Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 463 posts

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#181

Post by overcast »

e40 wrote: post #179
gr3yh47 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.

Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.

Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#182

Post by sevensor »

frankc wrote: post #59

I propose the following system for commenting on news sites: -comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam This eliminates any back and forth arg…

I like it the idea of an interval between publication and comment! However I don't think back-and-forth is necessarily bad. I'd modify your proposal to include two or three rounds of rebuttal, each at a 3-day interval. You'd have to be seriously invested in the discussion to participate, and there's very little room for a flamewar to develop.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#183

Post by ebbv »

Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.)

It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR to have an image hosting service.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#184

Post by overcast »

e40 wrote: post #177
overcast wrote: post #170

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 conce…

It depends on the subreddit. There are many where civil conversation is the norm. r/politics and places like that are horrible. Just remove them from your default set.

You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#185

Post by Balgair »

overcast wrote: post #170

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 conce…

Then make sure to NOT talk about HN. Hidden gems only stay gems if you do NOT blab about them.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#186

Post by iLoch »

overcast wrote: post #181
e40 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.

Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?

Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer to keep things the way they are.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#187

Post by gjem97 »

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…

I don't know enough about Disqus to render an opinion, but I do find it entertaining that the sample comments shown in the animation on their front page are entirely noise, in that they contain nothing more than a "Yay!" sentiment.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#188

Post by snerbles »

r0muald wrote: post #180
justinlardinois wrote: post #140

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. 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 solution to bad comments is deleting them before they are even visible to other users. Deleting aggressively, as is done in certain subreddits (r/science) may seem offensive towards naive users who just want to add their "2 c" to the discussion, but it's the only effective AND honest strategy: if your comment adds little of interest, it's worth nothing. The bar should be very high, the more popular the website th…

The aggressive moderation in /r/science is quite honest compared to other subreddits, which is partly why its moderators attract less controversy when compared to others such as /r/news.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#189

Post by overcast »

iLoch wrote: post #186
overcast wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?

Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer to keep things the way they are.

Fair, I think they could simply just sort by most recently commented posts you've created, and that would just solve that issue.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#190

Post by overcast »

Balgair wrote: post #185
overcast wrote: post #170

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 conce…

Then make sure to NOT talk about HN. Hidden gems only stay gems if you do NOT blab about them.

HN doesn't appeal to the general population. It works because it's niche to a specific crowd, that is probably more educated, and working towards a specific goal of improving things in general.
Post reply on HN