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Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

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Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#151

Post by slang800 »

I don't buy the "troll" argument. Every site has low-value comments and people either ignore them or down-vote them. They're not an issue. Take YouTube for example - they are known to have a cancerous comment section with little-to-no moderation, yet people don't avoid YouTube, they just avoid reading the comments on most channels.

The real problem for VICE is when comments aren't from trolls - when they're debunking the article and pointing out flaws in real-time.

That being said, I'm happy to see them disable comments. This will open up an opportunity for someone else to take over managing comments on their content... Hopefully someone who cares more about open discussion.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#152

Post by zigzigzag »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #113
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…

> It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. 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…

What does it mean to dissent? Go look at the Guardian. They have been progressively eliminating comments sections on their stories. If you go look at the comments sections that are left it's pretty obvious why: the articles are often crap and the comments point it out. Obviously the "journos" take offense at that and start telling each other how horrible the comments are and how full of trolling it is.

In reality the comments are often pretty on point. The Guardian seems to have dropped off a cliff quality-wise since Rusbridger stopped being the editor = many stories are either hopelessly biased, hysterical, or demonstrate profound hypocrisy. Often they are simply opinion pieces where the opinions are extremist. Closing down comments is a form of sticking their heads into the sand.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#153

Post by Fnoord »

mc32 wrote: post #121
Declanomous wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at $.10 a comment, trolling would still be incredibly inexpensive compared to many other hobbies.

What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.

> What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.

$0.50 is a lot of money in some countries in the world. It'd make trolling vastly more expensive for people in those countries.

If you don't deal with the unpopular/controversial opinion getting downvoted problem it also devalues the unpopular/controversial opinions of those from those countries.

If you're $local_news_paper in some small US town the above is irrelevant, but NYT is read worldwide, as is HN and Reddit. (Tho I suppose Reddit more than HN.)

If you still wanna go ahead with your proposal, I think a good model on downvoting would be to see use it as currency with a relative cost plus an absolute base. E.g. absolute_base + 5%_of_current_karma. The relative cost is to avoid hoarding, the absolute cost is to avoid efficiency of karma depletion.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#155

Post by asciimo »

jpfed wrote: post #126
spott wrote: post #120

I think there actually might be a market here for Reddit... 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 a…

>Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Amusingly, https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/

You can comment on this thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/5jfgim/getting_... :)

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#156

Post by zigzigzag »

woodsier wrote: post #128
spott wrote: post #120

I think there actually might be a market here for Reddit... 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 a…

It does sound like the best option available. Is anyone out there aware of a solution that currently exists (and is available to people like you and I?). Reddit has made it easy to embed comments on a site since last year: https://redditblog.com/2015/03/23/announcing-embeddable-comm...

No, because the problem isn't really technical. Whilst Vice could probably improve the quality of their commenting by putting more effort into the software, the real problem is that they were receiving political opinions from a camp they didn't like much.

The article doesn't really try to hide it:

Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy

Anarchy?! I thought anarchy involved Mad Max style gunfights and burning oil barrels. What does "anarchy" mean in the context of a bunch of words on a web page? Oh, right, uncontrolled and uncensored discussion where people can say what they think.

Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top

So they don't like their comments (whereas they presumably did before) because over time the comments have become "stupid", "offensive" and - of course - racist/misogynistic/hate speech/bigoted.

I'm willing to bet that many of the comments that enraged them the most weren't particularly stupid or even racist, but rather belonged to a part of the political spectrum that Vice's writers wished they could make go away for real. If there's one thing 2016 shows it's the unlimited capacity for people to paint political views that they don't share of any kind, regardless of reasonableness or validity, as "racist" or "bigoted".

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#157

Post by vinhboy »

duaneb wrote: post #8
astrodust wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things. Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.

The comments on the New York Times seem to be high quality.

The NYT is the ONLY high quality comment "left" on the internet. It's sad that we are letting extremists mute comment sections.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#158

Post by vinhboy »

aphextron wrote: post #96
Fr0ntBack wrote: post #2

I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

Nonsense. Literally any comment section on any news website will be filled with people spouting off their random insanity because it's simply a platform. The actual content of the article rarely even matters to these people.

We can easily discern, with statistics, which political ideology is providing all the insane comments. But in places like HN, people will scream at you for being partisan if you mention it.

I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#159

Post by Pete_D »

kl4m wrote: post #70
akshayB wrote: post #10

I feel its about time we have thumbs up, thumbs down and a troll marker on comment section.

Full circle back to Slashdot's moderation? :)

I'm always surprised Slashdot-style tagged voting isn't more widespread, and curious what would happen if more communities tried it.

One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#160

Post by reality_czech »

brennen wrote: post #91
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media were not SHOCKED, they expressed shock in an attempt to get more attention/views.

I really haven't seen much evidence that media professionals expressing shock at, for example, Brexit and Trump's election are engaged in some strong form of deception. There's a reasonable set of critiques about media incentives and behavior here, but I think this is a case where cynicism of this kind can obscure observable reality: The majority of people really didn't expect these outcomes.

The point is that the media were in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.
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