111–120 of 233 posts
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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.
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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 explanator…
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 think you're ignoring the historical aspect here. Most news sites (especially ones for originally print/broadcast media) just threw together a commenting function at some point in the past 20 years because it was an easy thing to do to increase engagement. This was both before lots of people discovered internet trolling as a significant past-time, and before US politics were as polarized as they are today. These organizations never intended to be host to a "community" (though they may use that language in marketing).
Also what exactly does it mean to "dissent" against a news publication? What are you consenting to them doing in lieu of that? You can act against them with your clicks and dollars. And isn't "controlling the message" literally the existential purpose of any publication?
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Interesting to look back on this. Reddit seems to be doing fine now - it's put the line in a clear and simple place, and while there are occasional paranoid grumblings that certain subreddits are getting away with brigading it's mostly working out. Whereas Twitter - which seemed to follow a line closer to the one being advocated there - is a disaster area.
> Reddit seems to be doing fine now Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016 reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity. Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by far outstripped its prosocia…
The same is true of the Web as a whole, at least until we allow governments and other special interests to start nailing various doors shut.
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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.
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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.
Rolling Stone lost all credibility after publishing that fake rape story.
The New York Times has suffered hits to its credibility, fake photographers, plagiarism and such, but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work done by their talented staff. There's still good work being done there despite those setbacks. It's a fallacy to instantly discount everything as without merit, putting it on the same level as Breitbart.
Like always you need to regard things with a critical eye.
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…
There are no technical solutions.
(There is, at best, tooling which helps to some extent but which can easily backfire.)
Moderation is necessary and difficult. Skilled human hours must be spent. Humans with the temperament and skills are rare and likely to suffer burnout. Organizations rarely value community management skills in proportion to their necessity and the difficulty of acquiring them.
Even where community management is valued, moderators are often forced to walk a narrow line between exercising power to shut down bad actors and having their authority undermined by their own organizations when bad actors complain, especially if those bad actors can be conceived of as customers.
To put it another way: Before you latch onto the view that removing comment sections is about suppressing dissent, consider life from the perspective of someone whose job it is to moderate comments.
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> Reddit seems to be doing fine now Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016 reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity. Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by far outstripped its prosocia…
The model of Reddit as a multistory building with a basement is flawed from the outset. It's more like a building in n-dimensional hyperspace. No matter what room you're in, the doors that lead to every other room, as well as to the street outside, are never more than a footstep away. The same is true of the Web as a whole, at least until we allow governments and other special interests to start nailing various doors…
Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Embed the relevant post on the news site.
Since "karma" is transitive across Reddit and across news sites, users are slightly less likely to troll. You could also do this with some sort of reputation system across websites (Disqus could add in something like that).
The big problem with news sites is that the communities aren't big enough that there are any negative correlations associated with being a dick. Even facebook runs into this problem because there isn't any way to "punish" someone for a rude comment. Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue (at least in my very non-expert opinion). Reddit helps, with comment karma and post karma... but it obviously isn't perfect.