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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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421–430 of 463 posts

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#421

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…

There's a german blog that used to be popular (blog.fefe.de) without comment function. So some people built a website that offers the same blog just with a comment function. They built in a captcha function, that fails with a the probability that your comment is a troll comment. Here's the talk about it (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

See also

http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/

- a chrome extension

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's more than that; it's a psychological thing. You're not likely to shell out five bucks to spew an epithet at someone - you have to think about it. You have to get your payment info together. You have to think about your budget, even a bit in passing.

And, in Metafilter's case, there is a waiting period between payment and the ability to comment.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it.

Why can I only downvote some comments here? I don't downvote much, but any time I see a comment such as "I like it" it really deserves a downvote for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained.

There's an eight hour downvote window.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#424
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had previous accounts banned for stating the following: "Homo sapiens are a sexually dimorphic species of primates, in which the Y chromosome results in differential physiological development between males and females." So yes, HN is quite a hivemind when it comes to gender/identity politics. In fact, I have a feeling I'll get banned for this comment.

Perhaps I live with rose colored glasses, but I do not believe that anyone has ever be be banned from HN for making that quoted statement unless you have left out some essential detail. My guess would be that you made that statement, and subsequently you were banned for something else. Perhaps you could post a link to the thread in question? Never mind, maybe I found it, or at least the account: https://news.ycombina…

That is a good first order analysis, but I have witnessed HN darlings get away with far, far worse ad-hominem vulgarity with nary a peep from the moderators. This is most definitely about thoughtcrimes, and not manners.

For history's sake, let's link the original post which dang replied to and subsequently killed. There was zero rule breaking in that one, just thoughtcrimes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221055

As a scientist, I find human behavior fascinating. Particularly when people say one thing, and do another. My argument has always been as follows:

If HN is about entrepreneurship and technological progress, why do they ruthlessly suppress established scientific consensus?

And here's my hypothesis: because it does not fit the current political zeitgeist.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#425

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…

you had me until this: > Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. that statement floored me because historically, HN has been one of the most toxic comment forums I've seen. I've kept coming back despite it, not because of it. there's enough signal to justify it. but it's a kind of low-grade toxicity: a weird mix of passive aggressiveness, disagree-based-…

The nit-picking and edge-casing is what spoils it for me. You can write 500 words about a general topic and someone will reply, "See in that sentence, you said 'all' there instead of 'some' and I can show you a counter-example! Your entire message is therefore wrong!!"

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#426
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical social-discussion model I've been meaning to build an MVP of: 1. there are replies and up-voting, but no down-voting; 2. you can classify a comment reply, at time of posting, as a "rebuttal"; 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent; 4. the aggregate score of a subthread is calculated as a Euclidean distance, with all the positively-scored comments as dimensions…

> 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent; I often upvote both a comment and its rebuttal, because in many debates I have no dog in the race and I often find that people on both sides have valuable or otherwise interesting insights. Even if I don't agree with them completely, I sometimes find that I'm able to view an issue from another perspective that I hadn't considered bef…

Not every reply would be a rebuttal. Not even every reply challenging the premises of the parent comment would be a rebuttal. Maybe "rebuttal" is the wrong word.

In a discussion being had in good faith, a thread will frequently go into a pseudo-debate mode to "find the truth" of a statement someone offered. Kind of like we're doing here. We all add anecdotes and counterfactuals and so forth, and see where the inductive process takes us. None of these comments would/should be tagged as rebuttals.

But there's a very specific situation where, I think, this feature is an important addition: when the original comment (or the post-link heading the discussion!) just doesn't know what it's talking about, and the reply outlines why this is so.

The concept is less like "this post disagrees with its parent, and so up-voting (agreeing) with it should mean down-voting (disagreeing) with its parent", and more like "this post is a petition to flag/retract its parent, and up-voting it is signing that petition."

This is why I had point 4 in the above, which might otherwise seem an unrelated feature: negatively-scored posts are not "disagreed with", but rather "flagged dead." But negatively-scored posts must still stay visible, in order to give requisite context to their positively-scored rebuttal-comments. And, in fact, a thread containing a negatively-scored top-comment might even still be the top-sorted thread, if its replies are considered valuable enough.

(One might still want to add some visual effect to remind those reading the post that the community considers it "retracted." Perhaps adding a strikethrough that disappears on hover, or a background of faint red Xes. You don't want to make the post illegible—it's still necessary context for its subthread, unlike the current HN/Reddit system where the post "fades" to nothing, and then the whole subthread gets considered a lost cause and collapsed.)

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#427
post #375
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical social-discussion model I've been meaning to build an MVP of: 1. there are replies and up-voting, but no down-voting; 2. you can classify a comment reply, at time of posting, as a "rebuttal"; 3. up-voting a rebuttal comment will also be considered as down-voting its parent; 4. the aggregate score of a subthread is calculated as a Euclidean distance, with all the positively-scored comments as dimensions…

Why remove downvoting directly? I'm not against the idea, I just want to understand the thinking. I wonder if the problem is the binary nature of so many things. 5 star/1 star reviews are the most common, we have up and down votes, but no real context for that. I wonder if the problem that needs to be solved isn't context, rather than directional. This is me spitballing, so feel free to IGNORE everything below. I was…

Another social-discussion voting system I wanted to try out was one where:

1. both of the 'unit-weight' up- and down-votes were only done through implicit/passive actions (basically a piece of Javascript running in a browser extension, that tracks whether you read the whole article/comment—i.e. scrolled through it at a reasonable reading speed—before scrolling away/closing/going back/beginning to reply)

2. there are above-'unit-weight' up- and down-vote mechanisms that are explicit, but require something humans consider very-slightly onerous: solving a CAPTCHA, paying a tenth of a cent of pre-paid credit, etc.

In my conception, the small votes would be named "OK" and "Meh", and the large votes "Love" and "Hate", with about a 10x difference between their power. The site, of course, would be called "Mehddit." ;)

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in. It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a…

As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit. I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides sim…

I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping.

Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Really? I would point to the comments on just about any "women in tech" story as a counterexample.

I have had previous accounts banned for stating the following: "Homo sapiens are a sexually dimorphic species of primates, in which the Y chromosome results in differential physiological development between males and females." So yes, HN is quite a hivemind when it comes to gender/identity politics. In fact, I have a feeling I'll get banned for this comment.

Users who make self-flattering claims about why they were banned from HN—always for some allegedly tinpot reason—are unreliable narrators. The real reason is invariably more sordid, which is why they omit to supply links.

The typical such user has a long history of breaking the rules here, getting banned, and creating new accounts. They often do so shortly after proclaiming that they're leaving HN forever and will never set foot in this crappy, horribly-run echo chamber again. Most HN readers would be surprised to learn how small the number of users generating all this drama really is. The rest of us just want to use the site for its intended purpose, which isn't ideological flamewars or meta grandstanding.

There's nothing more common than posturing as a brave independent thinker standing up to the mob. Therefore that posture has the interesting property of being self-refuting.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I are around the same group, but I've long since abandoned participating in these conversations. Honestly I am in these comments because I had hoped this was the conversation being had. The HN community drove me away long ago.

Maybe for the next community you need to figure out where it is in order to be self selected for membership.

I've had several people try to discern the meaning of your comment, but none of us could figure it out. You have words here that together sound like a sentence, but don't make any actual sense.
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