With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?
Like reddit?
Isn't Reddit trying to get rid of comments, too?
NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#42I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…
What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right. This seems to solve part of the problem by setting an established, if not mostly-objective, standard for comment quality: journalistic publication standards.
As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation!
Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand.
To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#43I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…
"When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise."
Those were your users.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#44Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.
Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?
Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#45I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…
While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric.
It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it.
If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#46I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in.
What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#4795% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.
The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.
Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#48With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?
Maybe.
It feels like the quality of online discussion is related to the narrowness of the topic/community.
For example: I find the comments that make it to Reddit's homepage humorous, but not really that helpful/insightful/smart. Most of the subreddits I frequent offer much better discussion, assuming the source topic is interesting. I.e., I don't expect much from r/cats. Although, even r/cats has much better comment that the homepage...
HR is a great aggregator, but still fairly narrow compared to NPR, CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, etc. And most of the commenters on those sites don't have any direct experience or insight to offer to those discussions. Until that problem is solved, the comments aren't valuable.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#49It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#50Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging. On the other hand, if…
>On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
When was the last time you used Facebook?