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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#121

Post by unethical_ban »

mtberatwork wrote: post #32
unethical_ban wrote: post #8

Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation. The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.

> Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter... Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.

I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a public square is lazy and lacks vision.

[1] http://idaretolisten.org

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#122

Post by mosburger »

In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to "engage" with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for not having comments on his site).

But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have "Letters to the Editor," which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every article?

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#123

Post by empath75 »

mrweasel wrote: post #78

We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them. It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments. What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit…

4chan is a cesspool.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#125

Post by tater_sent_me »

showerst wrote: post #106
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

no we dont. internet points are stupid.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#126

Post by darkstar999 »

psyc wrote: post #94
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In no way and by no stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, it's more insidious than that. I've been a heavy Reddit user for 7 years. The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail. They just do it after the comments appear, giving the impression that free discussion is still happening. Which comments and threads are allowed to persist is becoming very obviously narrower over time, all over the site. The…

> The situation on most subreddits is now basically all comments being moderator-approved at a fine level of detail.

Uhh... do you have a source for this?

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#127

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

Think of it this way:

Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard.

Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#128

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

The German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ / http://www.faz.net) also has thoughtful comments. I used to think it was something about the community but at this point it seems more related to moderation. You don't see a lot of trolls on the site.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#129

Post by guard-of-terra »

Karunamon wrote: post #117
guard-of-terra wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting. Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches. On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that…

Doesn't make the issues not relevant. Do you argue that we're incapable of dealing with these issues for all eternity?

"Who voted this up?" is the community rift.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#130

Post by guard-of-terra »

empath75 wrote: post #119
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…

I only see that on political posts.

Unfortunately, not much interesting happens outside of politics. CRISPR and exoplanets spring to mind as exceptions, but software field definitely stalled.

Politics seems to be the force that can bury any amount of advancements in other fields, hence interest.

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