NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments • Hacker News Board

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#101

Post by showerst » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #92

showerst wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 majori…

Thanks for your reply! >I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters,…

RE:Machine learning: I think there are two problems with that approach, one cultural and one technological.

The cultural issue is that many news orgs are still run by people for whom the idea that technology could accidentally censor a valid criticism or ban a decent voice is just too risky. I think this is changing, and many newsrooms today a little more fluid than when I really cared about the problem 4 years ago.

The tech issue is a little bit of a cop out on my part. An ML approach is super attractive to me as a techie. Google (youtube), facebook, NYT, WaPO, and tons of other billion dollar orgs have this problem, and could loads of money by being seen as better communities.

On the more guerrilla side, hundreds of subreddits have automoderaters written by savvy, caring moderators.

They have terabytes of training data, already tagged, and world class ML experts on staff. If it was a tractable problem with business value, why wouldn't they have fixed it? I'm guessing it's the sort of thing that looks doable from the surface, but you get buried in the details.

Again, cop out answer, so please go prove me wrong!!

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#102

Post by chiefalchemist » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc.

Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable.

In short, allowing comments != community.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#103

Post by Grue3 » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#104

Post by spriggan3 » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #38

Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging. On the other hand, if…

Site using Facebook for comments usually end up full of horrible spam. Facebook isn't a good solution either.

IT's interesting to see how a lot of big websites moved from Discuss to livefyre, I wonder what's wrong with Discuss, livefyre looks like it has fewer features and options.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#105

Post by guard-of-terra » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

hx87 wrote: post #81

guard-of-terra wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like that.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#106

Post by showerst » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #89

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. P…

Yup. It's basically saying "we can't afford this, so we'll make it not our problem."

FWIW FP briefly used an embedded facebook widget, and a nonzero percent of their livefyre users logged in via FB.

It did little to nothing to stop abusive comments. The HN crowd cares a lot about what sort of history follows around our names and our handles. Many others, both in the western world and abroad, do not.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#107

Post by Karunamon » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #97

Karunamon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 concl…

That's true, but I think it misses the point. Journalism is rarely (if ever) objective . Good journalism should, however, be factually-correct and analytical. In other words, the product you're paying for is along the lines of informed opinion . The claim, as I understood it, was that NPR was making factually incorrect claims (i.e.: reporting things contrary to reality ). Either the OP has a confused understanding of…

They've done that in the past too, but citing sources is hard because usually it's the right leaning media calling out the left leaning media (and vice versa- c.f. Media Matters against Fox), and it lends itself well to people shooting the messenger by way of "that's just a $slant-ist site" rather than actually evaluating the claims.

Random search example: https://community.aarp.org/t5/Medicare-Insurance/NPR-Contine...

Factually true, but misleading in context claims about Medicare.

Another, worse example: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/14/nprs-distortions-abou...

An NPR reporter misrepresenting a Dutch report on the downing of MH317 as evidence of Russia firing the missile (while the report only says the missile was Russian-made).

NPR aside, I reject the notion that journalism can't be objective. Well, not completely, sure, in the same way that we can never completely reach the speed of light.

Does that mean we stop trying? No! Does that mean we lower our standards? Hell no! My issue is, I see this concept used more often to excuse misconduct and lazy reporting. "We can't do it, so why try?"

If someone claims to be unbiased, they should be held to their own standard, and when bias is pointed out, expected to change their ways, or else acknowledge that their statement about being unbiased was a lie.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#108

Post by vectorpush » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

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.

I'm not sure the GP would agree with your sentiments, however, NPR pretty clearly slants to the left. All their hosts lean to the left and the composition of their multi-guest panels usually include a balance of viewpoints that lean more to the left.

Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#109

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much smaller percent.)

Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-r....

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#110

Post by acbabis » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

rexaliquid wrote: post #99

coldtea wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall US audience -- should it be shut down too?

Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles. No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?

Some comment service providers like Disqus only load the comments if the user scrolls to them, while others only load if the user clicks on a button. If these services' analytics tools don't track this, they should. I'm much more interested in how many people interact with the comments section. This includes posting, lurking, voting, and flagging.