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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#81

Post by hx87 »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #58
showerst wrote: post #17

I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…

Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content. HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensiv…

Which articles are you reading? I have yet to see a single article where that has happened.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#82

Post by showerst »

omginternets wrote: post #42
showerst wrote: post #17

I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute 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 analy…

I think that incentive idea is great, and is a smart move to build a community, particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. I like how some of the Ask reddits do it, by flagging people with verified advanced degrees. People think that news sites are afraid of conflicting opinions, but in my experience that's nonsense, it just has to be well thought out and not "DEATH TO ", which is the vast majority.

It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried.

I'll err on the side of caution with revealing employee counts, but in my experience many of the FP/Atlantic/Mother Jones/Weekly Standard/Pick your midrange site are running on a single digit to low double-digit number of web production staff, many of whom are also trying to make a writing, article layout, or fact-checking quota. The suggestion that these magazines can either get those staffers to moderate tens of thousands of comments per day, or quadruple their web staff just to improve the comments ignores the business reality.

User moderation in the normal HN/Reddit way doesn't work well on news sites, it's too easy to game or brigade, and news sites can't or won't give add unpaid moderators to be gatekeepers.

That's what's hard; creating comments is scalable, filtering them is not. Leaving them unfiltered doesn't work either.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#83

Post by formula1 »

dublinben wrote: post #68
formula1 wrote: post #28

I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass c…

Were NPR engaging in "mass censorship" before they introduced online comments in 2008? They are just returning to the status quo of the rest of their 38 year history. You are still free to comment on their stories in alternative venues, exactly as you are doing here.

"They do not need to provide anything above and beyond". I find it fascinating how polarizing this thread will be. Ill have you know I love many of their shows but I should respect people to only respond to what triggers them

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#84

Post by bryanlarsen »

notadoc wrote: post #47

95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution. The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're…

Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#85

Post by Karunamon »

omginternets wrote: post #70
vectorpush wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you feel a little disingenuous making a flippant deceleration of what is true without substantiating it?

In all fairness, NPR's reporting is of exceedingly high-quality, by journalistic standards. I admit that the comment you're replying to is flippant, but NPR does check its facts quite well.

You don't need to be broadcasting lies or bad journalism to be broadcasting a political slant. It can show up in something as mundane as story selection or one-off comments on shows that are not hard news.

There was an interesting study[1] from 2011 where NPR's Twitter social graph correlates with what you'd expect a person with left-leaning political tendencies to have. Probably a bit too broad to draw general conclusions from, but interesting as a data point still.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/03/22/science...

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#86

Post by hx87 »

qaq wrote: post #7
michaelbuddy wrote: post #2

Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.

With automated troll armies it's hard to have a reasonable comments section.

I'm pretty sure the trolls are still human, albeit employed by organizations. With that in mind, I wonder if it's possible to create sites that are nothing but trollbait (i.e. articles supporting/critical of Russia) to soak up and waste the trolls' time.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#87

Post by krapp »

qaq wrote: post #7
michaelbuddy wrote: post #2

Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.

With automated troll armies it's hard to have a reasonable comments section.

Unfortunately, one person's troll army is another person's truth brigade.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#88

Post by vectorpush »

bordercases wrote: post #44
vectorpush wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?

Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?

I'm not trying to bait, I am genuinely curious. I think it's possible to recognize bias in NPR and also recognize bias in Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe they can recommend a news outlet that they view as more impartial, even if not perfect.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#89

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

showerst wrote: post #17

I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…

> "these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges"

But suggesting people engage instead on Facebook brings a whole new set of ethical concerns. (1) Facebook manipulates users. (2) Facebook reorders feed. (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. And lets not forget that Facebook is probably outsourcing moderation anyway. Plus, Facebook commenters can be just as bad as regular site commenters.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#90

Post by legulere »

showerst wrote: post #17

I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute f…

There's a german blog that used to be popular (blog.fefe.de) without comment function. So some people built a website that offers the same blog just with a comment function. They built in a captcha function, that fails with a the probability that your comment is a troll comment.

Here's the talk about it (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

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