NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments • Hacker News Board

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#271

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #84

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…

Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Sturgeon's law at Internet Scale is far worse than six-sigma compliant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...

On the volume vs. time-to-assimilate basis, nobody can read more than a minuscule fraction of online content.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#272

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:51 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #96

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…

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.

That's what an accrued-over-time reputation is supposed to help with.

Your Imaginary Internet Points on HN, for example.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#273

Post by sbuttgereit » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:52 PM UTC

vertex-four wrote: post #256

bradleyankrom wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re HN: also anything that can be coerced into a political discussion will devolve quickly. Conservative views typically wind up grayed, even when they are substantive arguments.

Right-libertarian views are generally most popular here - both "conservative" and "liberal" (American definitions of both) views are generally not popular. And god forbid you have views that would be considered slightly left of center in much of the EU.

I have to disagree. While I do agree that the "liberal-right" (referring to the "classical liberal" definition) certainly is tolerated rather more than American style conservatives, Progressive/Left viewpoints are rather more in vogue here than anything that could be considered libertarian. That a vocal and supportive minority of libertarian types exist here doesn't change the predominate viewpoint of the community as a whole.

One need only look at the number of articles that deal with ideas like basic income, regulatory responses to climate, energy, or finance, public transport, or other areas where systematic centrally planned responses are supported as being the way forward and you can't help but see that progressivism is the larger ideal supported here.

It's hardly surprising though. This is group of professionals that engages in build systems to tackle problems in new ways. We convince ourselves that we're the disruptors who's vision can change industries and our way of life. A natural extension of that viewpoint is to believe that the public sphere can be molded, too, if only the right programs are put into effect under the watchful eye of intelligent and visionary custodians... which has much in common with progressivism.

Of course, that's my personal viewpoint (and I am certainly not a "progressive").

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#274

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:52 PM UTC

dylanfw wrote: post #211

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 would imagine such a system would be mostly equivalent to no comment system at all. I'm not going to bother commenting if nobody can even see it, and 3 days later when they can I won't even remember that I commented.

Feature.

I'd hope that my comments mean something, even after three days.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#275

Post by guelo » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #205

overcast wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the issues that makes political discussions extra toxic is that because there are hundreds of millions of dollars spent on propaganda using the most sophisticated psychological techniques available everybody is full of outrage-inducing hatreds against "the other side". This makes it really hard to have a constructive exchange of ideas without falling into a minefield of unexamined, implanted mental prejudices, even if you try really hard.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#276

Post by hsod » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

vertex-four wrote: post #256

bradleyankrom wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re HN: also anything that can be coerced into a political discussion will devolve quickly. Conservative views typically wind up grayed, even when they are substantive arguments.

Right-libertarian views are generally most popular here - both "conservative" and "liberal" (American definitions of both) views are generally not popular. And god forbid you have views that would be considered slightly left of center in much of the EU.

I think this is pretty true for economic issues, but not for diversity/identity politics/social justice. On those issues, the HN-hivemind is pretty solidly leftist (though not to the extremes of some corners of the web).

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#277

Post by mwfunk » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

guard-of-terra wrote: post #202

Karunamon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because you want to argue about politics with people doesn't mean that people want to argue about politics with you! Maybe they do, sometimes, in some contexts, but if the social cues (i.e., downvotes) indicate otherwise, then maybe not at that time and place. There's nothing wrong with people not talking about stuff they don't want to talk about.

Also, internet forums have learned over multiple decades that otherwise interesting discussions can easily get derailed by people screaming at each other over unresolvable issues. If the community doesn't keep a lid on it to a degree, the quality of discourse goes into a downward spiral that it can never recover from. It attracts people who just want to argue about stuff and it drives away people who want to have interesting discussions. This has been seen time and time again, in newsgroup after newsgroup, mailing list after mailing list, web forum after web forum.

Holding back that inevitable decline is like fighting against entropy- if it stays popular, HN is almost guaranteed to decline, and become more and more like Slashdot circa 2010, right before it poofs out of existence and/or relevance. But if users actively push back against the tides of forum entropy (i.e., discussion getting drowned out by arguments), a forum can at least have a nice long run before that happens.

I think what people want to avoid on HN is the sort of discussions where people are just asserting hot takes back and forth to no other end than the act of publicly asserting hot takes. This was never fun to watch on Crossfire or First Take or whatever, it's not fun at awkward drunken family gatherings, and it doesn't fit in with the vibe of HN. It's invigorating to the participants but much less interesting to read, and for every poster there are hundreds or thousands of readers.

That applies to online forums just as much as it does to real life, some forums are just more focused than others (just like some households are way louder, more chaotic, and have more drama than others). Almost every place other than HN thrives on arguments, so at least there are plenty of places to have them.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#278

Post by dibujante » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

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…

u wot m8?

i will rek u

i sware it on me mum

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#279

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #241

eddieh wrote: post #233

Earlier 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…

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…

As somebody who generally posts in a contrarian manner (to a right-libertarian): there's a lot less grey here in general than there used to be. I also think that in recent years greying algorithms are protecting controversial comments to some extent (comments with lots of upvotes and downvotes.) I've had negatively rated comments that were not grey. Also, as mentioned below, greying seems to attract attention to comments, getting them upvoted until they ungrey. Downvotes are limited; I don't think anything gets lower than -3 or -4, so greying doesn't have the ability to reinforce itself very much. You have to keep posting to allow people to keep downvoting you.

Just offering my perspective.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#280

Post by lake99 » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 11:00 PM UTC

bradleyankrom wrote: post #257

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because it is de facto HN policy to be OK with downvoting to register disagreement. pg put that one down and it hasn't changed.

I've noticed flagging being used similarly, too. The argument that downvoting should be used to register disagreement falls apart when you consider that only users with enough (>= 500, I think?) karma have disagreement privileges.

I think the 500 limit is justified as a means to discourage vote-brigading. Age of the account, by itself, is not a good enough indicator, because a person might create hundreds of accounts to be used for brigading at a later date.

But, yes, both downvoting and flagging can and have been abused here, despite measures to prevent them.