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

261–270 of 463 posts

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#261

Post by showerst »

cloudjacker wrote: post #43
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…

"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." Those were your users.

Assuming you're trolling, but at the risk of feeding:

Someone who posts "Sir your magazine and Hillary Clinton are tools of Israel and should be killed by Hamas, God willing", on all every story about the State Department, or "Oh $WRITER I see you live in DC and went to $COLLEGE, maybe I'll come pay a visit to the next alumni event and teach you some respect for $COUNTRY" isn't the target user for a major American publication. It doesn't want those kind of abhorrent sentiments to live alongside its brand on its website, and is under no obligation to give voice to their ideas.

They're an exceedingly small percent of total readers (when they're even real readers), but a much larger percent of online commenters, hence the problem in the first place.

Even in the non-bot non-astroturfing case, the people who make those comments may be actual readers (although they're exceedingly unlikely to be paying subscribers), but they definitely fall into the bucket of 'can be filtered out, to no appreciable loss'.

They're users in the sense that the website is free, and anybody can be a user, but not in the sense that the publication has a duty to them, in exchange for their money or attention.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

Karunamon wrote: post #117
guard-of-terra wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like that.

Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting. Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches. On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that…

It's far easier to manipulate systems than it is to accurately reflect either your typical reader viewpoint, or an intelligent and informed viewpoint. This is a classic failing of any democratic system, election balloting included.

Early "democratic" systems were often anything but -- about 14% of Athens' citizens could vote, and about 6% of the US at the time of George Washington's election. There are arguments for a broader electorate, but they come with distinct problems.

Vote brigading in particular is a standing issue on almost all online moderation systems. Some sort of trust cascade might help. It's what, say, the US electoral college was meant to provide initially, though how much of that function remains (and how it might manifest) is rather in question.

As for Snowden, a counterpoint is that some people see this as an issue which requires constant reminding. Advertising and propaganda both work through repitition, and sometimes the truth gets a chance for that as well. There's certainly enough repeat traffic on other topics at HN. (Though yes, many of those get beat down in the submission queue.)

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#263

Post by jsmthrowaway »

kbenson wrote: post #259
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-dissent phenomenon is amplified by the greying of comments, which continues to be a bad idea all these years later. The literal message and incentive there is: leave a comment that gets upvotes or it will get progressively harder to read until nobody can actually read it. So now you have to care about what you say, because it will be completely removed from the site by natural voting if you don't toe a certa…

I agree the greying out of comments is problematic, but I think it also serves an important purpose, and that's to incentivize care in the crafting of your comment. It is the punishment of community norms as much as the negative points are. Unfortunately, community norms have a way of adopting views as well as actions , and we have what you refer to as anti-dissent mode. Ultimately, the question is whether negatives…

> I agree the greying out of comments is problematic, but I think it also serves an important purpose, and that's to incentivize care in the crafting of your comment.

Sure, I'd grant that as intent, but where this falls down is that it instead incentivizes me to just not be a part of the community. Why would I put care and work into a comment if I'm going to be rewarded by the time invested becoming essentially worthless? Arguably, silencing someone because they diverged from "community norms" is slightly hostile; I have a hard time believing your position that a community is served well by being built atop hostile moderation. You might build a community, but it might be a much smaller, much less desirable community. (I don't know.) It's also a weird incentive to throw down, as you allude to, because "acceptable opinion" and "acceptable comment" are extremely conflated. So now one finds oneself writing comments that contain acceptable opinions, which is the care in crafting that you're describing.

Look, the opinion of HN from outside and the opinion of HN from inside are wildly different. I think this community tells itself things about civility, moderation, and so on; your comment sounds good, for example! It's just slightly off-base and overlooks some consequences, and it's not obviously wrong because we're within HN discussing it.

> Were you downvoted because your comment was lacking in some regard, or because you stepped into a pet issue of the community. It's easier to believe the second, and while it is the case sometimes, it's hard to tell what is perception and what is reality.

Careful; this is lightly making the case that I'm unable to discern the difference and therefore off-base for criticizing a real issue. I can't prove this to you, but trust me when I say that I can tell when I've "earned" the downvotes. And I do, occasionally.

(And, were I less civil, I'd use colorful four-letter words to describe community "norms," as I'd hope any hacker would. I didn't become a hacker because I cared about normality.)

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#264

Post by godshatter »

latj wrote: post #156
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…

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…

It solves the problem for me, I guess. I won't be commenting anywhere you have to log in to facebook because I don't want them tracking me all over the web.

While a facebook account gives some legitimacy, I also like sites where you can post anonymously or at least pseudonymously.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#265

Post by dredmorbius »

showerst wrote: post #135
omginternets wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>cultural issue I understand, and I think that's probably the most difficult problem of the two. I'd just like to point out -- in the interest of discussion -- three things: 1. Pre-filtering for moderators is different (much safer) than auto-banning by a bot 2. It's valid both to filter informed opinions that are poorly expressed, and for a publisher to have a preferred "voice", i.e. a style of writing that it favors…

omginternets we're starting to run into HN flame-war restrictions, and I'm working so apologies if responses come slowly. > How do you think publishers would respond to these counter-points? In my experience 1 and 2 are fine, but 3 is actually a _net negative_ to some of them. People who by and large have come up through 10+ years of paying dues in a 'The patrician editor is always right' culture _hate_ giving up con…

Taboola and Outbrain's recommendations are so pathetically insulting, and the tracking so obvious, that I've both blocked their domains (router DNS server) and specifically set "display:none;" properties on any CSS classes/IDs matching their names or substrings.

It's pathetic bottom-feeder crap.

Maybe if I fed the beast through tracking, I'd see higher quality recommendations, but I won't, and I don't. They only serve to tell me just how precariously miserable the current state of advertising, tracking, surveillance-supported media is. I'm hoping it will crash and burn, not because I want present media organisations to die, but until they do, we don't seem to stand any chance of something better.

(What better, you ask? Information as a public good, supported by an income-indexed tax.)

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#266

Post by BadScience »

My guess is that this has nothing to do with the content of the comments and everything to do with resources. They used to outsource commenting to a third-party. They either decided that they couldn't afford to do this or that they could handle it in-house. Meanwhile, their social team, as of two years ago, was one person and sometimes an intern. NPR Digital does/did a great job at fumbling and half-assing products (like NPR One), user engagement and actually reaching/monetizing/analyzing new audiences.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#267

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Metafilter is interesting in several regards.

There's the token payment. It doesn't cost much to post, but it does cost to be an asshat.

It's tiny. The userbase and total content volume are a small fraction of other social networks. Which I've objectively measured.

The S/N is amazingly high. Better than all but the best paid-contribution (e.g., professional media) sites.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#268

Post by foob »

Analemma_ wrote: post #62
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #38

Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging. On the other hand, if…

> the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue. This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it. People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's not just an anecdotal feeling anymore: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...

It's interesting to see that real name policies can actually make trolls behave more aggressively. On the other side of the spectrum, I anecdotally find that they actually prevent me from posting constructive things. I frequently refrain from leaving reviews for restaurants and stores on Google because I don't want them associated with my real name. It's not that I would otherwise be leaving low quality or bitter reviews, I'm just not particularly interested in anybody who knows my name having access to information about where I shop, what I eat, etc (even though I would be happy to share this information anonymously to help other people make informed decisions). I feel similarly about commenting on news articles, blogs, and apps that I use. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant factor in how real name policies affect overall comment quality.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#269

Post by dredmorbius »

Shivetya wrote: post #201
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.

There's content which is simply disinformative. It's not only wrong, but makes the reader stupider for having read it. Objectively.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#270

Post by CM30 »

davesque wrote: post #60

Don't they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?

Pretty sure Disqus is often set up so comments are also stored in the site's database. That's how it worked when I used it for a WordPress site.

So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with Disqus.

Post reply on HN