191–200 of 463 posts
We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning.
Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a "Comments on HN" link at the bottom of a post.
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>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.
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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,…
Perhaps the comments sections for journalistic pieces from organizations like Ars, NPR, NYT, local news, etc could be more of a competition (like Slashdot). Top 300 comments get preserved, leave it open for a month with no comment limit and some light moderation, and let the conversation go wild (I like Reddit's system for this), then delete all but the top 300 at the end.
Adjust "300" and "top" to fit your organization's needs, just make sure they're clearly defined. Would also help limit the scope for an ML-based solution, too. :)
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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.
You're missing the point of e40's response (and others of its kind). It's not "stop whining, don't use it if you don't like it". It's informing you that there are still parts of Reddit you can get value out of if you change your usage patterns a little bit, instead of your blunt-instrument approach that leads to losing gems like (e.g.) /r/AskHistorians just because /r/politics is terrible. There's of course nothing _wrong_ with you deciding that Reddit overall isn't worth the effort, but there's nothing wrong with someone giving you an alternative in case you were unaware.
When Reddit blew up in popularity, almost everyone I know who'd used it for a long time got sick of the default feed (both submissions and comments) and then at some point found out that being parsimonious in your subreddit subscriptions can give you a pretty high-quality feed. Reacting with defensiveness and hostility to someone giving you that advice in case you didn't know is frankly just bizarre.
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 co…
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…
>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.
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NPR's mission statement doesn't include "a open forum where the users can speak to one another" though, and removing the comment section doesn't constitute censorship. The web and many social media services are available for people to publicly and freely speak their mind, unlike some other governments, where censorship does in fact exist. Ultimately, I think moves like this are good for promoting a more decentralized…
"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…
I think it's also worth considering the vast number of organizations receiving federal funding directly (and indirectly through tax breaks, subsidies, etc) and how practical a mandated per-organization discussion mechanism would be.
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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.
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…
Yes, I think using FB login pretty much solves the problem as it is today. Take a look at civilbeat.com a regional news site by Pierre Omidyar (The Intercept). I'm fairly certain they only allowed comments via FB login for years. It meant a lot fewer comments than they would have gotten but they were all legit. Now it looks like they allow FB, Twitter, or local auth. But the comments are still mostly ok. Maybe they a…
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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.
I click on "threads" on the top menu. Not sure when it was added but it shows all my comments with replies inlined.