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As the first person in the world to put comments directly under news stories (japantoday.com), I am appalled by the excuses that sites give to stop their commen

As the first person in the world to put comments directly under news stories (japantoday.com), I am appalled by the excuses that sites give to stop their comment sections. For example, the Daily Beast said they were stopping comments because of the trolls, yet there were plenty of good commenters on there. What about them? This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls, which is not actually all that difficult, and the arrogance of some journalists who simply don't want their opinions to be questioned. I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they don't want you to engage. I've always found that the commenters are the core of the community and they will come back time and time again to discuss the issues and add extra context and meaning. They give sites life. Life is messy, but we deal with it. These sites seem to think they can offload the work to Facebook, but all they are doing is losing their community, the people, and the spark. They should know that Facebook doesn't care about their community -- it only cares about Facebook, and will screw them as soon as it can.

nyolfen 11y ago
newspapers existed for centuries without comment sections, i think the mode of propagation will survive
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  horse carriages existed for centuries without the engines, i think the mode of transportation will survive.
  - codingdave 11y ago
    It has. Go visit Amish country. Or come out west where people still ride horses around the small towns.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Newspapers have long had letters to the editor and published essays sent their way. A famous example being the Constitution debate in the US with the publishing of what came to be called the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers.
  - firebones 11y ago
    And plenty of sites follow that model without requiring comment sections. And they're better for it.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Letters to the editor is a heavily moderated comment section.
interpol_p 11y ago
It's not a matter of not wanting people to engage. It's a matter of not wanting to provide a platform for engagement when the web itself is that platform. I read a lot of blogs which disallow comments. Their engagement comes through linking other blogs and responding, or linking tweets. I wouldn't call it arrogance to disallow comments. It's a matter of encouraging people to create their own platforms from which to respond. (That said, I have nothing against comments and think comment-first sites like this one are valuable. But not every site needs to provide a platform for engagement or risk being called arrogant.)
Steko 11y ago
> This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls, which is not actually all that difficult If it's so easy why is it the case that well meaning website after website decides to give up? I'll suggest that it's actually quite hard, that trolls and astroturfers will modify their behavior in accordance with whatever rules you put up but they are still not commenting in good faith and will tend to derail and dominate conversation.
mc32 11y ago
I think dealing with trolls is easier when you have a community of expats and [something]-philes as your audience. They tend to be more tightly knit, smallish community with waves of users as people cycle in and out of the country. Because of that the somewhat heavy handed moderation at japantoday was okay. It was more a place for expats to have more or less agreeable opinions about things. In those cases the volume was rather low and expats were just glad to have a forum so they were more forgiving. It wasn't as if they had an alternative source for copy-pasta news translated to English. So they were a more or less captive audience, regardless. At a site like CNN, etc. The volume is too large and the kind of moderation people would put up with would be different. So their decision is different. [edit] you'd need more than one person going thru the firehose at CNN and you'd have a backlash if the pruning displease any of the constituents.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >At a site like CNN, etc. The volume is too large and the kind of moderation people would put up with would be different. So maybe they could NOT moderate there? How about totally free speech? (which shouldn't need a qualifier such as "totally" in the first place) People enjoy writing in the comments, including those involved in flame wars (especially those: else they wouldn't participate message after message).
  - jerf 11y ago
    "How about totally free speech?" But we've seen the result of that. It's not some sort of blindingly beautiful laboratory of democracy, it's a whole bunch of barely-literate people chanting slogans at each other between the trolls. There's a fundamental structural problem here. Imagine a full stadium of people all trying to talk to each other about the same thing, on the same topic, through the same pipe. What do you expect to happen? No real-world conversations work like that. The Internet can scale conversations up to real-world-absurd sizes, like the one we're having here, but there's still limits, and sites like CNN blast right through them. Not through any fault of their own, they're just too large to host any sort of reasonable conversation. To have reasonable conversations, you need something else, some sort of segmentation, by interests, by personalities, by who happened to show up at some obscure website, something to make it not just a few thousand people trying to shout into the same tin can. This has little-to-nothing to do with "free speech" or ideological issues of any kind... it's an engineering problem. I'd call it social engineering, but that has the entirely wrong connotation for this problem. But it's still some sort of community engineering problem more than anything else. I've had the hobby of watching those sorts of things for about 15 years now and I've never seen even a hint of technology that a site as large as CNN could use to have some sort of robust, interesting debate. The incentives are all wrong, for all the participants, including CNN. Even the best tech I've seen breaks down at what is easily one order of magnitude below what CNN gets, if not two.
anigbrowl 11y ago
This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls On a popular website that's a round-the-clock job. How much do you think a media organization should budget for this?
snowwrestler 11y ago
I've run some smallish content sites with comment sections. My experience was that in 2007, comments sometimes added interesting context and trolls were relatively easy to ban. By 2014, there were thousands of high schoolers in Asia being paid tiny amounts of money to sit in Internet cafes and create accounts and post spam comments as fast as they could. The only solution was constant, manual moderation, which is very expensive. And for what? When we went back and reviewed our recent comments data, we found that commenters were no more likely to return to the site than anyone else. Engagement metrics like time on site and pages per view were not significantly better for commenters. Commenters talked to each below stories, but persistent connections were rare; mostly it was a one-time conversation between strangers. Essentially, it seemed like the vast majority of comments were just people blowing off steam and then leaving. This coincided with a shift in traffic sources. In 2007 it was largely search engines, other content site referrals, and email newsletters. By 2014 the clear leader was Facebook, with Twitter in the top 5 too. To me it was clear what happened: people now establish one or more "home bases" on community-first sites like social media or aggregators like HN. From there, they jump out to read articles that other members of the community posted. This was the reverse of 2007 and earlier. The challenge therefore today is: how does a site hold onto that social media "snack" traffic. One thing that doesn't work: community features. There's already plenty of community on Facebook (and Twitter, and HN, and Reddit, etc.), so that's not a compelling reason for a visitor to stay.
duaneb 11y ago
I don't see news sites as having a community. I don't believe I've ever intentionally read the comments, and I always viewed it as a way to interact or provide feedback with the author, not a place for discussion. Alternatively, you could have commenting-as-a-service, where users opt into commenting on arbitrary URLs.
- laumars 11y ago
  Isn't that what sites like Reddit and this place are? Or have I missed your point?
  - duaneb 11y ago
    Yea, I see what you mean. I was imagining it differently but Reddit fills the role I was imagining.
adsche 11y ago
> I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they don't want you to engage. In my humble experience, some sites with comment sections also don't want you to engage if you're not on their side. And I think that's more problematic, especially on news sites, because you could get the impression that the comment section was representative of the readers. Just as an anecdotal example, a couple months ago, I tried engaging in a discussion in the comment section at welt.de, online outlet of one of Germany's largest newspapers. My comments were all short, on-topic, and never personal. I provided some sources but generally a different point-of-view than the (until then few) other comments, all right-wing barroom clichés, even celebrations of refugees drowning. None of my comments was cleared, while very vile and unfounded comments continued to pour in. I tested for a while and experinced the same behaviour on almost all newspaper websites. (On some others, I was immediately attacked personally for my opinion, and that is with moderation in place.) I since blocked disqus and never looked back. Twitter has been a good alternative for me so far.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >My comments were all short, on-topic, and never personal. I provided some sources but generally a different point-of-view than the (until then few) other comments, all right-wing barroom clichés, even celebrations of refugees drowning. None of my comments was cleared, while very vile and unfounded comments continued to pour in. Make a screen capture video (or a few screenshots) of that happening, post it up on a competitive news site to them, and enjoy their embarrassment and backtracking... (and help change their bad ways in the process).
  - _up 11y ago
    Copetitors in Germany won't care. They make money with misinforming. The Government also openly wants Facebook to censor refugee critics.
codingdave 11y ago
You presume that all sites want a community around them. Some site just want an audience, which is not at all the same thing.

nyolfen 11y ago

newspapers existed for centuries without comment sections, i think the mode of propagation will survive

jedmeyers 11y ago
horse carriages existed for centuries without the engines, i think the mode of transportation will survive.
- codingdave 11y ago
  It has. Go visit Amish country. Or come out west where people still ride horses around the small towns.
protomyth 11y ago
Newspapers have long had letters to the editor and published essays sent their way. A famous example being the Constitution debate in the US with the publishing of what came to be called the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers.
- firebones 11y ago
  And plenty of sites follow that model without requiring comment sections. And they're better for it.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Letters to the editor is a heavily moderated comment section.

interpol_p 11y ago

It's not a matter of not wanting people to engage. It's a matter of not wanting to provide a platform for engagement when the web itself is that platform. I read a lot of blogs which disallow comments. Their engagement comes through linking other blogs and responding, or linking tweets. I wouldn't call it arrogance to disallow comments. It's a matter of encouraging people to create their own platforms from which to respond. (That said, I have nothing against comments and think comment-first sites like this one are valuable. But not every site needs to provide a platform for engagement or risk being called arrogant.)

Steko 11y ago

> This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls, which is not actually all that difficult If it's so easy why is it the case that well meaning website after website decides to give up? I'll suggest that it's actually quite hard, that trolls and astroturfers will modify their behavior in accordance with whatever rules you put up but they are still not commenting in good faith and will tend to derail and dominate conversation.

mc32 11y ago

I think dealing with trolls is easier when you have a community of expats and [something]-philes as your audience. They tend to be more tightly knit, smallish community with waves of users as people cycle in and out of the country. Because of that the somewhat heavy handed moderation at japantoday was okay. It was more a place for expats to have more or less agreeable opinions about things. In those cases the volume was rather low and expats were just glad to have a forum so they were more forgiving. It wasn't as if they had an alternative source for copy-pasta news translated to English. So they were a more or less captive audience, regardless. At a site like CNN, etc. The volume is too large and the kind of moderation people would put up with would be different. So their decision is different. [edit] you'd need more than one person going thru the firehose at CNN and you'd have a backlash if the pruning displease any of the constituents.

coldtea 11y ago
>At a site like CNN, etc. The volume is too large and the kind of moderation people would put up with would be different. So maybe they could NOT moderate there? How about totally free speech? (which shouldn't need a qualifier such as "totally" in the first place) People enjoy writing in the comments, including those involved in flame wars (especially those: else they wouldn't participate message after message).
- jerf 11y ago
  "How about totally free speech?" But we've seen the result of that. It's not some sort of blindingly beautiful laboratory of democracy, it's a whole bunch of barely-literate people chanting slogans at each other between the trolls. There's a fundamental structural problem here. Imagine a full stadium of people all trying to talk to each other about the same thing, on the same topic, through the same pipe. What do you expect to happen? No real-world conversations work like that. The Internet can scale conversations up to real-world-absurd sizes, like the one we're having here, but there's still limits, and sites like CNN blast right through them. Not through any fault of their own, they're just too large to host any sort of reasonable conversation. To have reasonable conversations, you need something else, some sort of segmentation, by interests, by personalities, by who happened to show up at some obscure website, something to make it not just a few thousand people trying to shout into the same tin can. This has little-to-nothing to do with "free speech" or ideological issues of any kind... it's an engineering problem. I'd call it social engineering, but that has the entirely wrong connotation for this problem. But it's still some sort of community engineering problem more than anything else. I've had the hobby of watching those sorts of things for about 15 years now and I've never seen even a hint of technology that a site as large as CNN could use to have some sort of robust, interesting debate. The incentives are all wrong, for all the participants, including CNN. Even the best tech I've seen breaks down at what is easily one order of magnitude below what CNN gets, if not two.

anigbrowl 11y ago

This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls On a popular website that's a round-the-clock job. How much do you think a media organization should budget for this?

snowwrestler 11y ago

I've run some smallish content sites with comment sections. My experience was that in 2007, comments sometimes added interesting context and trolls were relatively easy to ban. By 2014, there were thousands of high schoolers in Asia being paid tiny amounts of money to sit in Internet cafes and create accounts and post spam comments as fast as they could. The only solution was constant, manual moderation, which is very expensive. And for what? When we went back and reviewed our recent comments data, we found that commenters were no more likely to return to the site than anyone else. Engagement metrics like time on site and pages per view were not significantly better for commenters. Commenters talked to each below stories, but persistent connections were rare; mostly it was a one-time conversation between strangers. Essentially, it seemed like the vast majority of comments were just people blowing off steam and then leaving. This coincided with a shift in traffic sources. In 2007 it was largely search engines, other content site referrals, and email newsletters. By 2014 the clear leader was Facebook, with Twitter in the top 5 too. To me it was clear what happened: people now establish one or more "home bases" on community-first sites like social media or aggregators like HN. From there, they jump out to read articles that other members of the community posted. This was the reverse of 2007 and earlier. The challenge therefore today is: how does a site hold onto that social media "snack" traffic. One thing that doesn't work: community features. There's already plenty of community on Facebook (and Twitter, and HN, and Reddit, etc.), so that's not a compelling reason for a visitor to stay.

duaneb 11y ago

I don't see news sites as having a community. I don't believe I've ever intentionally read the comments, and I always viewed it as a way to interact or provide feedback with the author, not a place for discussion. Alternatively, you could have commenting-as-a-service, where users opt into commenting on arbitrary URLs.

laumars 11y ago
Isn't that what sites like Reddit and this place are? Or have I missed your point?
- duaneb 11y ago
  Yea, I see what you mean. I was imagining it differently but Reddit fills the role I was imagining.

adsche 11y ago

> I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they don't want you to engage. In my humble experience, some sites with comment sections also don't want you to engage if you're not on their side. And I think that's more problematic, especially on news sites, because you could get the impression that the comment section was representative of the readers. Just as an anecdotal example, a couple months ago, I tried engaging in a discussion in the comment section at welt.de, online outlet of one of Germany's largest newspapers. My comments were all short, on-topic, and never personal. I provided some sources but generally a different point-of-view than the (until then few) other comments, all right-wing barroom clichés, even celebrations of refugees drowning. None of my comments was cleared, while very vile and unfounded comments continued to pour in. I tested for a while and experinced the same behaviour on almost all newspaper websites. (On some others, I was immediately attacked personally for my opinion, and that is with moderation in place.) I since blocked disqus and never looked back. Twitter has been a good alternative for me so far.

coldtea 11y ago
>My comments were all short, on-topic, and never personal. I provided some sources but generally a different point-of-view than the (until then few) other comments, all right-wing barroom clichés, even celebrations of refugees drowning. None of my comments was cleared, while very vile and unfounded comments continued to pour in. Make a screen capture video (or a few screenshots) of that happening, post it up on a competitive news site to them, and enjoy their embarrassment and backtracking... (and help change their bad ways in the process).
- _up 11y ago
  Copetitors in Germany won't care. They make money with misinforming. The Government also openly wants Facebook to censor refugee critics.

codingdave 11y ago

You presume that all sites want a community around them. Some site just want an audience, which is not at all the same thing.