Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#101

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #77

caseysoftware wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how much of the media was shocked SHOCKED by Brexit, the election of Trump, Sarkozy's loss, the fall of Merkel, and the rise of Le Pen, maybe they should pay more attention to the comments..

Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions. Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump)…

> Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.

I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#102

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

scythe wrote: post #49

I wish it didn't fall on me to point this out, but bigotry is a political position, and trolling is a personality flaw. Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE's comment section was a liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which wa…

[deleted]

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#103

Post by throwaway420 » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #16

Many sites have been closing their comments section. It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation, these sites just shut the community out and become a broadcast medium once again. A notable removal of a comments section was NPR's shutdown right around the time of the Democratic National Convention. Th…

I hate this trend of getting rid of comments for many reasons, but honestly it's usually because the comments section in many publications has some of the most insightful ideas. Yes, you'll occasionally have to see some idiot spouting off or see some spam, but I think the cost is worth it.

Look at Techdirt for example: great articles, and actually insightful and funny comments that add to the discussion. Every article of theirs that I check out gets at least 1 extra page view from me simply because I love checking out the comments. Shoutout to them for nurturing an actual community.

I agree with you that this trend of getting rid of comment sections has more to do with controlling the message. The corporate media doesn't have to (and can't) fool the majority of population with pro-establishment news anymore. But what they're trying to do is convince enough people that they're mostly alone and isolated in opposition to official policies. When there is no comments section with lots of dissenting voices, it's easy to feel like you're alone in being against war propaganda or whatever the latest cause the establishment is promoting.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#104

Post by throwanem » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

rezashirazian wrote: post #86

seanalltogether wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually a good argument toward shifting commenting into a paid subscription offering. Give access to the site free of ads and allow you to comment on articles.

I disagree, if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and less likely to self-moderate. It would make more sense to grant commenting privileges to individuals who have engaged with the site previously and are in good standing. Much like the Product Hunt.

> if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and less likely to self-moderate

Not if getting banned means they have to buy a new account to post again.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#105

Post by pg_is_a_butt » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

gulperxcx wrote: post #95

seanalltogether wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually a good argument toward shifting commenting into a paid subscription offering. Give access to the site free of ads and allow you to comment on articles.

The standard charge should be $0.02 per comment.

well, that's just like, your opinion, man.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#106

Post by whybroke » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #82

swalsh wrote: post #60

Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality). A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That b…

Would Ycombinator be willing to start a separate product with its ranking/reputation system to allow other sites to host comments section? Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is built on.

Much of the apparent quality is the prohibition of topics that will attract controversy _regardless of their importance_ and regardless of the authenticity of the commenters who spam nonsense on it.

For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/forgers-use-fak...

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#107

Post by astrodust » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #85

sbarre wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, Vice covers a wide spectrum of topics, all aimed at youth.. Some is heavy, some is not.. Find a mainstream (non-topic-specialized) publication that doesn't do that, and I'll be surprised.

The Economist?

These days The Economist and Teen Vogue have more in common than most are prepared to admit.

It's disappointing that the only publications willing to tackle heavy issues are things like Vogue, The Rolling Stone and Vice Magazine. The rest seem content to sit back and take a more academic approach if they take one at all.

USA Today, like CNN, is utterly worthless.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#108

Post by douche » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #82

swalsh wrote: post #60

Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality). A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That b…

Would Ycombinator be willing to start a separate product with its ranking/reputation system to allow other sites to host comments section? Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is built on.

It'd only work if you keep the quality of the people commenting the same or better. There's nothing really unique about the way HN works, there's just smarter people here, on average, than in your typical Youtube comment thread.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#109

Post by MaxfordAndSons » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

monksy wrote: post #90

danso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also expend significant resources in moderating it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv... (a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)

I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage). You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if yo…

> a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage

Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#110

Post by brennen » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

DashRattlesnake wrote: post #61

danso wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0]. Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model i…

Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users. The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been qui…

> The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.

As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.

MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.

This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.

I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)

It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.