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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#141

Post by jonathankoren »

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…

Of the article isn't interesting, the article wouldn't have been voted up.

Marking down the comments indicates a desire by some to to enforce groupthink. Why? Because many people use votes to indicate agree-disagree instead of a quality metric.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#142

Post by incogitomode »

mosburger wrote: post #122

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…

I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on.

Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content. Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author?

Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#143

Post by jonathankoren »

empath75 wrote: post #123
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.

So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be depressed check your local paper's comment sections.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#144

Post by justinlardinois »

empath75 wrote: post #123
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.

Depends on what boards you go to. The topic boards are mostly good for serious discussion. Just avoid /v/ (neckbeards), /mu/ (circlejerk), and /pol/ (racists).

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#145

Post by justinlardinois »

Grue3 wrote: post #103

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.

Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment section before you start reading?

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#147

Post by justinlardinois »

vectorpush wrote: post #108
omginternets wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you ever listened to NPR? A large portion of the content has nothing to do with politics.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#148

Post by epoxyhockey »

cloudjacker wrote: post #43
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…

"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.

Aside from [bot] spam, I agree with the statement of Those were your users.

What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#149

Post by kuschku »

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…

A solution a German blogger did was kinda funny.

For every post you made, you had to enter a captcha.

Then, if your comment had words that were likely to be hateful, it’d show your comment again to you, and force you to enter the captcha again.

The worse the likely quality of your comment, the more captchas you’d have to enter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#150

Post by robwilliams »

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 New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.
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