Please read the paper before you comment • Hacker News Board

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#131

Post by numpad0 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #86

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

I'm certain that social networks have played a large role, if not the sole reason for this behaviour by encouraging limited attention, FOMO, OCD-scrolling etc. But, I guess we wouldn't able to prove that more people read the content before commenting before social networks without a proper control and besides many visitors of these sites are from social networks. All major News organisations know that only small frac…

First 3 to come reads the title, skim read TFA, write corrections or complements.

Next 30 reads the title, read comments, and write some pretend skepticism.

Next 300 reads the title, view comments, upvote the strongest opinions, and share.

Next 3000 reads the title and immediately decide whether to share.

Somewhere from here and above, 3-4 people tries to plagiarize something in it just to get votes and/or because they have personal issues in forming opinions.

Rest of the million people after this point just applaud and share what’s being thrown at their faces.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#132

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

Max-q wrote: post #93

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

NRK Beta, the tech lab of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, make you take a quiz about the article before you are allowed to comment. I really like that idea.

Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them.

You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#133

Post by cm2187 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#134

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise…

You mean Ben Shapiro didn't actually have to make his tweet about how his sex life sucks and his wife had gone on a two month getaway with her personal trainer? :o

I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#135

Post by pembrook » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

liangx4 wrote: post #125

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

I did a similar thing with recruiting ads, I added a line of "If you are interested in this role, please reach out to me starting with 'Heyyyyyy I am XXX', thanks!" in the middle of the JD. And I simply ignore 99% of the reach out because they didn't start with that line. It's just like the brown M&m thing Van Halen did. Works way better than I expected.

Job ads are universally filled with jargon-y HR copy-pasta bullshit, so I’m sure most people never read them on purpose.

Instead of being clever, you’ve simply overestimated the importance of your ad in people’s lives while simultaneously optimizing for inexperienced people who’ve never read a job ad before and don’t know they are BS.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#136

Post by pelliphant » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #118

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

Alas, this time you haven’t read far enough! The author, on page four of the comments: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... > yak8998 wrote: >> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%... >> "bananas" > That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our edi…

That's one awesome PR-trick!

From my own experience: when I comment on something that I haven't read it's usually because I'm more interested in the conversation around the subject than the subject itself. So, in that case, I have usually read the comments, and if half of them just randomly included the word "bananas" in them, I'm pretty sure that the convesation whould change to be: "wtf are ppl saying bananas all the time?"

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#137

Post by trizic » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:06 AM UTC

Max-q wrote: post #93

cgrealy wrote: post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

NRK Beta, the tech lab of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, make you take a quiz about the article before you are allowed to comment. I really like that idea.

I had this idea as well. It only solves the low quality comment problem if that is something the site owners want. In some cases they may benefit from low quality comments.

Before the web, the HTTP POST equivalent was an envelope and stamp and maybe some moderation at the receiving side. People should look into ways to limit comments / filter noise now that it is in abundance.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#138

Post by rglullis » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #97

rglullis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea, but how is that different from a personal website/blog with private access?

The ability to have people on it who don't have the time or background to read tutorials on Digital Ocean?

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=free+blog+hosting&s=l

Ok, to make my answer a little bit less flippant. I didn't say that people need to host their own sites, just that a "social network without all the engagement" is no different a personal site or a blog.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#139

Post by necovek » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

I think a better exercise is to ignore (it's hard, I know) those who haven't obviously read the paper/article: it's not like they'll read your reply either.

And sometimes (usually?), people will truly not understand what a paper is about, and that makes it even harder to figure out which comment is which.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#140

Post by wruza » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

evolve2k wrote: post #2

When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional. I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!” It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that th…

That would be fun to implement in election voting worldwide. I still don't get why you have to pass a test before driving, healing and working at your profession, but not before changing how your society works.