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Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit
- seiji 17y agoI think this should go a bit further. The next time Google or Apple announces something major-ish, the entire Internet should just be turned off for two days. Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in the first place.
- anigbrowl 17y agoAgreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are so obnoxious. I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.
- newsio 17y agoDitto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles. The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment threads are excellent reading. Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real identities were tied to people's words. Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is a great way to say what you actually think.
- carbon179 17y agoI just had to register on HN to say how much I completely agree with this statement: "Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles."
- awa 17y agoWelcome to HN! Please take some time to go through the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. And hit upvote when you agree with somebody's comment.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- andyking 17y agoA radio industry forum did that a few years ago - fed up of the vitriol being spouted anonymously, the forum owner closed it down and reopened it with a verified real name policy. You have to register with an employer email address and the forums are invisible to all but the registered users. The result? The forum is quiet and discussions very boring - for a start, Google isn't picking up the topics to pull in new users and besides, no one wants to say what they think when they know either their current boss or a potential employer is reading it under their real name. (The British radio industry is a small place.) Worse still, you get the odd threat. "I know such-and-such a radio boss and you're never going to be employed again if you keep posting that station X is pants." It's just not a pleasant atmosphere.
- andyking 17y agoI couldn't agree more. I've lost count of the number of times I've read an interesting article on the Guardian website only to have hundreds upon hundreds of dull comments and irrelevant arguments squeezed down my meagre internet connection. I go to the newspaper website to read the newspaper's writing and opinion, not that of thousands of internet pundits. Every article about economic recovery, for instance, currently attracts hundreds of doom-laden comments. It's enough to make you slit your wrists. It's the overwhelming volume of comments at the bottom of national newspaper articles that gets me. A Guardian piece can get anything from 100 to around 500 comments before it starts to fizzle out. Who has the time to read through all that? It's just a racket - noise at its worst catering to the very few participants and irritating the many readers. What was wrong with letters pages, with that same noise filtered and edited by editors for hundreds of years?
- metra 17y agoCan't you just not look at the comments for two days?
- youngian 17y agoBold. This makes me really happy. Comments sections are the cesspools of the Internet, so it's great to see someone say "This is going away until you think about what you did wrong." P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least cesspoolish place I've found so far.
- roc 17y agoThere's no real irony. While anonymous-account sites can have reasonable comments, that's a function of size, really. Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess. Similarly, Engadget used to be alright, then they grew and added the voting system... etc. Frankly, what works for smaller sites doesn't scale. At their visibility, Engadget should either go comment-less or do subscriptions for early-access and comments. Anonymous comments just don't provide enough value with that much noise.
- sjs382 17y agoI browse slashdot at +4 and I think the comments are pretty good/insightful. They are a bit too slow on the news sometimes, though.
- JadeNB 17y agoIt seems to me that this solution also “doesn't scale”, though not necessarily in the sense of the grandparent: For there to be a sufficient supply of +4 posts that you can read, someone has to be going through, reading them, and promoting them above the dreck. Thus, only a limited number of people can pursue your strategy before it stops working.
- illumin8 17y agoEasy fix for this: If you have Slashdot mod points, browse at 0; if you don't and just want to read good comments, browse at +3 or 4.
- mattcrest 17y agoWe haven't enabled comments on our blog precisely for this reason. Are there any success stories or best practices for quality comments and discussions on blogs? What makes Hacker News commentary successful? User accounts required and therefore no anonymity? Guidelines?
- allenbrunson 17y agothe reason comments are good here is because the moderators are serious as a heart attack. you don't get to make many jerk-like comments before your account gets banned.
- marciovm123 17y agothe other reason is that this community started out as extremely self-selected - people who got through a pg essay or applied to yc, and appreciated the quality that was here already w/o being turned off by the sparse visuals. As more people have joined, that quality is getting diluted, but there's a long way down before it reaches current reddit levels.
- gr366 17y agoI wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts, and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to their comment.
- _delirium 17y agoThey might be less likely to post lots of other stuff too, though. Do you really want any potential future casual acquaintance, boss, or what have you, to have instant, easy access to a transcript of every conversation you've had?
- CamperBob 17y agoThis would also rule out people like myself, for better or for worse, who refuse to use Facebook.
- michael_nielsen 17y agoFor an example of blogs with very high quality comments, see, e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.... It's an essay describing the use of blogs and blog comments to solve a difficult open mathematical problem. The average quality of the comments made in that project - more than 800 comments in all - was extraordinarily high. Several strongly research-oriented blogs in mathematics and physics routinely have very high quality comments, e.g., the blogs of Richard Lipton, Terence Tao, Tim Gowers, and the n-category cafe. (I should perhaps disclose that I'm one of the authors of the linked article.)
- javanix 17y agoWell, the content of that particular blog has something to do with that. You need a certain level of sophistication to come up with something coherent to post, and most of the trolls out there know they'd be instantaneously obvious to everyone else on a topic like that.
- dotpavan 17y agoAfter reading Siver's post (http://sivers.org/punish http://sivers.org/punish), this development seemed like a perfect data point (though I am unaware of the extent of threats etc which drove them to take the decision)
- s3graham 17y agoThey're almost universally total garbage on engadget anyway (and not just recently). I don't see any loss of value in leaving them off permanently. To be clear, I like engadget just fine, but the comments never seem to provide any insight/value.
- phatboyslim 17y agoI noticed a while ago Jeff Atwood did this on codinghorror.com too (I believe citing a technical reason, although they have not yet come back). Also, Seth Godin does not have comments on his blog either. Is this a trend going forward? I'm not against it...
- prawn 17y agoKottke's blog is without comments also. More should follow their lead.
- marciovm123 17y agoIt seems every new open web community tries desperately to stave off its own Endless September. I think a scalable answer will probably look more like multiple layers of authentication. Only some actions can be completely public; you have to be respected before you are allowed progressively more reign. That is what our society does with kids and things like drivers licenses, college degrees, etc.
- Super_Jambo 17y agoFor anyone else who doesn't get the Endless September reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- jorsh 17y agoI love this. Absolutely love it. I've always kind of dismissed comments as mostly empty white noise on the internet, and have never figured out why so many CMS systems/Blogging software/Web apps/etc are so eager to add comments to EVERYTHING. Give me the content, I can form my own thoughts on it, and if I actually feel like my thoughts are worthwhile for reading I can publish them myself.
- aaronbrethorst 17y agoYou just added a comment to a story. How is your comment on HN not exactly what you're dismissive of?
- jorsh 17y agoYES I REALIZE THE IRONY HERE I will admit HN is one of those rare sites with a pretty good signal to noise ratio in comments.
- qjz 17y agoThere is no irony here. This is a discussion forum. If I check out a book from the library, I don't want to see comments scribbled in the margins, but I'm more than happy to join a lively discussion about it on HN or reddit.
- benologist 17y agoEngadget has written 54 articles about the iPad in the last 12 days. I'm honestly surprised that they are surprised their audience are idiots.
- potatolicious 17y agoThe funny bit is that Engadget's commenting community seems to be vehemently anti-Apple, but the fact that Engadget keeps writing huge numbers of Apple articles implies that these generate traffic still (gut feeling: most of the non-commenting visitors). This seems like complaining about a movie theater while sitting in the first row munching furiously on popcorn.
- gamble 17y agoApple gets so much press precisely because few people have the capacity for indifference toward them. Write a story about a new Microsoft product, and half the audience will yawn. Write a story about an Apple product, and the other half will be pounding their keyboards in fury.
- lunchbox 17y ago54 articles about the iPad in the last 12 days Reminds me of another website I know :)
- madair 17y agoPeople need to chill-out their self-righteous and frequently hypocritical disgustometer. If you're gonna have a worldwide open discussion you're gonna have some trolls. How about thinking about how amazing it is? How about not having your emotions triggered by the trolls. There are things to learn on all sides.
- stingraycharles 17y agoHow is it self-righteous to turn off a feature on your site that you feel is currently causing more harm than doing good? Are they in some way obligated to give the trolls a place to troll?
- madair 17y agoI'm responding more to the outburst of (self-)righteousness happening right here on HN right now.
- stingraycharles 17y agoSorry, I misunderstood that then, my bad.
- jrockway 17y agoWow nice. Reading sites like Engadget without comments is almost better than reading them without ads. When I want to comment on something, I will come to a site designed for that. There, I have a single place to track replies, so I can actually discuss things, rather than which blog I commented on today. I know for my own blog redesign, I will not allow comments. I just don't see the point.
- muffins 17y agoNews Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress. Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to kick and scream more than before. This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.
- gioiam 17y agoI'm not sure what was being said in the comments, but I always think its a bad choice to cut off the medium that your users voice their opinions on.
- Gormo 17y agoSpam and flame wars are not at all a new phenomenon. The decline of intelligent conversation amidst the noise does seem pretty new. I think this may be more related to the nature of these sites and the communities that form around them, rather than merely to the scale of the community. Sites that go for a very broad appeal rather than targeting a specific, well-defined audience tend to have much lower-quality comments. Engadget is a great example - it is a consumer-oriented tech blog, and it's structured more like a traditional publication than an online community. The comments there are almost always not worth reading. On the other hand, I visit sites like HN, Slashdot, and Ars Technica primarily for the discussions.