etc. It spawned numerous sub-controversies (Did Ellen Pao make things better or worse? Was banning /r/whatever censorship or not?), each of which was a new opportunity for all of the bloggers and journalists and randos to weigh in again and argue some more.
Point is, if you follow this meta-conversation, by reading articles about Gamergate and Ellen Pao and so forth, you are exposed to much more of the worst Reddit has to offer than you would've been simply by using Reddit as a discussion forum to talk about fly-fishing or programming or whatever it is you went there to chat about. From the sounds of it, you did follow this stuff, at least casually. And it seems plausible to me that that changed your opinion more than any real change in the underlying "character" of Reddit (to the extent that such a thing even exists).
Eh. I see your point. I'll grant that it's more or less true, from a certain angle: My thoughts on reddit are influenced as much, these days, by its effect on the wider world as by experience on the site itself. My direct participation trailed off some 3 or 4 years ago, judging by my comment history there. On the other hand, my participation tailed off in part because being on the site was becoming actively unpleasant, and I think that the direct experience of phenomena like GG is a reasonable basis for judging a community that fosters them.
(To be clear, I think a lot of the delta here is a question of scale as much as anything. I'm well aware that there were always virulent racists and ideological misogynists present in the userbase.)
Anyway, we disagree and that is that. Thanks for a reasonable interaction.
In my humble opinion perhaps websites might benefit simply from more sorting filters on comments.
Reddit allows sorting by most upvoted and most controversial which is cool. However I wonder if sorting by the reading age of the comment for example might work. Perhaps creating a set of words which are inflammatory and sorting by most negative comments to most positive comments. Perhaps combining filters could be constructive.
Of course there are performance concerns here but nevertheless I'm sure there are better alternatives to banning comments in general.
The problem with the internet is it allows people to wall themselves off from information and people who contradict their view. Even if they're in need of said contradiction.
What you're describing is part of the problem, not the solution.
I think that's a fair point. I've seen reddit change over the years into a place where people no longer debate in the comments section, they just find the thread they agree with and comment on that. It's part of why I'm looking for somewhere else.
Can you find it though? Or, like a string of trees in a rainstorm, will it too become saturated?
I'm no longer looking for an alternative. Wishing for the good old days of dial-up BBS like Totse is useless as well. However, there's still hope this will all turn out to be a narcissism fad which will eventually give way.
Comments are one of the only time effective ways to challenge news stories. Indeed editorials in newspapers used to be a mode of public discourse. If we consider VICE a legitimate news outlet, then this a sad day.
There's a difference between reasonable public discourse and incessant trolls spamming, which is what 95% of all vice comments was. Any type of actual argument or discussion were drowned out by a multitude of "ugh another trash article by shitty vice" which doesn't add anything to the discussion whatsoever.
editorials in newspapers used to be a mode of public discourse.
Do you mean letters to the editor? If so, I agree that they do permit some public discourse. I'm sure papers also chose which letters to publish, in effect moderating the discussion.
I'm always surprised Slashdot-style tagged voting isn't more widespread, and curious what would happen if more communities tried it.
One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).
Considering Vice is run by upper-class WASPs who write as if they grew up underprivileged, it shouldn't be a surprise that most of its readers (actually working-class types) habitually call them out on their flawed, bias-filled stance.
I'm not trying to be contrarian here. The biggest issue with VICE is that it pretends to be alternative the same way Lady GaGa pretends to be alternative.
Anyone can be "alternative" but it's impossible for a well-off Canadian who hires writes specifically from upper-class NYC and LA to be legit alternative.
My point is, this is just like when Starbucks tried to copy indie coffee shops, or when record labels tried to produce "underground" bands, or when Walmart attempted to sell "hand-crafted" and "artisan" products. The premise makes the end result impossible.
They're not WASPs - the closest label you could put on them would be "hipster" or "liberal". Plus, most of the writers don't even work at VICE. Articles are contracted out to freelance writers so they don't need to pay benefits or provide office space. Only dev, strategy, management, analytics, marketing, and video/tv production are kept in-house.
Many sites have been closing their comments section. It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation, these sites just shut the community out and become a broadcast medium once again.
A notable removal of a comments section was NPR's shutdown right around the time of the Democratic National Convention. The comments were overwhelmingly anti-Hillary, but they were for the most part civil. It looked really bad because these were progressives and liberals going after her rather than rabid right-wingers. Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.
> It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message.
Insofar as "control the message" means "we are tired of anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."
> Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.
There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.
> anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."
That is a cop-out and not true for all comment sections.
> There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.
That's a huge cop-out statement to shutdown conversation, and this is about as on-topic as possible. Who are you to decide what is on-topic?
Sorry - did you read the article? It was true for Vice:
> Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise... we had to ban countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and subjects, doxxing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against pretty much every group imaginable.
> We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving forward.
If you want to put your head in the sand, more power to you. Might benefit you though to look at the whole picture and really try to observe what's happening though.
Internet writers are busy enough without having to maintain fake racist diatribes against themselves in their own comment sections. I don't see what "profit" any writer gets from shutting down the comments section; they clearly wanted to keep it open, despite the numerous accounts they had to ban. This is ludicrous.
From the perspective of someone who wants to create a narrative, and doesn't care overmuch about the truth, allowing comments on articles is just a nuissance. If they express a point of view contrary to the narrative, you have to waste time moderating them down so they can't be seen, or (in extreme cases) actually replying to them. So you just post a fake comment or two, scream "think of the children!!!" and shut it down. Or you just wait for that one mentally ill guy to post something crazy and just point to that. Same result.
It's the same tactic news sources use in other contexts, too. You want to create a narrative against candidate or political party X. So find a really loathsome person who supports X and run a story about them. Perfect. Never mind that most people affiliated with X woud never associate with that person.
In my opinion, and I would venture the opinion of most of these organizations shutting down their comment sections, the comments being posted add nothing to the discussion and have to be monitored for abuse. That's apparent on the majority of Facebook, in my experience: children arguing and calling names. There is no positive.
You want to dissent? An Internet comment is about the least effective way to do it.
I've listened to and read NPR for many years, and I've perceived (perhaps falsely as perception is not infallible) an increase in the amount of stories that I found to be questionable in terms of neutrality. In my observation, the comments section in many of these stories, on NPR and on other sites, had been pretty good about calling out slanted stories and offered an alternative viewpoint. Granted, the signal-to-noise ratio on purely factual stories was pretty poor, but I think the value of a comments section really came out when an article that was more about narrative than about reporting slipped through.
Again, in my observation, it seems like more news outlets are cutting their comments sections as the incidence of the comments calling out poor reporting increases.
I hate this trend of getting rid of comments for many reasons, but honestly it's usually because the comments section in many publications has some of the most insightful ideas. Yes, you'll occasionally have to see some idiot spouting off or see some spam, but I think the cost is worth it.
Look at Techdirt for example: great articles, and actually insightful and funny comments that add to the discussion. Every article of theirs that I check out gets at least 1 extra page view from me simply because I love checking out the comments. Shoutout to them for nurturing an actual community.
I agree with you that this trend of getting rid of comment sections has more to do with controlling the message. The corporate media doesn't have to (and can't) fool the majority of population with pro-establishment news anymore. But what they're trying to do is convince enough people that they're mostly alone and isolated in opposition to official policies. When there is no comments section with lots of dissenting voices, it's easy to feel like you're alone in being against war propaganda or whatever the latest cause the establishment is promoting.
> It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message.
I think you're ignoring the historical aspect here. Most news sites (especially ones for originally print/broadcast media) just threw together a commenting function at some point in the past 20 years because it was an easy thing to do to increase engagement. This was both before lots of people discovered internet trolling as a significant past-time, and before US politics were as polarized as they are today. These organizations never intended to be host to a "community" (though they may use that language in marketing).
Also what exactly does it mean to "dissent" against a news publication? What are you consenting to them doing in lieu of that? You can act against them with your clicks and dollars.
And isn't "controlling the message" literally the existential purpose of any publication?
What does it mean to dissent? Go look at the Guardian. They have been progressively eliminating comments sections on their stories. If you go look at the comments sections that are left it's pretty obvious why: the articles are often crap and the comments point it out. Obviously the "journos" take offense at that and start telling each other how horrible the comments are and how full of trolling it is.
In reality the comments are often pretty on point. The Guardian seems to have dropped off a cliff quality-wise since Rusbridger stopped being the editor = many stories are either hopelessly biased, hysterical, or demonstrate profound hypocrisy. Often they are simply opinion pieces where the opinions are extremist. Closing down comments is a form of sticking their heads into the sand.
> Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation
There are no technical solutions.
(There is, at best, tooling which helps to some extent but which can easily backfire.)
Moderation is necessary and difficult. Skilled human hours must be spent. Humans with the temperament and skills are rare and likely to suffer burnout. Organizations rarely value community management skills in proportion to their necessity and the difficulty of acquiring them.
Even where community management is valued, moderators are often forced to walk a narrow line between exercising power to shut down bad actors and having their authority undermined by their own organizations when bad actors complain, especially if those bad actors can be conceived of as customers.
To put it another way: Before you latch onto the view that removing comment sections is about suppressing dissent, consider life from the perspective of someone whose job it is to moderate comments.
When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it again, just forget about it. However when a youtube video on 10 ways to keep me from being productive" has its comments disabled I can live with that.
In the case of Vice it is a whole new dimension. Guys, you are journalists. The comment section often is a direct indicator on the quality of your stuff. These days there are so many BS-articles written even by you guys that I can't keep up and I really like how someone in the comment section can just point out wrong statements for everyone. I can read through the BS of trolls, just give the people a choice! If you want your comment section to be clean just implement a HN-like upvote system.
>When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it again, just forget about it.
The argument that disabling comments is censorship is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like the way a website works, just don't bother visiting it again, just forget about it.
A healthy comment section needs active moderation. Consider getting your readership involved. You could, for example, follow the Stack Exchange model by giving frequent contributors more editorial powers in the comments section.
anonymity without oversight that actively kills toxic individuals is going to revert to the lowest possible quality.
there should be some rule: The lower the friction for anonymous commentators the greater the affinity towards resembling a low quality and toxic communities.
Considering all the events that occurred in 2016 from the brexit to trump that came as huge surprises to the media, maybe media elites should be paying MORE attention to the comments.
This is a good point. The sentiment of "deplorables" is largely being removed and modeled-out from the mainstream internet/media and helps create a filter bubble. However, I don't think those comments give any value to the users of the site.
I think many people have realized that the costs (filtering & moderation) vs. benefits (community engagement) of comment sections just don't make sense for most websites.
I suspect that for comment sections to be good the users need to actually be invested in the 'forum' they're posting in. Without any skin in the game (reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to add value and the system becomes dominated by 'low value' posts (like trolls, flamewars, spambots, etc.).
This actually a good argument toward shifting commenting into a paid subscription offering. Give access to the site free of ads and allow you to comment on articles.
I disagree, if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and less likely to self-moderate.
It would make more sense to grant commenting privileges to individuals who have engaged with the site previously and are in good standing. Much like the Product Hunt.
I think a notable exception to this is comments on the wall street journal. They are typically well-informed professionals having reasonable opinions who take the time to write in-depth comments -- not unlike this site, I suppose. And of course commenting is gated on having a paid subscription to the magazine, and I believe there is an additional paid membership that gets ones comments promoted.
I don't know if things are still like this though -- I haven't had a subscription for several years.
On the other hand, trolls and coordinated political campaigns tend to be a lot more willing to spend money to pursue their causes than people that just want to add a relevant anecdote or express their approval, so it might skew the balance of comments more towards trolling and brigading.
What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.
I don't want to pay just because people disagree with me though. For instance, I've had relatively innocuous comments get downvoted on Reddit because it's an unpopular opinion. A great way to get downvotes is to find a thread where people are complaining about speed locks in apps and post "studies have shown that distracted driving is at least as dangerous as drinking and driving."
You'll almost instantly get downvoted to at least -5, despite the verifiable truth of the statement.
It would make vote brigading really attractive as well. Imagine if /r/TheDonald users could have caused a financial impact to anyone just by downvoting their comments. Reddit would have been a nightmare.
I naively presumed mods and meta mods would dampen the impact of voting rings and disagreement votes. One additional tool might be requiring a "reason" for the downvote as /. used (still does?) to do (off-topic, irrelevant, inflammatory, etc.) and for people whose downvotes massively stray from the reason, revoke downvoting privs.
> What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.
$0.50 is a lot of money in some countries in the world. It'd make trolling vastly more expensive for people in those countries.
If you don't deal with the unpopular/controversial opinion getting downvoted problem it also devalues the unpopular/controversial opinions of those from those countries.
If you're $local_news_paper in some small US town the above is irrelevant, but NYT is read worldwide, as is HN and Reddit. (Tho I suppose Reddit more than HN.)
If you still wanna go ahead with your proposal, I think a good model on downvoting would be to see use it as currency with a relative cost plus an absolute base. E.g. absolute_base + 5%_of_current_karma. The relative cost is to avoid hoarding, the absolute cost is to avoid efficiency of karma depletion.
This. A lot of news outlets in Europe actually do that. Only paid subscribers can comment. It's a good compromise. It reduces trolling AND finances moderation.
Part of the problem is that Vice promotes their posts all over facebook to (I presume) a bipartisan demographic based on target age range.
Because these are 'sponsored posts' not ads, people who do not agree with Vice's often highly partisan slant are constantly served their relatively provocative headlines with a really easy opportunity to leave a comment (both on fb and by clicking the link and heading to the comments section).
edit: changed 'broad demographic' to 'bipartisan demographic'
I wish it didn't fall on me to point this out, but bigotry is a political position, and trolling is a personality flaw.
Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE's comment section was a liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which was always pervasive.
The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the intelligentsia, have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike us. What we haven't got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi's of the world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering them things you can't actually give them. I can't tell you how many times I've criticized liberals who respond "But conservatives [...]!".
We're supposed to be better than them. That's the whole point.
The main complaint listed by Vice in the article was that the comments section inevitably led to low quality debate, and commenters frequently had to be banned for posting racist, sexist comments, and/or releasing private information about Vice's writers or other people in the comment section. Those seem like perfectly valid reasons to shut it down, and seem orthogonal to "conservatives started winning," however you want to define that.
It has been a long time since I actually dove into a comments section on any news site and found anything other than inflammatory arguments. It seems like people target out these news sites intentionally to start these arguments with no intent of listening to the other side. I would much rather come somewhere like here, and actually seem to have mostly civil discussions even when people disagree.
Does anyone find the comment section of any news site informative and useful? If so, where?
De Correspondent, a Dutch publication, their comments section is only accessible to paying members. They treat their subscribers as a community and usually an article ends with a question to the reader to discuss.
Their publisher has a typical Medium post about their strategy. As a subscriber I would say it works, unless the topic is already really controversial.
I think it's great giving their subscribers a voice, however I don't agree that it's good to only be open to paying members. It's better to have something like subscriber accounts with unlimited comments and regular user accounts with limited number of comments.
This seems like the ideal project for a ML experiment. Offer an integrated comments section, attach the ability for humans to moderate it, and then feed the moderated items into your favorite classifier for training and see if it can learn how to mute the louder nuisances without blocking more civil discussion.
Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.
Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality).
A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I've always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to reach Reddit's size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.
I'd guess that a big part of the quality control here comes from efforts of the moderators, so I don't think that replicating the ranking system would replicate the quality of discourse.
Much of the apparent quality is the prohibition of topics that will attract controversy _regardless of their importance_ and regardless of the authenticity of the commenters who spam nonsense on it.
For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.
It'd only work if you keep the quality of the people commenting the same or better. There's nothing really unique about the way HN works, there's just smarter people here, on average, than in your typical Youtube comment thread.
>Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality
It's easy to maintain quality when the majority of your visitors have the same political and social beliefs. Basic income, renewable energy, income inequality...
It gets really old for people living outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.
Are you implying that NH is limiting its audience to politically agreeable, or that those who disagree self-censor themselves and move to other platforms?
If the latter, it does invite the question of why. Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?
If the latter, it does invite the question of why.
It's simply not worth the effort. Forget about the political topics you mention for a second. Changing minds in that realm through conversation is know to be hard. Look at something easier like conveying factual information about non-controversial topics.
Even in that case, if a topic is complicated enough that an early 20's newbie can't pick it up from a 1000-word medium essay, forget it. People who engage in trying to inform are fighting a constant uphill battle with no upside if they succeed.
Now pile the baggage back on of trying to disagree the "conventional wisdom" of a social bubble. A few try, most give up, and the spiteful join the jokers in trolling.
> Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?
If you care about your karma level, you have to be careful about it. There are some perfectly reasonable positions that attract downvotes from some quarters. At the end of the day, it's just internet points, though. Sometimes unpopular things need to be said, if for no other reason than to register the existence of dissenting opinions.
You think that because I'd like to see a basic income, care about renewable energy and income equality, that I must be living in the Silicon Valley bubble? Is that genuinely what you think?
You think that because I'd like to see a basic income, care about renewable energy and income equality, that I must be living in the Silicon Valley bubble?
Nope, you're not "in a bubble" for holding those positions. I see parent poster as listing some things that happen to be popular in the bubble, even if they're also generic american left. When discussing a "bubble", it doesn't matter what the positions happen to be, but how they're discussed, how uniform opinions are, how well they understand where their own positions fit into the contemporary political spectrum of people who share their government, how dissent is handled, etc...
Is that genuinely* what you think?*
Now, this remark is how I know you're in the bubble.
That is a bizarrely anti-factual description of HN, which as a moderator I can tell you is deeply ideologically divided. It surprises me that this isn't obvious.
> Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality
For the most part, especially on well trodden topics that regularly feature on HN (tech, science, &tc). Unfortunately most HNers have the same blind spots and are unable to spot low-quality comments on more esoteric/fringe subjects - especially if it confirms their bias. I've seen inaccurate screeds about 3rd world countries be voted to the top more times than I care to count. Sadly, after many years, I still can't think of a way to personally profit from from this knowledge-gap, maybe via some form of arbitrage?
I honestly believe that the HN community is good largely because the website is so terrible. The buggy and unappealing UX turns off most low effort users.
I think that it's simply too easy to comment. If there were a cost or some kind of difficulty in doing it that slowed down the process and made people think twice it would be completely different.
One possible solution to this problem is to use a crowdworking platform like Mechanical Turk to delete low quality comments. This is a lot cheaper than employing dedicated moderation teams, but there is a trade-off in that more low quality comments will slip through the net.
I’ve wished that there was some kind of HTTP header I could have my UA send that told the server not to bother sending me the comments section, as I consider them to generally be a waste of resources. I even thought a little about how I’d go about formalizing it. After realizing that such a system would require an RFC, my brain broke from the irony.
I can't comment on what might be the best technique(s) for retaining a high level commentary on news sites - I don't have the expertise.
But I do know where I stand on my own digital interactions; if there appears to be the possibility of having a critical, constructive dialogue, I'll try it out.
Everything else just encourages the mob. Walk away, don't let my ego or emotion convince me to reply to non-constructive comments.
Non-constructive comments are, as the old chestnut goes, like love. Tough to define but you know them when you see them.
232 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadHonestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.
(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)
I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).
You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.
Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...
Hence, trolling.
I very much disagree with that.
Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.
Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).
Some is heavy, some is not..
Find a mainstream (non-topic-specialized) publication that doesn't do that, and I'll be surprised.
It's disappointing that the only publications willing to tackle heavy issues are things like Vogue, The Rolling Stone and Vice Magazine. The rest seem content to sit back and take a more academic approach if they take one at all.
USA Today, like CNN, is utterly worthless.
The New York Times has suffered hits to its credibility, fake photographers, plagiarism and such, but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work done by their talented staff. There's still good work being done there despite those setbacks. It's a fallacy to instantly discount everything as without merit, putting it on the same level as Breitbart.
Like always you need to regard things with a critical eye.
While other publications have had lapses in journalistic integrity, rolling stones case is especially egregious. Along every step of the way, the writer and her editors violated the basics of journalistic integrity, like not fact checking and trusting one side.
[0]http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...
Yes. The "story" made specific criminal accusations.
> You must live in a world where nobody is credible.
Publications are held to a different standard.
> New York Times... but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work
It just means you can no longer trust the publication.
> putting it on the same level as Breitbart
Here we go. Tell me what's wrong with Breitbart?
Every story they run on climate change is a pile of innumerate, scientifically illiterate crap? Those are the only stories I see from them as they get quoted for amusement value sometimes on the Sea Ice forums.
But maybe their sports coverage is good or something. Who knows.
You, apparently, since you talked of "the same level as Breitbart", though don't apparently know what that is.
Also, if you have specific knowledge of a subject area, you might be inclined to a kind of reversal of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: judging a publication on you area of expertise alone, when publications may differ in their relative strengths.
On the other hand.. You answered for them? Only astrodust can know what problem astrodust has with Breitbart...
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/14/media/breitbart-incendiary-h...
Just to pick one: 'A July article suggested that research revealed "women might just suck at job interviews."'
Is this claim false?
If you want a private conversation, then HN comments are the wrong venue.
I was asking astrodust specifically, and anyone else can see the answer; this would not be the case with a "private conversion".
You have got to be fucking kidding.
If you don't know what's wrong with Breitbart you have absolutely no place to criticize anyone.
I guess we both have blind-spots, so let's share the evidence. There's been a lot of fake news around.
https://notvice.com/fact-checking-vice-a-fiction-2d482100116...
In my opinion, Vice is nothing more than a clickbait machine that got somehow famous for being "edgy".
Yes, you need a few people willing to go through the filth, but you will get a better online presence out of it.
Demonstrate the cost/benefit advantage of having to police these garbage piles and maybe I'll buy it. But I don't believe that most people read the Times or CBC or WaPo for the comment section. More likely they read those outlets despite them.
I agree with Vice. Leave the discussion to dedicated services like Reddit, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and focus on core competencies: producing top notch content.
Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-revie...
The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.
Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.
As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.
MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.
This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.
I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)
It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.
Not so much as bad jouirnalism
Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump).
None gets solved by polling trolls.
I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.
Actually, a few journalists who spent serious time hitting the streets outside London concluded that Brexit would win or at least was quite likely, just by talking to people. They were largely ignored because they weren't "experts", just people talking to other people. John Harris being an example of that.
No one addresses the obvious weaknesses, they just say "this is the best we have", but then act with confidence in the predictions, rather than admit we don't know.
Those were not shocking events. People wanted a prediction with more confidence than those sources of prediction were able to provide. Faced with the hard limitations of existing predictive tools, people that should damn well know better started listening when they found someone to tell them "Nate Silver has Trump at 25%" really meant "Hillary will win."
It would not have been irresponsible to account for the possibility of the less likely but still possible outcome. In fact it would be irresponsible to NOT be prepared for it.
>Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.
We're never going to be able to predict the future with total accuracy. The question is how we want to face them limitations of that accuracy. People who don't take "no" for an answer will read too much into unreliable predictions and attempt to rebuild systems for more predictable results regardless of externalities. The question should be how we adapt to that reality.
Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.
Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.
But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.
The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.
The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.
e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content.
My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.
I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.
Can you explain your reasoning behind that?
*https://chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/
But I'm pretty sure that was true of the internet before Reddit came along, too. And I don't see how combining all of those discussion groups under the same domain made the world any worse than back when they were three separate message boards.
I work in one of the most controversial crypo fields out there - Bitcoin - and other than blocking dozens of people my experience on twitter is fine. Or put another way, the blocking/filtering tools work and let me focus on people worth talking too.
It's open discussion forums like reddit where my experience sucks; /r/btc is a trash fire.
Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016 reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity.
Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by far outstripped its prosocial functions.
The same is true of the Web as a whole, at least until we allow governments and other special interests to start nailing various doors shut.
And again, the cave entrance is never more than a few steps behind you.
My take now is that this falls apart in that the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system, moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture. While it's true that userbase and culture are differentiated between subreddits, they aren't really isolated enough, and maybe more importantly, things like GamerGate and /r/The_Donald keep happening.
It doesn't work to assume that every space or interaction on reddit is terrible, but at this point in history it works pretty well for me to treat reddit itself as a terrible meta-space: It routinely and actively produces systems that damage society, out of all proportion to its positive effects.
(Edit: I should add that I was on reddit pretty early in its lifecycle, probably owe my career to proggit in some very important sense, and sincerely feel for the people who have to _run_ the damn thing. It's been a pretty amazing platform in many ways, and it still feels kind of bad to write it off.)
I don't buy this, not a whit. I think /r/the_donald and /r/woodworking are as different as any two phpbb messageboards on the pre-reddit internet ever were. What is the same between them (the voting, mod tools, etc) are not opinionated enough to affect the culture, they are the bare minimum necessary to make the site work.
I don't think Reddit has changed as much as you think it has. It had its share of racists and trolls back in the halcyon days you remember, and it dealt with them (or didn't) pretty much the same way back then as it does now. If anything it is doing better on that score. But I do agree that something has changed, and I have a theory on what that is, which I will now share with you (and the one or two people who ever read HN comment threads more than a day old):
I think that what's changed is the, shall we say, meta-conversation about Reddit in the larger media. For the past 2-3 years or so, the question, "Is Reddit racist/sexist/etc?" has been a newsworthy one. Like any newsworthy topic, it has generated commentary: pro- and con- essays, nuanced opinions and dumb ones, insightful well-researched articles and misleading clickbait journalism, blog posts, FB comments, etc, etc. It spawned numerous sub-controversies (Did Ellen Pao make things better or worse? Was banning /r/whatever censorship or not?), each of which was a new opportunity for all of the bloggers and journalists and randos to weigh in again and argue some more.
Point is, if you follow this meta-conversation, by reading articles about Gamergate and Ellen Pao and so forth, you are exposed to much more of the worst Reddit has to offer than you would've been simply by using Reddit as a discussion forum to talk about fly-fishing or programming or whatever it is you went there to chat about. From the sounds of it, you did follow this stuff, at least casually. And it seems plausible to me that that changed your opinion more than any real change in the underlying "character" of Reddit (to the extent that such a thing even exists).
(To be clear, I think a lot of the delta here is a question of scale as much as anything. I'm well aware that there were always virulent racists and ideological misogynists present in the userbase.)
Anyway, we disagree and that is that. Thanks for a reasonable interaction.
Reddit allows sorting by most upvoted and most controversial which is cool. However I wonder if sorting by the reading age of the comment for example might work. Perhaps creating a set of words which are inflammatory and sorting by most negative comments to most positive comments. Perhaps combining filters could be constructive.
Of course there are performance concerns here but nevertheless I'm sure there are better alternatives to banning comments in general.
What you're describing is part of the problem, not the solution.
I'm no longer looking for an alternative. Wishing for the good old days of dial-up BBS like Totse is useless as well. However, there's still hope this will all turn out to be a narcissism fad which will eventually give way.
There might be something useful in spam detection, but it's a fine line between moderation and censorship.
Well, there's your problem.
Do you mean letters to the editor? If so, I agree that they do permit some public discourse. I'm sure papers also chose which letters to publish, in effect moderating the discussion.
One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).
I'm not trying to be contrarian here. The biggest issue with VICE is that it pretends to be alternative the same way Lady GaGa pretends to be alternative.
My point is, this is just like when Starbucks tried to copy indie coffee shops, or when record labels tried to produce "underground" bands, or when Walmart attempted to sell "hand-crafted" and "artisan" products. The premise makes the end result impossible.
A notable removal of a comments section was NPR's shutdown right around the time of the Democratic National Convention. The comments were overwhelmingly anti-Hillary, but they were for the most part civil. It looked really bad because these were progressives and liberals going after her rather than rabid right-wingers. Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.
Insofar as "control the message" means "we are tired of anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."
> Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.
There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.
What it lacks in veracity it makes up for in truthiness.
That is a cop-out and not true for all comment sections.
> There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.
That's a huge cop-out statement to shutdown conversation, and this is about as on-topic as possible. Who are you to decide what is on-topic?
> Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise... we had to ban countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and subjects, doxxing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against pretty much every group imaginable.
> We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving forward.
2. use the comments from #1 to argue that anonymous comment sections should be shut down
3. profit!
It's the same tactic news sources use in other contexts, too. You want to create a narrative against candidate or political party X. So find a really loathsome person who supports X and run a story about them. Perfect. Never mind that most people affiliated with X woud never associate with that person.
You want to dissent? An Internet comment is about the least effective way to do it.
Again, in my observation, it seems like more news outlets are cutting their comments sections as the incidence of the comments calling out poor reporting increases.
Look at Techdirt for example: great articles, and actually insightful and funny comments that add to the discussion. Every article of theirs that I check out gets at least 1 extra page view from me simply because I love checking out the comments. Shoutout to them for nurturing an actual community.
I agree with you that this trend of getting rid of comment sections has more to do with controlling the message. The corporate media doesn't have to (and can't) fool the majority of population with pro-establishment news anymore. But what they're trying to do is convince enough people that they're mostly alone and isolated in opposition to official policies. When there is no comments section with lots of dissenting voices, it's easy to feel like you're alone in being against war propaganda or whatever the latest cause the establishment is promoting.
I think you're ignoring the historical aspect here. Most news sites (especially ones for originally print/broadcast media) just threw together a commenting function at some point in the past 20 years because it was an easy thing to do to increase engagement. This was both before lots of people discovered internet trolling as a significant past-time, and before US politics were as polarized as they are today. These organizations never intended to be host to a "community" (though they may use that language in marketing).
Also what exactly does it mean to "dissent" against a news publication? What are you consenting to them doing in lieu of that? You can act against them with your clicks and dollars. And isn't "controlling the message" literally the existential purpose of any publication?
In reality the comments are often pretty on point. The Guardian seems to have dropped off a cliff quality-wise since Rusbridger stopped being the editor = many stories are either hopelessly biased, hysterical, or demonstrate profound hypocrisy. Often they are simply opinion pieces where the opinions are extremist. Closing down comments is a form of sticking their heads into the sand.
There are no technical solutions.
(There is, at best, tooling which helps to some extent but which can easily backfire.)
Moderation is necessary and difficult. Skilled human hours must be spent. Humans with the temperament and skills are rare and likely to suffer burnout. Organizations rarely value community management skills in proportion to their necessity and the difficulty of acquiring them.
Even where community management is valued, moderators are often forced to walk a narrow line between exercising power to shut down bad actors and having their authority undermined by their own organizations when bad actors complain, especially if those bad actors can be conceived of as customers.
To put it another way: Before you latch onto the view that removing comment sections is about suppressing dissent, consider life from the perspective of someone whose job it is to moderate comments.
The argument that disabling comments is censorship is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like the way a website works, just don't bother visiting it again, just forget about it.
I've seen big youtube channels switch to human moderation and that made the comment section a real place for discussion.
there should be some rule: The lower the friction for anonymous commentators the greater the affinity towards resembling a low quality and toxic communities.
I suspect that for comment sections to be good the users need to actually be invested in the 'forum' they're posting in. Without any skin in the game (reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to add value and the system becomes dominated by 'low value' posts (like trolls, flamewars, spambots, etc.).
It would make more sense to grant commenting privileges to individuals who have engaged with the site previously and are in good standing. Much like the Product Hunt.
Not if getting banned means they have to buy a new account to post again.
I don't know if things are still like this though -- I haven't had a subscription for several years.
On the other hand, trolls and coordinated political campaigns tend to be a lot more willing to spend money to pursue their causes than people that just want to add a relevant anecdote or express their approval, so it might skew the balance of comments more towards trolling and brigading.
You'll almost instantly get downvoted to at least -5, despite the verifiable truth of the statement.
It would make vote brigading really attractive as well. Imagine if /r/TheDonald users could have caused a financial impact to anyone just by downvoting their comments. Reddit would have been a nightmare.
$0.50 is a lot of money in some countries in the world. It'd make trolling vastly more expensive for people in those countries.
If you don't deal with the unpopular/controversial opinion getting downvoted problem it also devalues the unpopular/controversial opinions of those from those countries.
If you're $local_news_paper in some small US town the above is irrelevant, but NYT is read worldwide, as is HN and Reddit. (Tho I suppose Reddit more than HN.)
If you still wanna go ahead with your proposal, I think a good model on downvoting would be to see use it as currency with a relative cost plus an absolute base. E.g. absolute_base + 5%_of_current_karma. The relative cost is to avoid hoarding, the absolute cost is to avoid efficiency of karma depletion.
or, don't do this, and make seeing comments optional.
Because these are 'sponsored posts' not ads, people who do not agree with Vice's often highly partisan slant are constantly served their relatively provocative headlines with a really easy opportunity to leave a comment (both on fb and by clicking the link and heading to the comments section).
edit: changed 'broad demographic' to 'bipartisan demographic'
Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE's comment section was a liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which was always pervasive.
The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the intelligentsia, have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike us. What we haven't got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi's of the world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering them things you can't actually give them. I can't tell you how many times I've criticized liberals who respond "But conservatives [...]!".
We're supposed to be better than them. That's the whole point.
There's zero evidence for this. Please read the article.
I don't believe you for a second, though.
Does anyone find the comment section of any news site informative and useful? If so, where?
Their publisher has a typical Medium post about their strategy. As a subscriber I would say it works, unless the topic is already really controversial.
https://medium.com/@ejpfauth/lets-give-reader-comments-anoth...
Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.
A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I've always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to reach Reddit's size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.
Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is built on.
For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/forgers-use-fak...
It's easy to maintain quality when the majority of your visitors have the same political and social beliefs. Basic income, renewable energy, income inequality...
It gets really old for people living outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.
If the latter, it does invite the question of why. Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?
It's simply not worth the effort. Forget about the political topics you mention for a second. Changing minds in that realm through conversation is know to be hard. Look at something easier like conveying factual information about non-controversial topics.
Even in that case, if a topic is complicated enough that an early 20's newbie can't pick it up from a 1000-word medium essay, forget it. People who engage in trying to inform are fighting a constant uphill battle with no upside if they succeed.
Now pile the baggage back on of trying to disagree the "conventional wisdom" of a social bubble. A few try, most give up, and the spiteful join the jokers in trolling.
If you care about your karma level, you have to be careful about it. There are some perfectly reasonable positions that attract downvotes from some quarters. At the end of the day, it's just internet points, though. Sometimes unpopular things need to be said, if for no other reason than to register the existence of dissenting opinions.
Nope, you're not "in a bubble" for holding those positions. I see parent poster as listing some things that happen to be popular in the bubble, even if they're also generic american left. When discussing a "bubble", it doesn't matter what the positions happen to be, but how they're discussed, how uniform opinions are, how well they understand where their own positions fit into the contemporary political spectrum of people who share their government, how dissent is handled, etc...
Is that genuinely* what you think?*
Now, this remark is how I know you're in the bubble.
Lack of high-sticky features (no "notifications" indicator, e.g.) also help.
Founding cohort and community also help.
Websites get the commenters they deserve. Leave trolls unchecked because they bring in clicks - become a haven for trolls.
For the most part, especially on well trodden topics that regularly feature on HN (tech, science, &tc). Unfortunately most HNers have the same blind spots and are unable to spot low-quality comments on more esoteric/fringe subjects - especially if it confirms their bias. I've seen inaccurate screeds about 3rd world countries be voted to the top more times than I care to count. Sadly, after many years, I still can't think of a way to personally profit from from this knowledge-gap, maybe via some form of arbitrage?
But I do know where I stand on my own digital interactions; if there appears to be the possibility of having a critical, constructive dialogue, I'll try it out.
Everything else just encourages the mob. Walk away, don't let my ego or emotion convince me to reply to non-constructive comments.
Non-constructive comments are, as the old chestnut goes, like love. Tough to define but you know them when you see them.