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.
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.