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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#201

Post by Shivetya »

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…

well some one's trash is another person's insightful comment. that isn't to say there isn't hate and trivial comments but far too many will simply dismiss any comment as ignorant that they don't agree with. This is most likely to occur with political or religious discussions.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#202

Post by guard-of-terra »

Karunamon wrote: post #152
guard-of-terra wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Relevance isn't the watchword for inclusion on HN, interestingness is. That's per the guidelines. And you'll note I said "online".

Politics is interesting if you ask me, because it have the property of ruining every other interesting thing.

We live online.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#203

Post by overcast »

dnautics wrote: post #198
overcast wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Click on your username in the upper right corner, then navigate to "comments" on the left.

That's the same function as "threads" in the main heading.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#204

Post by basch »

dageshi wrote: post #165
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 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.

it seems sites find it to complex to implement.

slashdot nailed moderation, no one has attempted something similar. most systems are simple up/down vote or like/report

i am also starting to wonder if the agegroup being hired to implement "social" for websites is now young enough to have missed slashdot in it s prime.

the fact that people are still brainstorming from scratch instead of talking about how to improve slashdots model reeks of reinventing the wheel because they never heard of it.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#205

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

overcast wrote: post #184
e40 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's probably due to the nature of politics.

It certainly tends to get a lot of people riled quite easily.

What's that thing about polite company not talking about politics, religion, or sex.

The average person, myself definitely included, probably doesn't have much worth listening to on the subject anyway. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke: though there certainly are many political commentators who might be worth listing to. Under some circumstances. In a crisis. Maybe.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#206

Post by ebertx »

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…

I've always thought of technology as being the sole driver behind the fragmentation of communities into small niche communities. It's interesting seeing that comments appear to be one aspect of technological change that drive people to seek niche communities (going off of another comment that it's better to frequent smaller subreddits rather than the larger, default ones).

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#207

Post by joezydeco »

roywiggins wrote: post #169
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.

Having payment linked to a name goes a long way towards deterrence, IMO.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#208

Post by wutbrodo »

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…

> Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

Funnily enough, right around the time I made an acct here (4+ years ago, after ~1 year of lurking), I saw an internal post by a well-known Googler talking about the recent drastic decline of HN comment quality and looking for a replacement. I still get value out of HN comments (clearly), but it's definitely changed substantially in the last few years, and not really for the better. I've resigned myself to every high-quality Internet community without heavy, opinionated moderation being a slow treadmill towards popularity and then mediocrity, or worse. Though this is of course something of a "you're not in traffic, you are traffic" problem.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#210

Post by iamdave »

overcast wrote: post #184
e40 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

/r/politicaldiscussion was created as a response to the malarkey that has become /r/politics and they place an emphasis on civil, reasoned debate. May be worth your time.
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