291–300 of 463 posts
Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the article's author is advocating for.
There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.
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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.
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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 sla…
That's me! Can you explain the Slashdot model and why it worked? Or point to a good write up about it somewhere else?
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...
* Of course, this kind of action can have some far reaching consequences, and is quite ripe for abuse. I don't know if there is a way to fix that. And myself, not being the target of such abuse online, I'm not really that invested in trying it.
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Our HN can decline 5 x more and it would still be wonderful. With out ever seeing, talking to, meeting any HNer I am connected with smarter, curiouser, open minded (er) people than I work with everyday.
Really? To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. For example, anyone who questions the long term safety of genetically modifying organisms and eating them, will always be downvoted to oblivion.
Absolutely true. But is HN more closed minded than the folks you see everyday?
Personally, the HN community is more open minded than 95% of the people I personally interact with daily -- even after including what you've just mentioned.
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…
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…
I wish downvoting wouldn't be allowed without a "reply" to parent post, that way if I'm being downvoted nonstop I know why. Sometimes I get downvoted like crazy and have no clue as to why. Or even if I guess it doesn't add to the conversation to just shut me out because you disagree without teaching me why. I wonder how HN would be different if to downvote you had to respond to a post.
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…
While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric. It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it. If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be…
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Not difficult, just tedious. My being lazy and wanting to do something productive isn't proof of anything. Also, there isn't really an advantage to digging them up, since it is clear you'll just refute whatever I dig up.
Well, I might disagree with whatever you dig up; I can only really refute it if I present a good argument against it, which maybe I wouldn't be able to for some comments.
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…
Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system? Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_. That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the…
One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak.
This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.