NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments • Hacker News Board

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#161

Post by epistasis » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:27 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #138

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…

> (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in... Of course no one ever…

Sadly I feel that this is one of those cases where it's impossible for the correction to ever overcome the initial misinformation. On average, People do not accept new info when it refutes their existing knowledge base. This is doubly so in tribal areas like politics.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#162

Post by formula1 » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #160

formula1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Above and beyond" are the key words here. If this was a 100% private sector I would be fine with it because its about the companies choice. But the fact it is associated to the gov opens up many questions. - how do gov programs want to accept feedback? - does the government want open forums and discusion places? - how much anonymity does the gov want to provide in such discussions? - what types of contracts forve a…

What other government resources should have comment sections? Should IRS.GOV?

Thats an interesting point actually. Their customer oriented subdomain doesnt accept comments in either. Also is pretty inactive. Perhaps this has been a long time coming and is only now happening to the bigger names

http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta-blog

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c

Edit : Fbi alo doesnt accept comments

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted-federal-a...

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#163

Post by millermp12 » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:30 PM UTC

jamisteven wrote: post #4

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.

Left leaning sure, but i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times. If you listen to them regularly you would see that. The problem with most on the right is they hear one news outlet say something negative about the right and they turn off the channel and assume they are all on a right wing bashing spree. NPR is not this way in the least bit. This is coming from a republican.

"i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times"

I used to listen to NPR religiously (>4 hrs a week) before my apostasy from the Left. I could probably count on one hand the times they came down on someone on the Left e.g. bringing up to Coates his threat to assault his teacher and even in that case it was kind of a lob with no follow-up mean to allow self-exoneration (no push back in the absence of a mea culpa either).

So, no. I think this statement is disingenuous.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#164

Post by rexaliquid » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #115

rexaliquid wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly ~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.

Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet:

http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#165

Post by dageshi » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

justinlardinois wrote: post #140

omginternets wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't think you're correctly identifying the problem. In my experience, the problem with comments, especially on news sites, is a glut of bad comments, rather than a lack of good comments. This solution doesn't disin…

The slashdot system for categorising comments seemed to work really well at making the highest quality comments stand out, I wonder why other sites haven't tried something similar, I don't think I've seen it used elsewhere.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#166

Post by MollyR » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #74

MollyR wrote: post #5

With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

So something like a multi-niche thing? Where each niche gets it own page, with posts and comments? Might catch on. We can those pages subreddits...

Well I was thinking the hackernews model is better than the reddit model.

I'm still researching how important is it for companies to have control over their own site.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#167

Post by Theodores » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

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…

When I was delivering newspapers as a small child many aeons ago, the best page of The Guardian was 'letters to the editor'. The rest of the paper was pretty good back then, there was no email, so anything printed in the 'letters to the editor' had to be posted in, to appear some time after the events in question.

Needless to say an event happened and was reported the next day, so it could be a whole week between the Trump-of-the-day saying something and comment appearing about it. All of this would be filtered by the 'editor', however you did have frequent letters by the likes of Keith Flett, who somehow got his letters published more often than the other 3-5 million readers (as it was back then, just UK sales with poor distribution in places like Birmingham).

There were no 'likes' back then so you had to have something to say to bother writing in.

How do we get a digital equivalent? I don't buy the dead-tree paper these days so no idea if 'letters to the editor' still exists, but, back then it was good, very good.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#168

Post by jonathankoren » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #151

jonathankoren wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't think agree/disagree votes apply to articles like they apply to comments? And given what I've seen of the algorithm here, page positioning is a lot more complicated than vote count weighted by time.

I think it's harder to agree/disagree with the typical headlines featured on HN. Most articles on HN appear to be straight.

But let's say that two articles were in the queue, one pro-X, the other anti-X and the pro-X forces were dominant. Sure the pro-X article would hit the FP, but the anti-X forces would still comment on it and be down voted.

Also the bias is only visible in the comment section because down voted comments remain visible, whereas a down voted article gets flushed down the memory hole.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#169

Post by roywiggins » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

Metafilter does moderation well. They have a team of paid moderators. It costs a token $5 to join, which means it's expensive to generate sock puppets and anyway the moderators keep your credit card on file so they can permaban you if they need to.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#170

Post by overcast » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.