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NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

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Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#451

Post by Senji »

js8 wrote: post #402
labster wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure UBI is a leftist idea? The things that go along with UBI read like a right-wing wishlist: eliminate the minimum wage, discontinue welfare and unemployment benefits, and end the food stamp program. In its place, the free market would determine how best to spend basic income.

Yes, it is a leftist idea. Definition of left is that they care about social and economic equality. (The understanding - IMHO wrong - of left as proposing big state ultimately comes from Communist Manifesto, where Marx used "the State" in a certain sense as a shorthand.) Basic income would mean that part of GDP is redistributed in purely democratic manner - everybody gets the same piece of pie, whether they deserve i…

Neocons are basically leftists, so there's not really anything surprising.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#452

Post by dang »

mintplant wrote: post #445
nkurz wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vouch button appears for me. Interesting. I might understand this now. To discourage retaliation (I think) both downvoting and flagging are not allowed for direct responses to one's own stories and comments. Since "vouch" was added late, it reuses the same logic, even though the "retaliatory vouching" is not really a danger. I didn't flag it, but it contains some deliberately provocative phrasing from someone who…

> To discourage retaliation (I think) both downvoting and flagging are not allowed for direct responses to one's own stories and comments. Yep, that's exactly right. Downvotes are also disabled for comments older than a certain time interval (IIRC it's currently 8 hours). > Since "vouch" was added late, it reuses the same logic, even though the "retaliatory vouching" is not really a danger. That may well be true, and…

That's a good idea you guys came up with. We've enabled vouching on direct replies.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#453

Post by guard-of-terra »

ec109685 wrote: post #382
guard-of-terra wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content. HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensiv…

How has disqus figured out comment moderation? As far as I know, they don't make a big effort to create great comment communities. Do you have any extra details? HN has far better comments than any disqus comment feed, on average, in my opinion.

It's that bad comments sink down but the amount of downvoting is not shown, so downvoting behavior is not reinforced.

HN used to have far better comments, now it feels like a battlefield.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#454

Post by dang »

nkurz wrote: post #436
dang wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

The typical such user has a long history of breaking the rules here, getting banned, and creating new accounts. I'm hoping that you base your moderating decisions on the actions of the user in question ("human behind the keyboard" user regardless of account name) and not the "typical such user"? Do you have evidence that you are chosing not to release that 'james-watson' is such a user? Most HN readers would be surpr…

I think what you say about the 'echo chamber' bias is right, and I enjoyed reading it because this is something I've been pondering for a while* . It's an interesting case of a point so subtle that nearly everyone not only misses it but is sure that the opposite is true.

To answer your other concerns: Yes, we go out of our way to try to make moderation decisions individually. I don't think it would work to publish information about users' past accounts—that would be a surefire shitstorm. As you and others already figured out, 12313089 was flagged by users—that's what [flagged] always means, both on comments and stories. Vouches were turned off on direct replies, but I was inspired by the below to enable them.

* e.g. the subthread starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003178, plus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003205

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#455

Post by plasticsyntax »

mbreese wrote: post #175
jccalhoun wrote: post #173

I always liked slashdot's comment system back in the day. It allowed you to adjust what you saw and how many points a "funny" post got vs how many an "informative" one got and then set a point threshold based on that. Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either it wasn't working or they just didn't see it as worth reimplimenting when they moved away from their old code base.

And it wasn't just that - it was the complex system of meta-moderation. How you moderated posts was also scored. One downside was that it could lead to a complete hive mind where your karma was dependent upon how much you thought like others.

Meta-moderation was indeed a big part of it, and something I never saw _anywhere_ else.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#456

Post by [deleted] »

dibujante wrote: post #278
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

[deleted]

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#457

Post by gruyere »

intended wrote: post #448
gruyere wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How's this: Maybe for the next community, instead of making it public - potential users will instead have to find the site by solving a bunch of hidden puzzles. Think secret club. Jokes aside: a major part of why HN works is that the community here self selects for several traits which ensure healthier communication. As a forum becomes more mainstream, many things happen to attenuate the signal to noise ratio. (Pg ha…

Ah, that's a great clarification. I wasn't trying to be argumentative in my response, I was sincerely trying to determine what you meant. I'm glad you did, because your comment is great. Thanks!

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#458

Post by gruyere »

jessaustin wrote: post #432
gruyere wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The implication is that if one were truly too good for HN, then one would already know about "the next HN": that exclusive comment site at which sober mature discussion among intelligent sophisticated people takes place much as it used to long ago on HN. Which is funny not least because the level of discussion here even today seems vastly superior to what one finds elsewhere online. Part of that quality, may be a wil…

I have never felt 'too good' for HN at all. That's one of the reasons I loved it in the past- I can pick almost any link and look at almost any comment section to find information that's over my head and the content and conversations were challenging and force me to learn- and I loved that. At a certain point I felt that it turned in to a bunch of mean girls, and I left. I sincerely wanted OP to clarify his comment, because it seemed to be saying something poignant I just couldn't understand it. I see how my phrasing seems insensitive.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#459

Post by jessaustin »

gruyere wrote: post #458
jessaustin wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that if one were truly too good for HN, then one would already know about "the next HN": that exclusive comment site at which sober mature discussion among intelligent sophisticated people takes place much as it used to long ago on HN. Which is funny not least because the level of discussion here even today seems vastly superior to what one finds elsewhere online. Part of that quality, may be a wil…

I have never felt 'too good' for HN at all. That's one of the reasons I loved it in the past- I can pick almost any link and look at almost any comment section to find information that's over my head and the content and conversations were challenging and force me to learn- and I loved that. At a certain point I felt that it turned in to a bunch of mean girls, and I left. I sincerely wanted OP to clarify his comment,…

Fair enough. I apologize for misunderstanding.

Re: NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

#460

Post by syngrog66 »

ryandrake wrote: post #425
syngrog66 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!"

bingo! well said. part of why it's become, for me, that whenever I make a comment on HN, I almost always regret it. I'm so tired of having to think about filtering my comments to cater to every possible fine-grained exceptional case, or conforming to P.C.ness, or this site's particular participant hive-mind (which seems focused disproportionately around what it's like being a current semi-autistic teen/twenty-something white American male programmer of a relatively privileged background financially. Sorry if this hurts, but it's the best broadstrokes description I can think of for the median commenter personality I've seen here on HN.)
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