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The more threads you have the more resources are required for moderation. If comments were enabled for every single thread on an old enough site they'd need ent
by corobo 11y ago
The more threads you have the more resources are required for moderation. If comments were enabled for every single thread on an old enough site they'd need entire teams just to keep the spammy comments out.
When threads are closed you have a lot less moderation work to do to keep the site from being infested with spammy outbound links
It's unfortunate but the value of the odd one or two people commenting on an old post isn't great enough to outweigh the need to easily keep the site spam free for many sites
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoYou need to automate most spam filtering, instead of relying on humans for all of it. Something like bogofilter works very well after some training.
- codingdave 11y agoAnd then spammers beat the automation and you need to update again... playing that game takes effort, too. Much easier to just close comments.
- krapp 11y agoEasier still to have old threads auto-delete after a certain length, time or time since last comment, similar to the way they do on imageboards.
- scholia 11y agoSpam isn't really the problem on big news sites. The mods are policing flame wars, hate speech (racism, sexism, homophobia), insults and libels, trolling, and off-topic comments, among other things. In this context, the Guardian's "Community standards and participation guidelines" page is a good read. http://www.theguardian.com/community-standards http://www.theguardian.com/community-standards
- hollerith 11y agoThat reasoning does not apply when the person (or the automated system) watching for spam has an O(1) way to get a notification of the next new comment, such as for example refreshing https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments.
- maxerickson 11y agoWhy not? If closing old discussions outright eliminates some significant portion of new comments, it seems it must be reducing the resources requires to inspect new comments by some similar amount.
- hollerith 11y agoWell, sure, and sabotaging the button for submitting a comment so that half the time it does not do anything works the same way. The point is that for a given volume or rate of new comments, the moderation burden of a comment is the same regardless of the age of its parent -- provided, again, that the moderator's method for finding out about the next new comment is O(1). Note that I'm not claiming that old comment sections should always stay open forever, just that great grandparent is not on its own a good argument for closing them. So here is a second argument: maybe the site's moderation process relies on flagging by ordinary users, and maybe the modal ordinary user cannot be coaxed into using any method for finding out about new comments except for scanning individual comment sections. I jumped into this conversation because I suspect that it is worthwhile to try to keep comment sections open as long as practical, so if I were in charge of a discussion site where the assumptions of the second argument were valid, I'd try to avoid the conclusion: for example, I might give users a way to subscribe or express an interest in getting a notification (by, e.g., email) whenever a new comment appears in a particular comment section; then I'd keep a section open for new comments as long as it has subscribers; and then I'd wait to see whether the subscribers flag enough of the new spam in the section to keep rate of spam in the section to an acceptable level.
- dplgk 11y agoBut the user will probably open a new thread asking the same question, fragmenting the answers (between new and old thread) and still create content that needs to be moderated.