191–200 of 347 posts
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What people want isn't necessarily what they need . When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that . So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.
Needs aren't as profitable.
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I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them . If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when…
I think reading the news without commentary is its own form of echo chamber. We will tend to pick a news source that slants to our liking and just experience that over and over again. Don't get me wrong, NYT is among the top newspapers I would want to use as a citation, but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism. So much so that after the election the NYT apologized for how it covered the electio…
Oh, I notice it. I think it's a fun game to root out the bias in the Times. It's really how the news is meant to be read (i.e. confrontationally).
Shouldn't they be focusing on the browser? There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.
Particularly ones that are open-source and framework-agnostic.
I would love to see a big site try to use Slashdot's old commenting system. Commenting felt like a privilege and so did moderation.
Slashdot's commenting system was 100% an echo chamber ;)
Also, I was often curious to read what was "beneath my threshold" and often clicked. Which played a big part in convincing me that slashdot's moderation was top notch was that I usually did not find anything of interest.
Here's a slightly off-topic dream about online comments: In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client. That would would provide transparency to the moderation process, ability to comment anywhere, and it would allow modera…
Why would I, as a site owner, want to cede control of the comments that are associated with my site? If, for example, a comment was just a string of racial slurs, there's no way in hell I would want that associated with my site, and I would want that deleted as soon as possible, regardless if you would want to see it.
Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc... Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can lear…
Isn't that what Facebook does with their curated newsfeed? Doesn't that just make echo chambers?
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It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources. Then the hack: this is a newspaper. They have no reason to be fair. Give community moderators super-credibility. So they can upvote people and not just give their co…
What people want isn't necessarily what they need . When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that . So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.
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Meanwhile the right merrily balkanises and wins elections over and over because their people are whipped up by their echo chambers about death panels or pizza shop pedophiles or made up controversy du jour. The opposition can take the moral high road all the way to irrelevance. As a counter point. The NYT's job is to sell subscriptions. Faux 'balance' isn't going to sell one subscription to a Trump voter.
Or perhaps the right wins local, state, and federal elections because a large portion of the country doesn't like the solutions the left proposes.
Also - regardless of how great their new system is, the old adage holds: "Garbage in, garbage out."
Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc... Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can lear…
Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story. Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for like…