The comments are usually better than the article. It feels like the same article gets pushed across the web over and over and all the news comes from the same few sources on a few channels. The comments give variety and call out the BS.

Maybe on a dedicated discussion platform like HN, but so many times the comments section of a major news outfit read like a YouTube commentator's stupider, meaner little brother.

There's always gems among the dumb and/or mean comments.

I don't comment too much[1] because I've found that, in general, there's always someone smarter than me who has said what I want to say already. The fact that I always seem to find that smarter person in the comments is why I'd prefer comments sections not to go, even if they are loaded with trolls.

[1] This thread's an exception, I suppose. I don't want to see comment sections go, though!

Yeah, I don't know why general news outlets have comment sections, they're universally awful. They should go back to Letters (Emails) to the Editor, but that would mean they'd have to pay someone to field the emails.

I suspect comment sections outside of forums (or sites which are designed around discussion like HN or Reddit) are mostly attempts to make a site more "viral" and "social", in the belief that doing so will somehow drive people to your site and keep them engaged and maybe clicking on the ads or whatever.

While this could be true, with certain sites (like news sites) comments are bound to be politically charged and tend towards the negative. Doubly so if comments allow threading or reflinks, making tangential discussions (and arguments) between posters easy. I think many sites assume comments would somehow lead to a revenue stream because something something facebook.

Also, it's probably likely that any site built on Wordpress is going to keep comments by default in their templates.

Where voting is allowed for best comment, the best ones are often quite useful. The Economist for example, it's usually worth reading the top comments. For some odd reason the guardian does not allow sorting the comments by best votes.

Just to provide a counter point, I really love comment sections. It's a way of seeing how other people are reacting to what I just read. When a news site doesn't support comments I find myself searching for them.

I find old comments on old news stories interesting. They provide kind of a snapshot of what people were thinking/feeling at a given time.

The day Obama released his birth certificate for instance. If you go back and look at some of the more fringy sites, the comments on that day are pretty amusing. A lot of people mystified by pdf layers.

I don't know why anyone should believe comment sections are authentic. In my mind they are propaganda ground zero.

Well there are usually some authentic comments mixed in. Admittedly some dictatorial regimes appear to employ people to comment in their favour. Iran, N Korea and Russia seem to do that but you can mentally filter them.

From what I've observed on HN at least, people seem to invariably spot propaganda in comments which contradict their politics or biases, but somehow the comments they agree with are always authentic and valid.

The fact that I can count on opinions like this countering propaganda is exactly what makes comment sections valuable.

I think the comment sections of local news sources are amongst the most toxic, especially in smaller communities. Locally, Topix, Disqus, Patch comments, and a couple of others have been taken over by a vocal minority of paranoid individuals. While it is amusing to watch now and then, it basically makes the comment mediums useless. There is no granular oversight, just a blanket remove and lock comments at a macro (article) scale.

I think it is important and useful to expose those views to the outside world. How can those views be addressed, and progress made, if they remain largely invisible?

All these articles are starting to look the same: 1. commenters are all awful, therefore, 2. content sites should cut off comments

It's one of those awkward arguments where I want to vigorously deny the premiss but affirm the conclusion.

There are great places for civil discussion online. If people who make content can't figure out how to build one, they should stop trying and just stick to what they know.

> There are great places for civil discussion online.

Where? I'd like to see examples, especially any that are new to me.

well, HN is a pretty good example.

Maybe if you grade on a curve. But HN can and should be better.

We're working on a set of moderation tools for the community that we hope will help with this.

What are some of the "old to you" examples?

Everyone who thinks making places for civil discussion is doable has never tried to do it. It's an amount of effort that is usually uneconomical.

The problem with Internet comments isn't really incivility per se, but rather a free ridership problem. That is, people are getting to use a platform created by others without incurring any costs if they cause damage to that platform.

I'd argue that incivility itself isn't even necessarily a bad thing, and that the real goal shouldn't be eliminating incivility, but rather making people put their money where their mouths are. (So to speak.)

So, i've been obsessed with the concept that uber and lyft rates both the operator and rider. Now, it may already exist, but i've never understood the idea of new commenters being allowed equal weight with those of established reputation. Reddit may do well shadow-banning, but the effect that known trolls continuously show up at all seems a problem.

I've always thought we out to be putting people with reputations' comments by people with similar reputations' eyes, and noobs' comments to noobs' eyes. Once the new people have established them as reasonable people, they start showing up more to people who have built a reputation.

Not just gross, net, or average karma, but i think to do it right, you'd need some sort of handicapping system like golf. On a good day, to you provide good content, great. If so, we'll rank you higher in the feeds of others with good handicap. Not every comment will hurt you if it's not helpful (we all have bad days, and everyone is occasionally grumpy), but if more often than not, your comments are terrible you're aren't going to be placed high in the feeds of those who are more socially adjusted.

One downside is that if some lurker who is an expert in the subject comes alone, he or she may no be able to participate in with all, but in communities like reddit or these, if you cannot pass some threshold, then you're not really a part of the community anyhow.

Another downside i see is that lurkers are a major portion of theses websites revenues, and the sites don't really want to remove content from their eyes. I'm not sure how to fix that issue, but for well establish sites, i think filtering via similar karma-type levels would surely bring up the discourse for those who want to have it, while keeping the trolls trolling other trolls (which is rather interesting to watch anyway).

It's kind of like skill-matching in games...however, I think that all of the comments need to be made available to everyone, although the order of presentation my be altered by the skill-matching algorithm.

The idea that content should willfully, and secretly, be withheld from users is a bit frightening and I reject it.

What about the Randall Munroe scheme that Reddit actually uses?

http://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2ff814/reminder_randal...

More and more of the people I subscribe to on Youtube are disabling comments, purely because the amount of time and effort required to moderate them to stop personal attacks, spam, and those stupid chain comments is simply not worth it.

I used uBlock to hide comments on pretty much every site I visit, they are incredibly seldom worth the time reading.

I really highly recommend the Shut Up Chrome Extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikk...

It drastically improves the entire internet just by blocking every comment section everywhere on every website, except those you explicitly whitelist.

I used to be someone who defended comments in general. I think they are only good for a certain subset of usecases, such as college campus blogs, where different voices can and should be heard. But other sites often do comments rather poorly, and only on the occasional tech blog will one find useful information in a comment, but not usually.

CNN and many other major American news outlets got rid or significantly downscaled comments in the fall of 2014: http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/21/tech/web/online-comment-sectio...

I wonder what Disqus YC 07 thinks of that?

I get the "broken windows" approach, but moderation after the fact is the worst way to run a virtual community. For starters you have to embrace the notion that by having an open forum that you have a community, and you need to lead by example and nurture and give positive feedback to those who add something.

In that vein, perhaps there is a call for a protocol/RFC whereby each person's public comments live on their own server, and a comments section, such as HN, would just return a bunch of links (or even just a root link, with child links being distributed with each comment)? The client would be responsible for constructing the comments page by contacting each individual server. Maybe hashes could be used with each link, so a client could flag any after the event rewriting?

It's got a NNTP flavour to it, if clients start doing caching and the NNTP client's view is threaded, but the idea would be that the canonical copy remains on the author's server, where they retain control of and responsibility for what they write. Its also RSS like, in that a server's output could be viewed as a stream of comments? It would be a bit like a blog, but each entry would be linked into a conversation/comment page by the client, possibly with selective downloading if comment are collapsible. It's basically SMTP, but instead of the server sending a message once, a client could contact the server at some point in the future and request a retransmission of a particular message. Is there already an RFC or protocol that fills this niche?

You'd think we'd have the technology where we could dramatically reduce this problem without having every single community moderate its own comments - especially given so many of the comment systems are run by centralized third-parties like Disqus, but sadly, that has not happened.

I think we should treat the comment cesspools of the Internet like say, Youtube or Politico like a honeypot. If you comment there, frankly I never want to see anything you ever write on the Internet ever again.

I believe this is one of those cases where the problem can't be solved by technology because it's more of a social issue.

I mean sure, you can implement more clever ways for comment moderation, like HN, but there's always going to be the issue where some parts of the community complain about how things are going for the worse.

This will always happen I believe, regardless of the community or the tech used to moderate its comments. And so at some point someone will inevitably consider community X's comments to be poison.

I can almost bet that there are people out there that believe HN comments are poison because the comments all show groupthink or whatever (not saying I believe this is the case, but that there's probably someone who thinks this way). And technology won't ever solve this.

Comment sections are poison because they undermine the ability to control the narrative.

So basically the people who advocated for the Iraq war are the good guys, whereas the people complaining about it in the comments are the bad ones because they aren't nice. Even the darkest corners of 4chan have nothing on the atrocities the mainstream media has advocated for over the years.

Yeah, you may have a point there. With wars in general the elites benefit - defence contracts, interesting news, the chance to play the big leader - while the general population suffer the downsides - higher taxes, being held vaguely responsible for killings done by your country that you never asked for and so on. It's good to have some counter to all that.

Coming from The Guardian that's rich. Youtube comments feature a far higher level of discourse than their "Comment is Free" section.

The most important function comments serve is to allow readers to view dissenting opinions and remarks conveniently. Something they would otherwise have to search out.

To date I have not seen a method of comment moderation on any site that hasn't been used to stifle dissent or unpopular opinions. It's unacceptable to give the illusion of open, free discussion when you have the ability to downvote or delete a post.

This is, plain and simple, an article espousing censorship. I'm not qualified intellectually to argue with censorship proponents, especially here.

There's a difference between censorship and moderation. If I replied to your comment with vitriolic hate speech that was clearly against the community rules and the mods removed it, that would be moderation. If I merely disagreed with your ideas or expressed an unpopular opinion while staying within the rules and the mods removed it, that would be censorship. The line is admittedly fuzzy, but it's usually an issue of intent and perceived contribution to meaningful discussion.

People consciously or unconsciously associate comments with the site where they read them. This can hurt the brand of the site and be a distraction from the useful conversations that its trying to foster. Turning comments off isn't censorship, it's a matter of self-defense. It also isn't censorship by definition, as you can't censor someone without knowing what they are going to say or whether or not they are going to agree with you.

It would be nice if there was a technical solution that could separate politically divisive trolling from the informative presentation of opposing views, but that doesn't exist yet. We're left with expensive human moderation that doesn't scale well. So, for now, turning off comments is the best solution for some. Hopefully we can solve the problem by raising the overall level of public discourse, but I'd bet on a getting a technical solution to work long before that happens.

I prefer solutions that are local rather than global. For instance - a killfile to let users ignore other users or a keyword filter to block comments they might not want to see, rather than global bans or the fade effect HN has for downvoting.

Unfortunately, some people want open discussion, while other people want bubbles. I would rather people censor themselves than censor other people, and create their own bubbles.

> To date I have not seen a method of comment moderation on any site that hasn't been used to stifle dissent or unpopular opinions. It's unacceptable to give the illusion of open, free discussion when you have the ability to downvote or delete a post.

What are your thoughts on the downvote system? on Reddit, a comment that is badly downvoted sinks to the bottom and becomes collapsed... but if you want, you can still choose to read it.

Of course take everything with a grain of salt.

The Hacker News community's comments are actually more intellectual than the writer's click-bait propaganda, and leaves room for debate on the author's one-sided views.

Edit: grammar

HN is as much an echo chamber as any other moderated community; the fact you find it a more agreeable echo chamber doesn't mean much.

Absolutely. Hell, it's much more of an echo chamber than most communities as it's so tightly moderated. Moderation begets echoes.

My gut feeling is that community voting is more than enough to make HN an echo chamber.

Think about it, if you see a slightly greyed-out comment, that becomes a data-point in interpreting the comment.

Though compared to other places with such strong voting mechanisms, the echo chamber seems to be less in effect. Only topic I can think about where it really comes out is articles on Uber, bizarrely.

I really don’t think it’s that simple. Plenty of anarchic places are also aggressively homogenous in the views expressed there and their overall culture (e.g. 4chan and sites like that).

I think in those places aggression simply serves to push people who would think differently out.

I'm not sure if that's true. While voting does definitely encourage an echo chamber, it requires moderation so that the true majority doesn't gain a foothold. If it weren't for the moderation on this site, it would be much like reddit.

Which means nothing, because nearly every reddit community is different.

Moderation plays a small role in the HN community. Any "community bubble" is due to shared interests and a core set of guidelines. This seems like an excuse for making a libertarian rant and nothing more.

I'm far from a libertarian. I think moderation is a good thing, I just think we need to recognize that it creates bubbles in and of itself. If you want a more concrete reddit example, /r/lgbt and /r/ainbow would provide a concrete example. Moderation provides the tone for a community unless it remains totally unmoderated.

I don't disagree that moderation can set the tone for a community. I'm just arguing that's not the case on Hacker News. This site has a very strong focus on technology and startups. Any specific niche will create a bubble.

It's also worth keeping in mind that /r/ainbow was created as an alternative after the mess that /r/lgbt became. /r/games from /r/gaming is a similar example. As much as a change in moderation was a focus, it was also a different audience that moved over to the new subs.

I think HN is less bubbly than most enclosed communities, but it's definitely a bubble whenever it comes to feminism or social justice issues. Check out any post on those issues, check the comments, and refresh. It's intense how many comments are removed.

Turn on "showdead" in your profile. Those comments are removed by user actions (and there is a small difference from removed, they are still available to logged in users that know about that setting).

I would submit there's a significant difference between comment sites on the original site, and secondary comment sites like Slashdot, Reddit, and HN. The article is clearly about the former. I am not personally aware of a site that at scale (i.e., not a blog with a couple hundred commenters, tops) is worth reading the comments.

Sure, you can write complaints about Slashdot, Reddit, and HN (see siblings of this post competing to see who can slag on them the hardest), but at least there's a chance of some semblance of discussion. That is not a chance that big sites have.

The Guardian is Fox News for Anglo-American progressives (or at least a certain set of them).

Users are not permitted to comment freely on HN. Step too far out of line and your comment becomes invisible and you risk a shadow ban. This site offers the most vanilla, white bread, predictable discussion of any forum I frequent. No real surprise about what this user base wants.

Your spot-on comment is already getting grayed out. Oh the irony.

If the truth hurts... downvote it so it can be hidden! Yeah, that'll show you!

>In the absence of strict moderation, we’d be much better off without them.

I have little doubt as to the particular types of views that the author would want moderators to enforce.

> I have little doubt as to the particular types of views that the author would want moderators to enforce.

This is another argument for removing comments: implementing any form of moderation opens you to criticism that you're not doing it fairly, favoring certain viewpoints or users over others.

Anything you do is always open to any sort of criticism. I happen to believe that there are reasonable forms of moderation, as well as forms that are less reasonable.

What, why, and why is that a bad thing?