Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Embed the relevant post on the news site.
Since "karma" is transitive across Reddit and across news sites, users are slightly less likely to troll. You could also do this with some sort of reputation system across websites (Disqus could add in something like that).
The big problem with news sites is that the communities aren't big enough that there are any negative correlations associated with being a dick. Even facebook runs into this problem because there isn't any way to "punish" someone for a rude comment. Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue (at least in my very non-expert opinion). Reddit helps, with comment karma and post karma... but it obviously isn't perfect.
Reddit/HN/etc make the username behind each comment as small and discreet as possible. As much as I dislike the low content/cruft ratio of BBForum, its design emphasizes each commenter's login, and registration date. This helps at least a bit, as even visitors can readily notice the correlation between certain avatars and the quality of their posts.
Whereas on Reddit and here, I even sometimes miss that the same account is just replying to a reply--i.e. just continuing the conversation. I think the aim is to judge comments by their content rather than the character who posts them, but context is always extremely relevant. It matters whether the poster is a Senator, a thought leader, or a habitual troll. And I often get too wrapped up in the content to dig for the source.
It's also super-easy to get comment karma. For example, AskReddit has a pretty much weekly repeating set of questions, and since it's a default subreddit, lots of people vote there. Find last week's top answer and repost it. (I got the highest-voted comment on Reddit once, via AskReddit. A few weeks later, someone reposted my comment and got more upvotes than I did! And more gold!)
If you want to troll on Reddit, you will have no problems doing so. The only thing that makes certain subreddits usable are diligent mods. (Though sometimes they are too diligent. I am banned from AskReddit for apparently posting something that was in the same format as a phone number, which is "personal information". My appeal was ignored.)
While technically accurate, "slight less likely" isn't statistical significant when it comes to trolling.
Is anyone out there aware of a solution that currently exists (and is available to people like you and I?).
Reddit has made it easy to embed comments on a site since last year: https://redditblog.com/2015/03/23/announcing-embeddable-comm...
The article doesn't really try to hide it:
Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy
Anarchy?! I thought anarchy involved Mad Max style gunfights and burning oil barrels. What does "anarchy" mean in the context of a bunch of words on a web page? Oh, right, uncontrolled and uncensored discussion where people can say what they think.
Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top
So they don't like their comments (whereas they presumably did before) because over time the comments have become "stupid", "offensive" and - of course - racist/misogynistic/hate speech/bigoted.
I'm willing to bet that many of the comments that enraged them the most weren't particularly stupid or even racist, but rather belonged to a part of the political spectrum that Vice's writers wished they could make go away for real. If there's one thing 2016 shows it's the unlimited capacity for people to paint political views that they don't share of any kind, regardless of reasonableness or validity, as "racist" or "bigoted".
Comments with relatively unpopular political opinions on the site breeds discussion and views.
Comments that are literally "kill all ___" don't, scare advertisers and put your brand at risk.
Most of those comments fall in the latter camp. Look at any comments section. There's a thread on my local paper's site right now about a bicycle theft: "This n* needs to get special treatment in the big house. Confiscate the home and demo it eventually they'll turn ____town into one big lot and then can start a rebuilding in the area."
I think you're being extremely disingenuous here though. Have you actually hung around any of the poorly moderated comment sections on major news sites? Most of them are filled with flaming piles of word vomit, not the kind of enlightened right wing perspectives you claim are being censored.
Amusingly, https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/
I think this will likely be solved when human beings actually SEE others and see the reactions from others faces - thousands of years of evolution have honed this part of our social selves and that is what will be necessary to keep our less troll selves at bay.
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.
or, don't do this, and make seeing comments optional.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.
Hence, trolling.
(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Can you explain your reasoning behind that?
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.
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!
What it lacks in veracity it makes up for in truthiness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The real problem for VICE is when comments aren't from trolls - when they're debunking the article and pointing out flaws in real-time.
That being said, I'm happy to see them disable comments. This will open up an opportunity for someone else to take over managing comments on their content... Hopefully someone who cares more about open discussion.
This. But usually when the content is good and thoughtful ,(AKA void of controversy or outrage), the comment can be useful. But otherwise frankly Youtube comment is a worst place than reddit itself.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
Well, there's your problem.
I've been playing with this on a small side project (a literary journal, so the worst medium to try it out with), but it would be my dream to see a major publication try this out: Making commenting only available after correctly answering a quiz question that demonstrates that the reader has read the article. Initial questions have the ability to frame discussions, clarify controversial details, and discourage lines of thought - and on the other side, it requires little effort for an editor to implement.
I don't think that analogy holds up, though. People are free to sit down and write a well thought out email to the author of an article if they have a specific point of disagreement. The problem with comment sections is that people often times aren't even reading the story or providing constructive commentary on it. The page just becomes a platform for them to go off on whatever nonsensical theories they have and troll people.
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.
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.
This may be the real reason. Or at least a big reason.
I have seen some other sites push comments to social media in order to bolster themselves on those platforms.
There is a reason why Gavin McInnes left.
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.
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).
Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.
Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.
If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results.
Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers.
I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s.
It's called freedom of association. No one is owed a hearing by there mere presence online or even offline from private organizations and private citizens.
"If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results."
That's exactly what the web is. It's a pull model. They post pages, you send a GET request to see the content. Don't like the content then don't send the GET request.
"Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers."
It's intended for individuals and private organizations to freely choose how to disseminate/consume their content. If that offends you then maybe you're the pearl-clutcher here perhaps?
"I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s."
Sure and magically cable tv and talk radio will disappear from the Earth. /s
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.
