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Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

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Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#131

Post by snowpanda »

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…

>Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality

It's easy to maintain quality when the majority of your visitors have the same political and social beliefs. Basic income, renewable energy, income inequality...

It gets really old for people living outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#132

Post by rabidrat »

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…

> Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue

Reddit/HN/etc make the username behind each comment as small and discreet as possible. As much as I dislike the low content/cruft ratio of BBForum, its design emphasizes each commenter's login, and registration date. This helps at least a bit, as even visitors can readily notice the correlation between certain avatars and the quality of their posts.

Whereas on Reddit and here, I even sometimes miss that the same account is just replying to a reply--i.e. just continuing the conversation. I think the aim is to judge comments by their content rather than the character who posts them, but context is always extremely relevant. It matters whether the poster is a Senator, a thought leader, or a habitual troll. And I often get too wrapped up in the content to dig for the source.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#133

Post by mc32 »

Declanomous wrote: post #127
mc32 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't want to pay just because people disagree with me though. For instance, I've had relatively innocuous comments get downvoted on Reddit because it's an unpopular opinion. A great way to get downvotes is to find a thread where people are complaining about speed locks in apps and post "studies have shown that distracted driving is at least as dangerous as drinking and driving." You'll almost instantly get downvot…

I naively presumed mods and meta mods would dampen the impact of voting rings and disagreement votes. One additional tool might be requiring a "reason" for the downvote as /. used (still does?) to do (off-topic, irrelevant, inflammatory, etc.) and for people whose downvotes massively stray from the reason, revoke downvoting privs.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#134

Post by notatoad »

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…

Interestingly, this was almost the exact strategy that brought down digg back in the day. They tried to partner with some news sites to auto-submit each of their stories to digg, and their users revolted. Of course, they had a looser structure than reddit does and so the auto-posted "professional" posts began to dominate the main feed, while reddit has the opportunity to keep them within their own subreddit.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#135

Post by CamperBob2 »

brennen wrote: post #125
CamperBob2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who can't come through the door to the room you're in unless you invite them.

This does not actually seem to describe the state of the internet generally. I gravitate more and more towards little pocket-universe parts of the network that are essentially invisible, but (apropos of the article) things like comment sections are quite often the functional equivalent of a giant neon ASSHOLES WELCOME sign above the door.

You just have to remind yourself that the assholes are just shadows on the cave wall, the same as you are to them.

And again, the cave entrance is never more than a few steps behind you.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#136

Post by int_19h »

snowpanda wrote: post #131
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…

>Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality It's easy to maintain quality when the majority of your visitors have the same political and social beliefs. Basic income, renewable energy, income inequality... It gets really old for people living outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Are you implying that NH is limiting its audience to politically agreeable, or that those who disagree self-censor themselves and move to other platforms?

If the latter, it does invite the question of why. Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#137

Post by mundo »

brennen wrote: post #93
lmm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem with generalizing about Reddit is not its size, it's that Reddit is made up of a bunch of separate forums with separate mods and rules and users and so forth. It's just a place where discussion boards live. Reddit : forums :: Blogspot : blogs.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#138

Post by justincormack »

Bedon292 wrote: post #52

It has been a long time since I actually dove into a comments section on any news site and found anything other than inflammatory arguments. It seems like people target out these news sites intentionally to start these arguments with no intent of listening to the other side. I would much rather come somewhere like here, and actually seem to have mostly civil discussions even when people disagree. Does anyone find the…

The Financial Times often has pretty good comments, that are informative. Post Brexit its got worse though.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#139

Post by mundo »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #36
gdulli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddest thing about the fact that Reddit hasn't been disrupted is what that says about the collective tolerance of what it is.

maybe we don't read the same subreddits, but /r/programming /r/woodworking and /r/personalfinance are all mostly cordial.

That's the thing about reddit - it's so big that you can find whatever you want. Whether you want polite discussion about woodworking, erotic fan-fiction, or examples of horrible racism and misogyny so you can write an article for HuffPoabout how horrible Reddit is, you will find what you're looking for.

But I'm pretty sure that was true of the internet before Reddit came along, too. And I don't see how combining all of those discussion groups under the same domain made the world any worse than back when they were three separate message boards.

Re: Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

#140

Post by scythe »

kevinburke wrote: post #59
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…

> when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. There's zero evidence for this. Please read the article.

I read the whole article.

I don't believe you for a second, though.

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