In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.
Just yesterday an article that went in depth on all different kinds of atmospheric water harvesting was filled with comments on how this was 'debunked', despite some of the methods being used in practice (notably fog harvesting).
Moreover, the article was discussing emerging changes in the technology and the hurdles they would face (it's almost always energy!) but none of the comments seemed to discuss that at all.
In the Usenet there was custom of writing summaries. Article writer would direct the discussion.
> Authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. Accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. Responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. She, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. By following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say.
>When creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. Rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in.
>Also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). Summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the From: address as anonymous or (Address withheld by request).
https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_6.html#...
1. Flagging sources of information that are known to use clickbait tactics, stupid popups and generally low effort content. Paywalls can also be labeled as such.
2. Niceties like showing original title next to the updated one, or page title next to the submission title. I want to know what the original title was so I can appropriately shame the individual into trying to clickbait a boring topic onto the front page.
3. Downvotes should need to be justified and reviewed. A “I disagree with this comment because it offends me” is not a valid reason to bury good commentary. Happens too frequently. Remove showdead etc altogether.
4. Limited number of new seats for posting/commenting. Read-only for general public. Remove accounts that are regularly submitting garbage to the front page (happens more frequently than you think).
This community has degraded over the years and it’s easily seen in most high volume commentaries. A lot of it is emotionally charged nonsense with people being “convinced” of things with nothing to show where they obtained such strong convictions.
Dan shouldn’t moderate, he should outright ban, and in the process push the low effort armchairing to Reddit and other sites.
HN is first and foremost a vehicle for YC ventures to post their stuff anyway.
While I can understand people are optimistic that this site is somewhat more “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” about particular subjects compared to other sites, the range of that subject matter is so narrow that in majority of categories you’re more likely to find higher quality, insight and volume of posts elsewhere. Namely Reddit.
For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.
HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.
Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.
I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.
My /. id (JSG) is ~18K but is only so large because I lurked for a few years before signing up. sigh
Even back then I have always used identifiable IDs on forums, those are my initials and here I use surname + initial and do so on everything internets these days.
Am I mad?
Can it be monetized ?
But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.
People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.
“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.
The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.
But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)
So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.
And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.
You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.
Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.
You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.
Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.
All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.
Well, there's a small chance you'll update the submission to point to a working link in the future, and that some of the comments refer to that...
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 editor in chief, Ken Fisher, and it was put in by our managing editor, Eric Bangeman.
From that first comment mentioning bananas onwards, bananas are mentioned very regularly. A quick sample of a few pages suggests somewhere around 40% of the comments mention bananas.
The real explanation is also interesting.
I suspect that's what really happened. Would have been better if they included that note since publication time. The first comment with "Banana" then would have been the real indicator. Most others would have simply noted the keyword from the comments before reading the article, like you said.
... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic.
Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve your knowledge about a topic shouldn't be regulated by a pass.
Everybody wants their paper turning into a breaking new / symbol of authority or just cheat in the citations game, but this is not how it happens most of the time. Most of the time it is just published and nothing happens. Nobody will rush to read your hard work. Is just how it is
Consider how accurate the senses of a person that speaks without observing are. Existing is not license to proliferate otherwise there would be no notion of a cancerous cell, these would simply be another part of the organism. Uninformed opinions are the cancer of public discourse. Uncontrolled growth of irresponsible and subjective thought.
But at least someone made some money.
Yes. Personally I don't see a problem with that if you are trying to achieve a certain level of good response.
Maybe an alternative would be to let the presence of the "magic" word/phrase alter the ordering of the comments displayed to other users, or even "shadow delay" responses without it for fifteen minutes.
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?"
I really like that idea.
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.
A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow? I feel like it's chock full of witty jokes, positive vibes, light entertainment, and the occasional weirdo just to balance things out.
Music is nice and largely even positive—if repetitive (“anyone here listening to [90s band] in 2020??”)
Facebook insists even more on having "real people" using their real names, often forcing them to vet themselves, yet at times it easily steals the crown in terms of "really bad user interactions" from YouTube comments.
Very likely much more related to the topic under which people are commenting: Non-political feel good fluff does not allow for much friction to be inserted, thus the tone of comments will be much more civilized and friendly.
But anything that goes into controversial, and particularly political, territory is bound to quickly escalate into a complete shit show, on YouTube and Facebook alike.
Which fits neatly into common communication strategies like focusing on similarities rather than on differences.
But the migration of YouTube channels and comments to G+ linked identities was reversed[0], wasn't it? Not to mention that G+ has since been shut down.
Shouldn't that make the abortive effort irrelevant for the quality of YouTube comments today?
[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/everything-in-its-ri...
This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.
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.
I would not want to participate on such a platform forcing me to double check if my contributions were actually published or simply hidden away for some secret reason.
It's these pieces of accountability that go a long way to have users compliant with moderation.
Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.
You can state that you like strawberry marmalade and someone on this planet will threaten you and your family for that transgression. Problem is the net isn't as anonymous as before thanks to social media and some people without significant personality try to call your employer, who succinctly distances the whole company from strawberry marmalade to underline how important it is to have values.
Employees will be reprimanded and strawberry marmalade removed from the canteen.
depends on the topic, an article isn't going to convince a political party supporter to switch sides for example.
Why not? Are you suggesting articles can't carry information that changes peoples opinions; that people are wedded too much to Party identity; or perhaps that only one article wouldn't do it?
...But it won't, not in today's American politics. There's no nuance left, it's us versus _them_, entrenched political warfare. If the article says something bad about my party it's either: _fake news!_ or a smear campaign by _them_! If it says something good about their party it's ____-wing propaganda.
Works way better than I expected.
I don't think this idea of yours is as clever as you imagine it to be
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.
Playing king-in-the-castle with people’s lives by rejecting them over some bizarre game where you assume bad intent doesn’t sound like “respect” to me.
This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.
(epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though)
A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird.
There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes from sitting by a fireside doing chores for hours. It takes effort and vulnerability to make friends with whom you can have 2-hours-long chats. It requires planning and intentionally-directing attention to maintain those relationships. Those who fail to plan and execute those actions will reach out in weird ways to try to meet that need. These will disproportionately be people who:
A. Struggle to sustain attention long enough to plan and execute what they really intend.
B. Fear that interactions with new people will end up with them assaulted, infected, or dead.
C. Feel trapped in some situation and unable to plan a way out.
D. Struggle to form an intellectual connection during opportunities for deep social interaction.
E. Have been in a situation where A-D was true and are falling into old habits.
I posit that the intellectual masturbation of people on twitter or other forums is a symptom of an unmet hunger for real intellectual connection with other humans.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/iron-deficien...
As far as I can see, there's no indication on this page as to how frequently iron deficiency leads to ice chewing.
Huh? Are you saying that my source claims that chewing ice causes anemia?
So from that source you can't conclude that anemia "often" leads to chewing ice, it may very well be quite rare.
Abstractly, "A is often a consequence B" does not logically goes to "B often leads to A".
To use an extreme exemple, crossing paths with polar bears (chewing ice) is generally linked with dieing (anemia), but death is quite rarely caused by crossing paths with polar bears.
It also seems to miss the central point of my metaphor.
And yes, I am claiming that a lot of feminist twitter is in column B. They themselves have been quite explicit about that.
I think it's just called "journalism" these days. I find it hard to find publications without clickbaity stuff like this.
All major News organisations know that only small fraction of their audience on social networks even click the link anymore and rest of them just make up what they wanted from the title and description. At least now I think, Facebook doesn't allow one to alter the title, description of the website they're sharing; for years someone who shares could change those as well!
I don’t think that’s correct, depending upon your definition of "social networks". People were complaining about people not RTFAing on Slashdot in the 90s.
If one squints enough, Plato's Cave could be a complaint (circa -375) about opinions via pale shadows of secondary and tertiary sources.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
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.
The test was supposed to be about your ability to read and follow instructions, few people in my class passed the test. As soon as the test started you could see people poking holes and writing things.
But why should question 10 be the only one you follow?
"Read all the questions" is the only direction you have. There is never a "skip 1-9", except in number 10, but why would you start with that one?
It's a decent idea, but needs better execution.
Therefore, if you follow the instruction, you end up reading question #10 following the process, within the time it takes to read all the questions.
Now, that instruction might seem controversial, but it really isn't. If you have the time, its a good idea to read content well, before dealing with it further.
I suppose you are saying that no one ever told you to actually take the quiz, but that is pretty stupid if you follow that in every other situation. It's a set up, designed to make people look stupid.
I'm not an automaton. You didn't tell me at the beginning that the point was to follow every single thing exactly to the letter. Of course I could play that game, but you spend my entire career as a student telling me to happily skip problems and go on the next and then you want to act as if it's a problem with me that I engaged in the test in good faith.
I always wondered what would happen if I incorrectly answered those questions - would they still pay me? But I prefer cash to the truth
Most users clicked the "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions" and only a handful actually contacted the developer. They did receive the money though.
Google Rewards still exists, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago had a question in that format (though I am not sure if it was actually a nonexistent brand, and I don't recall enough about the question to look it up now).
I WANT to read the paper. Most of the time the article gives no link to it though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120205012403/http://www.inform...
It really made me much more conscious about seeking out and reading original sources, rather than relying on interpretations and summaries from journalists, bloggers, etc.
There was a rumor that one teacher didn’t read submitted essays. I decided to test this by applying the jargon translator from Dilbert’s Desktop Games (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) to my essay. The translator output was painful to read: for example, it replaces “mother” with “female parental unit”. I added a paragraph on the third page asking him to call me if he was still reading the essay. I never received a call but he later said that he had lost the essay so the results were inconclusive.
Maybe people just didn't want to play their stupid game and didn't mention bananas even if they'd seen the message?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...
Good times when I got 'bananas' in my mailbox.
Why? don't look for reason while analyzing the behaviour of the average internet user:-)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Massively reduces the number of messages you get from time wasters who just mash "can I have this?" or "is this still available?" to get in first, who will then ghost you because they've taken an extra half second to decide they don't want the item after all[2] so you spend time writing replies that achieve nothing.
Probably means some genuinely interested people get redirected to trash too, but if the item is worth having there will be enough responders to make this not matter. If you see no responses after a time, maybe then check your trash to see if there are any there worth responding to.
[1] those services attract much spam, always have a specific address for each that you can turn off once the junk starts flowing in
[2] as it isn't the right colour, or the right size, or you can't deliver, or will deliver but can't conveniently offer collection, or they completely misread the subject line, ...
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 paper? You're lucky if they read the article