I could be wrong - I don't know if those accounts are able to comment or not.
[edit: rewrote a badly written subclause to be clearer than before]
Your suggestion would address spam, but as major newspapers end up paywalled that's largely a non-issue. The others are moving to compulsory social login (e.g. FB) which also mitigates that (and basically makes you "pay" with your personal details).
Newspapers should totally have an easy feedback form, possibly even a dedicated forum, but not comments.
I believe the parent means that you pay/it hurts your wallet (even if it is $5 per year). When you "pay" via your facebook details being shared, then this cost doesn't affect you. If you cared you woulnd't be using FB in the first place :)
I'm experimenting with a fix for this at repowcha. There's probably a cost threshold past which it becomes unprofitable to post bad comments with an agenda.
I'm not trying to be snide, but I genuinely believe you are underestimating the overwhelming drive that is caused by spite.
It's a sweet idea, but I don't think it's at all in line with how people think/utilize comments sections.
The idea of selling things online was never about how to sell them to people who don't want them. You're clearly not the target market. It would be for people who are so fiercely loyal they don't think twice about how nice of a bonus it is to be able to be in the select audience that CAN comment. I don't know if people are this loyal to publications, but I've certainly felt it towards YouTube personalities that align with my thinking so strongly that I feel supporting them is promoting my values.
To support the content producer. Maybe $5 is too high, but what if it was $2 or $3? I pay that to a few producers.
The Athletic, for example, has its own comment section (duplicated on a much larger scale by Reddit discussion of quotes from the paywalled articles). Even niche outlets like the Dunc'd On Podcast come with their own Discord.
The lure, I think, is basically what's being discussed here.
Sports discussion ... suffers perhaps more than average from an absence of moderation, so a paywalled community is seen as a benefit.
It was beyond horrible. People were commenting about how glad they were that this person they *didn’t even know* was gone. “One fewer idiot” type of comments. It was one of those things where it was so bad you didn’t want to look away.
The moderation was non-existent.
I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/coronavirus...
Who wants to scroll through 1k comments in a narrow, awkwardly-paginated column? They also allow posts from anyone with an email account (mitigated somewhat by the paywall on most articles) which results in a lot of high-emotion, low-information spam. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal limits comments only to people with a subscription. Perhaps as a result, the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I wonder if this is driven by the different susbscription prices, or just the different audience.
How many WSJ comments sections have you actually read?
I don't dare look at the WP now.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/13/tim-dow...
* https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/25/inquirer-daily-new...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/Our_Comments_Are_Changi...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20100707_Le...
In my mind, the answer is quite easy: increasing the amount of page loads increases the amount of ads people see. If you deliver emails along the lines of "someone replied to your comment", people are gonna click on them and you're going to serve another set of ads.
Moderation requires effort and reduces the amount of page loads, therefore most websites that use comments don't want to do that.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
I don't think removing comments will affect page views by much.
I think I saw one system where you couldn't comment directly, but you could post a reaction. It would need to be approved before being visible to others first. I think such a system, while pretty labor intensive, would be preferable.
Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.
It's a lesson that definitely pre-dates computer-mediated communication. I've seen freely accessibly physical noticeboards quickly fill up with advertisements and suchlike, posted over the notices for which the noticeboards were actually for, for one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffito_(archaeology)
[edit: top comment on the top comment's top comment!]
As has become clear, “engagement” means public brawling. It generates clicks, and clicks are gold. It also encourages people to sign up for accounts, just so they can jump into the cesspool. Those accounts are quite valuable, as they are fodder for data miners, correlators, and aggregators. Making those accounts free, and easy to create (but not so easy to delete), is a natural.
That’s why so many of these sites wait until their comment fighting pits reach brand-destroying levels of rancor, before they do anything about it; sometimes, too late (remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).
Yeah, I’m cynical.
I did know about this shady part of the internet but knowing and seeing it in action is different.
[0]: https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-far...
I've been there for like 10 years and I don't remember this. Was it even before? Do you have a link or something? I tried some searches but didn't find any relevant result. Thanks in advance.
The guy was a paid subreddit mod, and an engineer in Arizona or New Mexico, or somewhere.
The story destroyed his career. I know he was immediately fired by his day job. Maybe it's a good thing that the story is hard to find. We all deserve a second chance. I actually felt a bit sorry for him.
They used to pay moderators?
I am not much of a Reddit user, so I don't know the landscape well enough to be cognizant of the terminology.
Thanks for the correction. I [honestly] appreciate it.
I suspect this was what had me confused:
> Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.
I think it's always been like that. The GNAA (when it was new back in early 2000s) was copying the template of existing trolls by challenging those on probationary on their IRC to get racist first posts, something like that. It was already just one of those things you ran across on Slashdot, like bizarre Natalie Portman copy pasta.
I do, and I had an old account there, back in the before times. But now it just looks like a less popular reddit comment section. What do you mean with the swastikas?
They probably aren't real Nazis; just bored teenagers, trying to get a rise.
You usually need to max out the comment filters to see them (rightly so).
But there's also plenty of good old-fashioned abuse trolls, there.
One of the reasons that I like this place, is because it highly discourages that kind of behavior.
If it starts happening here, I'm heading for the hills. I used to be a troll, but as I have gotten older, the shine has worn off that brand of behavior.
Thing is, newspapers as their business model currently is, have zero incentives in having quality comments. Negative incentives actually. Journalism is 20% facts reporting, 80% comments and that's generous: comments are the cheapest to write, some news website/papers are closer to 99% comments. If you have quality comments by your readers, what are you selling then?
We need to move to a business model where facts reporting and facts checking (careful: talking about facts checking, not analysis checking) are the primary services that journalists would get paid for. Comments, even quality comments can be done through a good enough moderation system and a big enough community.
I mean, even on HN, which I consider above average, you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts. 99% of comments are from highly opiniated people with little subject matter experience and no concern for subtlety. It's just not a very good value proposition.
I have a newspaper subscription and like reading editorials, because they often have interesting people talk about relevant topics. Usually the "professional" comments are a lot less divisive, and a lot more fact based than the simplistic bullshit that tends to be upvoted in comment sections.
I still like reading user comments, but I don't think they are a replacement for good journalism or professional writers.
The big problem: All comments have a half-life of half a day at most, and even during that short time they are buried in a mountain of other comments. If a story is popular (many potential readers that I could reach) there will also be hundreds of comments, mostly low quality, that make finding good ones hard. If there only a few comments so a good one will stand out more there won't be many readers.
Writing a blog post has a much higher chance to be found over a larger period of time. Probably, depending on the blog. A choice between getting attention (by borrowing the fame of reddit or HN to draw in readers) for a very short period of time, or be easier to find over longer periods but then it depends on the fame of your own blog.
So it is not worth spending a lot of time and effort trying my best because I only reach a handful of people in the first place, but even if it's hundreds, they are all just story- and comment browsing randomly for their daily does of entertainment. That means whatever I write will be forgotten pretty quickly because in the end it's not all that important. Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there.
What I mean by that is that only when you actually end up using what you read in a practical way does it really matter and you remember. Everything else, even if it's really great wisdom, if you have no practical application for it in our own life your brain does not put any priority on retaining the content. Even apart from comments, I for example took loads of courses (edX, Coursera) outside my own field, at the time I spent a lot of effort and even became a community TA in some of those courses (chemistry, statistics, biology). However, I forgot soooo much by now, because in the end none of it has any practical implications for me. With some completely random (all kinds of topics!) comments, even when they are good, it's much worse.
Therefore I don't expect such comment sites to ever rise above what we have now. It just does not really matter for either readers or writers. The quality will always just be "good enough" (on the low side).
PS: Oh and by the way, in my long reddit and HN experience, what gives the most "Likes" rarely is the quality technical stuff - but rare personal anecdotes.
Disagree. Reading these comments, especially when they relate to specific technologies, I have come across numerous systems, resources and techniques that I have gone on to use in practice. I'll just take this opportunity to say a quiet 'thank-you' to their respective authors.
For example, you see somebody posting what you know is a big misconception. You spend time and effort educating and clearing it up. Even if you succeed, you soon run out of patience - you reached a hundred people, 5 of whom cared and will remember. However, there are a few hundred million left in the world who still have that misconception, and there still are way more daily conversations and blog posts where the misconception is spread. You on the other hand spent half an hour education a handful of people. How long until you ignore comments you know are wrong and just shrug and go on with your life?
Answering a specific one-time question by pointing to some resource or project is easy enough in comparison. I did not mean to imply that all comments are always useless. I did not think it would be necessary to point that out. See, that's another problem, somebody always comes up with an interpretation of what you write that will make you spend even more time to clarify because you never thought that interpretation would happen.
Could comments be assigned some big weight that has the effect of the comment staying around high enough to clear the misconception?
Could each thread be allowed only a finite number of comments or words, to not disperse attention, with lower quality comments forced to disappear?
Could there be a fool-proof mechanism to force comments you know are wrong to disappear?
If a new site like HN or Reddit showed up, how would would like it work? I ask because I'm toying with the idea of one. Thoughtful beta users get in touch.
Not trying to be rude or a smartass, but umm... your comment didn't pass its own bar. Because you've set the bar incredibly high.
Even on HN, people come for some chatter/community, not only to have their worldview challenged every minute of the hour. Also, chatter is not the same as "no concern for subtlety".
If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.
Any fee attached to commenting is little different from just banning comments. Few will pay to put their $0.02 on a story they disagree with even fewer will pay if they agree with it. They'll go bitch about it on FB, then bitch about the commenting system too.
As you say, fighting comment trolling and spam is expensive, news media isn't making money hand over fist. I've rarely seen comments add value to a site so why pay to keep them?
The problem is that we are both approaching this as a problem that needs to be solved, while in reality it only needs to appear like one.
Social media companies make their revenue out of "engagement", and posts breaking the rules often generate the most of it, so properly moderating them would actually hurt their bottom line by more than just the cost of said moderation.
These companies are incentivized to leave as much "bad" content up as they can (as it generates engagement) while making it look like they are taking action as to not risk bad PR or legal consequences. Same goes for deterring or punishing offenders - long-term bans are trivial to implement and would significantly deter breaking the rules, but would also decrease "engagement".
In a typical paid product, the provider provides a service to the users who are paying the provider for said service. In this case, the provider is incentivized to deliver the best version of that service so that users keep paying, whether it's great journalism with added value (a high-quality comments section would be a plus here) or software.
With advertising, this changes completely. Broadly speaking, the profits negatively correlate with how much value is delivered to the user. There is no incentive great journalism and moderate the comments section while you can churn out inflammatory clickbait and leave comments unmoderated - the latter will actually net you more profit because outraged people barking at each other in the comments is a great source of "engagement" which is what advertising-based business models profit from.
As for expenses, HN seems like a lean site and likely doesn't require a ton of resources. I think there is only 1 full time moderator, dang. I have no idea whether YC makes money on HN or not, but I'd be surprised if it didn't at least break even.
It's honestly a fairly transparent transaction, and much preferable to the opaque world of on-line targetted advertising. I like how my ad-blocker just sits here twiddling its thumbs.
You can make enough money to sustain the thing with a one-time joining fee or unobtrusive, directly-negotiated advertising. You just can't make unsustainable VC-level money.
The other big advantage is that the only participants in channel are the newspaper and the submitter; no interaction between third parties on your platform means no flame wars or the like.
And if you can tolerate the meme format, [2] is my favorite academic fight of all times.
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/nicholas-spice/how-t...
[2] https://twitter.com/phonologist/status/982023915319906304
Comments on most news sites are typically just assholes making every story about whatever they're obsessed with.
Letters to the editor are still an active thing.
The idea that one can meaningfully socialize with more than several hundred people is.
Its a step in the human evolution in the capitalist internet era.
Except for substack. In an interesting twist the comment sections on substack are thoughtful and polite with the authors chiming in -- at least in my experience. Don't know how to explain that compared to most sites. Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
This is something I've seen with countless forums and message boards over the years, i.e. Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.
1) Going mainstream / mass appeal means the lowest common denominator drops, whether that's content or quality of conversation
2) Commercialization incentivizes the wrong things - see Twitter and how its been optimised for "engagement" above all else (not quality of content, or user happiness etc).
Interesting things are happening at Clubhouse but surely they know how this will go. I think successful new platforms that want to maintain their integrity should be looking at paid membership. Substack might be OK because of that.
That's certainly not true for all substacks. Authors choose whether each post is paid-subscriber-only or not, and publicly visible posts can be commented on by unpaid accounts.
Maybe Substack comments are better because they represent a narrow audience (people interested in the output of a particular writer). Generally it is up to the author of the substack to moderate its comments.
Only because they are not moderated properly. Newspapers should simply have a staff member read and approve every post. It really doesn't take that long to read something and hit yes or no.
Nobody said the comments have to be real time.
You're talking about a lot of added cost for little added value. Newspapers aren't exactly swimming in money these days.
Newspapers aren't swimming in money because they don't go all in on online content. Moderating comments, choosing information for their readers, that's their core competence. Writing articles or printing is secondary.
I don't want 50 different accounts and comment sections. I want to take articles I'm interested in and bring them to the town square or pub to talk about. This is that.
A news site running a comments section is sort of like a restaurant deciding they should also sell groceries. Can it work? Maybe - but more likely most people didn't want to pick up groceries at your restaurant, while people looking to steal food know that it's unattended most of the time, so you have a massive shrink rate problem. That doesn't mean groceries are a bad idea, it means it's something people need to specialize into.
Very few news orgs devote the resources needed to curate messages for relevance and filter trolls and flames.
Furthermore, places want to make money on subscribers so potentially have an incentive not to remove postsade by subscribers (no substance behind that theory).
Nytimes is the only news site I see that doesn't have absolute trash for dialogue quality.
Oh, it has plenty of trash comments, they're just expressed in a manner acceptable to the urban elite. All the comments from hoi polloi are filtered.
It's not the same.
So, like most of the content above the comments?
Newspapers struggle to exist as is without devoting more resources to an obsolete forum system. Better to retreat to a BBS system for overall discussion of the newspaper and let HN/Reddit/4chan provide platforms of discussion for your articles.
"BBS system" is RAS Syndrome, by the way. (-:
They claim they tried "everything", but did they actually try everything? For example, did they try limiting commenting to paying subscribers only? They don't mention in this post whether they actually tried that or not.
What I do see as an increasing and disturbing trend is newspapers selectively turning off comment sections on stories that are controversial. The Seattle Times does this, and in 2020 the readers were robbed of the opportunity to discuss controversial situations freely (like CHAZ or a violent BLM riot). This was presumably done to avoid the trouble of moderation of PR, but a less charitable and very believable take is that this amounts to controlled manufacturing of public opinion by disallowing a dissenting viewpoint.
In the absence of comment sections, all that’s left is one journalist’s biased take and characterization. With news houses across the country experiencing left-leaning employee activism and newsroom revolts, the opinions of readers is extremely important to not just platform, but feature prominently as a balancing force. And yes, anonymous comments in particular must be permitted, so the voice of those who aren’t in power is heard.
You mean like journalists themselves ?
And if you need to be informed to comment online should also require the same levels for voting. It seems it would be just as if not more so for the latter.
Also, who's deciding the truth so that we know what informed is?
And that seems to be the position of the Inquirer (and nj.com that they reference): they are outsourcing comments to Twitter, FB etc)
Anyway, more to the point: First, the comments are almost always the most interesting part of a mainstream article, to the point where I will scroll down to see if they are there (if not--don't bother). Are there idiots posting? Yep--just scroll past, no problem. Second, Mainstream media dislikes comments because they don't like people pointing out their errors. (No one does, of course.)
I think having comments everywhere possible was an idea from the web 2.0 era that’s proven to be not all that worth it in most cases. Moderation is hard and it doesn’t make sense for newspapers and magazines to be spending resources on it. There are other forums (reddit, hn) for this sort of thing.