Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?
Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?
Conversation is impossible when you assume everyone is out to get you.
NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
231–240 of 463 posts
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's not just r/politics—that's just one example. r/programming is another good example. The community there is very hostile and actively downvote and hate on most new things that aren't C++/Java/.NET/Python sometimes. It's been stereotyped as a bunch of overly angry .NET/Java devs, not sure how accurate that is but the angry part is right. It's just a waste of time.
I think it's grown that way over time. Used to be very focused on functional and dynamic languages back in the day. Hell, Perl was the hot topic back in 2005-2007 era reddit.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#233This 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…
Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell.
While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to encourage dissent.
I also get that HN, being mostly about tech startups, has different priorities than me personally.
I am forever in search of a place online to have good discussions and debate with a respectful community. The comment sections on news sites are rarely the place — even for very respectable publications. I'm fully in favor of NPR's move and other sites should follow.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if there's a way to allocate names that are pseudonymous but not disposable. That is: you can have an alter ego (or 5) that aren't easily linked to your real identity, but new identities are hard enough to come by that getting banned isn't trivially bypassed by a new identity. This would be a major step for email/messaging spam too.
SomethingAwful handles this by charging for accounts, so if you get banned it costs 5 or 10 dollars to get a new identity. Urbit handles this in a decentralized way by intentionally limiting the namespace, so that once it runs out you have to buy a name/address from someone who's selling.
Sure. For something global though, it might be a problem when your price per account is five minutes' wages in one country and five days in another.
I wonder if there's a way around this.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#235This 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…
Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to enc…
> This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell.
Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to enc…
> This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?
Sure, let me dig some up.
[edit, adding a link to a comment]
Here is one (th13's reply was downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447
(This is more tedious than I thought, I'll see if I can dig up some more. Looks like in the future I should make note of these as I see them.)
[edit, adding a second link to a comment]
You may need to follow the 'parent' link to see the telltale gray of the downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287
(Seriously, this is tedious. I know there are more, but I won't dig up anymore unless I'm pressured to do so.)
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 matte…
i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens. as for brooks' column, you…
I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.
The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#238Earlier 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.
Not so (imo). The neutralpolitics subreddit has grown continually for some years now, especially in the last 12 months, and I'd say that the moderators are doing a solid job of maintaining appropriate discussion and keeping things where they were intended at the start: rational, sourced, with a heavy hand on emotional content and personal attacks.
Similarly, I dropped r/gaming years ago, but r/games has been reliable enough and good enough for such a period that it's evolved into my default place I look for gaming news. (The League of Legends subreddit also does pretty well on content and moderation, for something running at the scale of some of the defaults).
The problem I have with reddit, usually, is discovery - its difficult to find subreddits that are popular enough not to be dead, have the content I want, and are managed in good fashion to prevent the usual content/comment trash.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#239Earlier 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.
Slashdot's moderation system was vaguely effective. Complete crap rarely rose to the top.
A great deal of high-quality commentary was buried, however, often the best and most informative. That's fairliy much par for the course.
Much the early vibe on the site came from the fact that it was simply where intelligent people were commenting online -- especially the early Free Software crowd (well, early in terms of Web 1.0 -- there was the whole 1980s and early 1990s contingent as well).
ESR (before he went fully whackjob mode), Ted T'so, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, Rasterman, and others.
Much that group seems split amongst HN, LKML, LWN, and Google+ these days, along with some blogs.
Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just r/politics—that's just one example. r/programming is another good example. The community there is very hostile and actively downvote and hate on most new things that aren't C++/Java/.NET/Python sometimes. It's been stereotyped as a bunch of overly angry .NET/Java devs, not sure how accurate that is but the angry part is right. It's just a waste of time.
I think it's grown that way over time. Used to be very focused on functional and dynamic languages back in the day. Hell, Perl was the hot topic back in 2005-2007 era reddit.
Right, which just reinforces my initial statements above. Popularity breeds trash. Forums move from a small group of passionate users, to general population. This is where quality deteriorates quickly.