25 ms·

NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

271 points by hampelm 10y ago

michaelbuddy 10y ago
Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.
- mc32 10y ago
  I think the main issue is that most comments (about npr news) are happening off nor properties and the only ones left commenting on their properties are a core not representative of their general audience.
- jamisteven 10y ago
  Left leaning sure, but i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times. If you listen to them regularly you would see that. The problem with most on the right is they hear one news outlet say something negative about the right and they turn off the channel and assume they are all on a right wing bashing spree. NPR is not this way in the least bit. This is coming from a republican.
  - millermp12 10y ago
    "i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times" I used to listen to NPR religiously (>4 hrs a week) before my apostasy from the Left. I could probably count on one hand the times they came down on someone on the Left e.g. bringing up to Coates his threat to assault his teacher and even in that case it was kind of a lob with no follow-up mean to allow self-exoneration (no push back in the absence of a mea culpa either). So, no. I think this statement is disingenuous.
  - michaelbuddy 10y ago
    With NPR it's entirely possibly that your commute in the morning is different content than mine. I can't possibly listen to them all day but I know one thing for sure. In general, they have positions on topics and they run that INTO the ground basically assuming everyone must agree with it. Then it becomes part of their narrative. They are very picky when to put on dissenting voices. Often times when they are needed, you get none. And NPR is horrible to Trump when they'd get respect if they'd buck the trend of the rest of media.
- deleted 10y ago
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- qaq 10y ago
  With automated troll armies it's hard to have a reasonable comments section.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    This is actually a very good point. There was an article a few months ago about Twitter bots influencing the Brexit vote (can't find it atm...)
  - hx87 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure the trolls are still human, albeit employed by organizations. With that in mind, I wonder if it's possible to create sites that are nothing but trollbait (i.e. articles supporting/critical of Russia) to soak up and waste the trolls' time.
    - qaq 10y ago
      Depends if you take Russian Olgino as example (based on how things appear to be). Profile creation is automated, some of the content posting seams to be identical texts being posted by multiple profiles. None-automated content is posted by different people for identical profiles working in shifts. I would guess they have something like monstrous SMM marketing platform some posts are automated some manual.
  - krapp 10y ago
    Unfortunately, one person's troll army is another person's truth brigade.
- zardo 10y ago
  Comments are a propaganda tool at this point. Commentary is bought and sold to support whatever narrative the purchaser wants.
  - chippy 10y ago
    The same can be said of HackerNews comments. I'd imagine that it's a given that Reddit is gamed via comments and submissions, but is it a given that HN comments have similar value?
    - zardo 10y ago
      It's certainly happening on major news sites and Reddit, but I don't know how far it goes into smaller communities. But... Consider how many comments you could post if you built the tools to manage accounts, did a little automated comment generation, and had a few dozen writers employed cranking them out.
- Fej 10y ago
  Or perhaps they just realized that comments sections are awful places for discussion, and that the kind of vitriolic discourse that happens there might actually be harming the reader's experience instead of enhancing it?
- Cacti 10y ago
  This is exactly the type of nonsense comments they're trying to avoid.
  - brandonl222 10y ago
    Yes, the truth does have a way of ruining a narrative...
    - vectorpush 10y ago
      Don't you feel a little disingenuous making a flippant deceleration of what is true without substantiating it?
      - omginternets 10y ago
        In all fairness, NPR's reporting is of exceedingly high-quality, by journalistic standards. I admit that the comment you're replying to is flippant, but NPR does check its facts quite well.
        vectorpush 10y ago
        I'm not sure the GP would agree with your sentiments, however, NPR pretty clearly slants to the left. All their hosts lean to the left and the composition of their multi-guest panels usually include a balance of viewpoints that lean more to the left. Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.
        justinlardinois 10y ago
        Have you ever listened to NPR? A large portion of the content has nothing to do with politics.
- boxy310 10y ago
  News articles involve editorial intent, discretion, and several rounds of "filters". Comments sections largely do not, which is why they generally devolve into just arguments. Only with heavily-moderated communities that impose those filters (like Hacker News, or the NYTimes, as the article mentions) can you have any substantive commentary. It's easy to hitch an underrepresented and specifically suppressed view (like white nationalism, anti-semitism, sexism) into the comments section as a means of piggy-backing off the visibility of the main article. Given that some people go out of their way to ignore the actual content as a means of furthering their underrepresented message means that the comments section is being used to short-circuit the moderation loop most journalistic publications go through.
- vectorpush 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?
  - bordercases 10y ago
    Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?
    - omginternets 10y ago
      It's hardly bait. I'm interested to know what he considers to be "good journalism" as well, if not NPR.
    - vectorpush 10y ago
      I'm not trying to bait, I am genuinely curious. I think it's possible to recognize bias in NPR and also recognize bias in Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe they can recommend a news outlet that they view as more impartial, even if not perfect.
    - npizzolato 10y ago
      Conversation is impossible when you assume everyone is out to get you.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Thanks for demonstrating better than I possibly could, exactly why this is a positive change for NPR. Their online comments were only a detraction from their stories.
  - michaelbuddy 10y ago
    Because you agree with their presentation of opinions. When you don't, you want to call them out, then and there. And they should hear it. They are after all paid in tax money and supposed to represent listeners and readers.
- bovermyer 10y ago
  I would accuse you of trolling, but I suspect you're actually serious. I find that immensely entertaining. You ARE aware that discussion of an article can happen on a different forum, right? Like, say, Hacker News. But then, I work at a news source, so what do I know.
- omginternets 10y ago
  The irony is that your comment is directly below this (equally useless) one: >I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"
MollyR 10y ago
With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?
- lazyjones 10y ago
  > I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ? ... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.
  - jchendy 10y ago
    > perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page. Genius sort of does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotator/ccaokncpmmjiakalbcfdbfmpcaiddjdn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotat...
  - tomjakubowski 10y ago
    I've been meaning to write a "Dark Souls"-style comment/annotation system for the web, via browser extensions, for some time now. What better use of the web is there than annotating a site like "goatse.cx" with the message "Be wary of but hole"? Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)
  - codemac 10y ago
    Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been thinking of doing something similar in scheme. [0]: via mousehole http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMousehole12.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh... / http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...
- dublinben 10y ago
  Like reddit?
unethical_ban 10y ago
Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation. The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.
- jchendy 10y ago
  They readily acknowledge that cost is a major factor in the decision: > The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.
- afarrell 10y ago
  The argument that it is a very small minority of users who are commenting on the site itself, seems correct. I've visited npr.org fairly frequently over the years and I've read the comments every so often over the years. while I've not taken a statistically rigorous sample, the comments invariably had a lot of the same users and were generally poor quality.
- mtberatwork 10y ago
  > Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter... Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.
  - unethical_ban 10y ago
    I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a public square is lazy and lacks vision. [1] http://idaretolisten.org http://idaretolisten.org
danso 10y ago
That's a shame, one of my favorite comments ever on a news site is from NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/mandy-patinkin-25-years-after-the-princess-bride-hes-not-tired-of-that-line#comment-674582040 http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/m... That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  Amazing! I was at a play recently and Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) was outside during the interval... Inconceivable indeed! P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!
acbabis 10y ago
> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience. If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on them. People reading the comments should count too.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall US audience -- should it be shut down too?
  - rexaliquid 10y ago
    Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles. No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?
    - acbabis 10y ago
      Some comment service providers like Disqus only load the comments if the user scrolls to them, while others only load if the user clicks on a button. If these services' analytics tools don't track this, they should. I'm much more interested in how many people interact with the comments section. This includes posting, lurking, voting, and flagging.
    - dominotw 10y ago
      > ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly ~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.
      - rexaliquid 10y ago
        Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet: http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf
showerst 10y ago
I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges. Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for the most part.
- draw_down 10y ago
  I know someone running a company that aims to solve exactly this problem, and they were attempting to sell to NPR, too. Last I talked to them about it, they said NPR seemed interested but has the typical years-long enterprise buying cycle. So, this news is really too bad.
  - edraferi 10y ago
    What's the company?
- deleted 10y ago
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- omginternets 10y ago
  What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right. This seems to solve part of the problem by setting an established, if not mostly-objective, standard for comment quality: journalistic publication standards. As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation! Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand. To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?
andrewmcwatters 10y ago
You don't agree with it, so it's nonsense. Anything the left doesn't like has to be painted as absurdist. Better downvote him as well, so he can't downvote anyone with leftist views, keep that point distribution strong.
- Cacti 10y ago
  I wasn't referring to the OPs opinion, I was referring to the fact that all their comment contained was a generic and useless complaint that we've all heard about 10 million times about "the media." If you or anyone actually wants to post a comment that has a substantiative content to it, feel free. I'm sure if it's so obvious as to how NPR is slanted that there's plenty of objective resources you can draw on to enlighten us all...
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Your comment is strictly speaking, a generic and useless meta-complaint. Is the OP correct or are they not? If we want to have a discussion, let's start there.
    - mtberatwork 10y ago
      > Is the OP correct or are they not? No. 1) Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. What facts can't they take? What's the narrative that NPR is trying to weave? As others have already mentioned, their coverage is often not favorable to the left. NPR syndicates content from hundreds of independent public radio stations, including other public and for-profit sources such as American Public Media, AP, Reuters, ITN, etc. Are they all conspirators in this narrative? 2) The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1. 3) They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. They are already offloading comments to Disqus. The problem is not technical but managing and moderating the vast deluge of spam, trolls and other bad actors. 4) Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point. This is just hyperbole.
carsonreinke 10y ago
I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"
formula1 10y ago
I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting as a president is one of "Fuck you, gov still pays me". They do not need to adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.
- notadoc 10y ago
  NPR gets about 90% of its funding from members, grants, foundations, etc. If you have ever listened to NPR, you know how frequently they solicit donations during funding drives. Only about 5% of individual NPR station funding comes from federal resources, and around 10% of CPB funding. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_about_np.php http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_abo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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- dublinben 10y ago
  Were NPR engaging in "mass censorship" before they introduced online comments in 2008? They are just returning to the status quo of the rest of their 38 year history. You are still free to comment on their stories in alternative venues, exactly as you are doing here.
  - formula1 10y ago
    "They do not need to provide anything above and beyond". I find it fascinating how polarizing this thread will be. Ill have you know I love many of their shows but I should respect people to only respond to what triggers them
Johan-bjareholt 10y ago
They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social networks to compare with though. Still a incredibly stupid decision though.
bordercases 10y ago
Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.
rrego 10y ago
>There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.
jkeat 10y ago
Rude reader comments can warp people's perception of what was being reported. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-stinks.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-...
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging. On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue. I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.
- clevernickname 10y ago
  >On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue. When was the last time you used Facebook?
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Facebook Comments (e.g. TechCrunch comments) are a secondary product for them, with even fewer features for publisher control and worse spam detection than Disqus. Posting with your real identity does surprisingly nothing to stop trolls/flame wars; it arguably makes it worse as now there is a target.
- rexaliquid 10y ago
  Facebook isn't the only social option. Twitter replies are an opportunity for anonymous or semi-anonymous commentary. But, also an opportunity for garbage.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    Twitter does not allow for conversations in the same page of the article, which is part of the appeal. (And Twitter's recent changes make it hard to track conversations even on the website)
losteverything 10y ago
I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in. What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?
notadoc 10y ago
95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution. The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read. Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Sturgeon's law at Internet Scale is far worse than six-sigma compliant. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat... On the volume vs. time-to-assimilate basis, nobody can read more than a minuscule fraction of online content.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide. I believe HN is good because it serves a specific trade purpose and caters to a specific high-end niche audience. HN's participants are willing to cross a significant participation threshold to be part of the community here. I believe that kind of structure needs to be in place to get good community participation. I guess I'd summarize it with these points: 1. require significant investment from the userbase to participate successfully 2. promise to assist the userbase with something that is critically valuable to them in exchange 3. regularly deliver on 2 to keep 1 worthwhile 4. provide reputation tracking and management utilities so that the user can cultivate a profile that reflects the investments made in point 1 5. for recurring participation, provide variable rewards that trigger the brain's hooks for surprise, which translates to enjoyment. HN hits those points, but blogs definitely don't and don't want to. They want to bring in barely-interested readers from search, from anywhere on the web. Many of these readers won't even make it into the comment section. Thus, a good community tacked on to the bottom of their articles seems unlikely. If those principles are required to cultivate a worthwhile community, the community should always occur external to the publication of the article. The community needs to be the centerpiece, not the article. I use HN this way; the discussion is the primary thing, the articles are the subjects submitted for the community's discussion. The other caveat is that it's difficult to provide points 3 and 5 when you're just starting out. From what I've seen, it practically always has to be artificial until the momentum becomes self-driving (if there is a physical community that uses the online forum for spillover, this may not be applicable; this is basically what happened with HN). We need better solutions there. Since individual blog posts have certain quantities of Google juice, comment sections will be overrun with spa--err, "SEO professionals". Other participants are often low-effort drive-bys. If the community isn't the principal focus, participation will be spotty and it will be hard to develop elements fundamental to meaningful community engagement. Facebook and Twitter are normal people making normal comments on random stuff they see. These people generally feel a compulsion to let their feelings out and Facebook/Twitter provide it. I believe this is probably what was originally intended for blog comments, but because Facebook/Twitter are real, stable communities, the participants are inclined to leave comments there instead of on the target article itself. These comments are often loose and instinctive, which is not necessarily to say they're invalid or worthless, but a community won't form around individual postings because there's no common unifying dictum (point 2 is unfulfilled, and point 1 is minimal on random FB/Twitter posts).
wangchow 10y ago
It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
frankc 10y ago
I propose the following system for commenting on news sites: -comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.
- overcast 10y ago
  I like it.
  - exodust 10y ago
    Why can I only downvote some comments here? I don't downvote much, but any time I see a comment such as "I like it" it really deserves a downvote for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained.
    - alayne 10y ago
      There's an eight hour downvote window.
- 205guy 10y ago
  I really like this. When I think about the most interesting comments, they are the ones where a reader adds something to the article, whether an anecdote, a correction, an educated opinion, etc. This system preserves that and removes the mud slinging. It also preserves the page views, as people are encouraged to return and read--perhaps with some "remind-me" mechanism. I could see other permutations of his idea as well: you can only reply to the article, once you view the comments, it no longer accepts a comment from you; keep comments open but delay comments by one or two days--allows slow back and forth, not flame wars. Or allow replies, but only one comment per user. There are a lot of mechanisms to explore here.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I like it the idea of an interval between publication and comment! However I don't think back-and-forth is necessarily bad. I'd modify your proposal to include two or three rounds of rebuttal, each at a 3-day interval. You'd have to be seriously invested in the discussion to participate, and there's very little room for a flamewar to develop.
davesque 10y ago
Don't they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?
- mynewtb 10y ago
  It would be sad if they let a(nother?) third party spy on their users.
- CM30 10y ago
  Pretty sure Disqus is often set up so comments are also stored in the site's database. That's how it worked when I used it for a WordPress site. So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with Disqus.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    That isn't how Disqus works. It is a centrally hosted widget.
    - CM30 10y ago
      Not quite: https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data-synchronization-for-local-storage https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data... At least for the WordPress plugin, the default functionality is to sync the comments in the database with those on Disqus servers.
mrweasel 10y ago
We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them. It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments. What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.
- Nagyman 10y ago
  > What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit Isn't reddit a forum site? Confused.
- empath75 10y ago
  4chan is a cesspool.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be depressed check your local paper's comment sections.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      They're full of people who just have to get things off their chest, but at least they don't have cheerleaders encouraging them to be even more asshole than they already are.
  - justinlardinois 10y ago
    Depends on what boards you go to. The topic boards are mostly good for serious discussion. Just avoid /v/ (neckbeards), /mu/ (circlejerk), and /pol/ (racists).
- astrodust 10y ago
  4chan is so toxic I'm surprised it hasn't been declared an EPA Superfund site.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc. Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable. In short, allowing comments != community.
Grue3 10y ago
I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment section before you start reading?
  - mynameishere 10y ago
    All the time. For many websites, the very first comment is a succinct and correct refutation of the article or blogpost itself. And that is why comment sections are disappearing. People really don't mind "trolls" or whatever all that much. They do mind being proven wrong.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Doesn't Medium have comments?
gnicholas 10y ago
Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much smaller percent.) Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-r....
intopieces 10y ago
>But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not that fake accounts don't get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on). I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.
mosburger 10y ago
In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to "engage" with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for not having comments on his site). But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have "Letters to the Editor," which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every article?
- incogitomode 10y ago
  I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on. Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content. Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author? Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).
- welanes 10y ago
  > what purpose do they serve? You tell me, we're doing it right now, albeit by proxy. A return to a read-only web outside of Twitter and Facebook would make articles less insightful, sites less accountable and the web a little more boring. For example, I have saved dozens of comments from The FT and The Economist which added brilliant addendums as well as counter-points to the article topic. It would be dull without these mini-communities below the line. Sure, some comments are toxic - it's a reflection of society and a consequence of everybody having access to the web. How about a 'show comments' button like some websites have? Make them opt-in.
misingnoglic 10y ago
Of course not a lot of users comment - the comment section is more or less hidden on the articles...
atombath 10y ago
That would make sense that Disqus/Livefyre charge by the volume of comments. The amazing torrent of ignorant circle-jerk comments that flood Fox News articles has a silver lining now. I've wondered why they haven't just done away with their comments and implemented a chat room.
hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
I have found comment sections on news websites to be reliably awful. It seems every discussion thread deteriorates into an attack on the other side's politics even when the link to get there is non existent. ("Thanks Obama") That being said, I love reading all the comments. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I often spend more time reading NPR's comment section than I do reading the actual content. I don't think this change will cause me to consume less NPR content, but I'll definitely spend less time on their website.
millermp12 10y ago
Safe spaces come to NPR.
overcast 10y ago
This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.
- gr3yh47 10y ago
  >Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.
  - overcast 10y ago
    I think it's prohibitive enough to not allow things to spiral out of control in some crummy argument. I feel it's more of a peer review system. State your comment on what you've read/seen, and move onto the next thing. Which honestly is fine with me.
  - e40 10y ago
    Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.
    - overcast 10y ago
      Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?
      - 10y ago
jccalhoun 10y ago
I always liked slashdot's comment system back in the day. It allowed you to adjust what you saw and how many points a "funny" post got vs how many an "informative" one got and then set a point threshold based on that. Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either it wasn't working or they just didn't see it as worth reimplimenting when they moved away from their old code base.
- mbreese 10y ago
  And it wasn't just that - it was the complex system of meta-moderation. How you moderated posts was also scored. One downside was that it could lead to a complete hive mind where your karma was dependent upon how much you thought like others.
  - plasticsyntax 10y ago
    Meta-moderation was indeed a big part of it, and something I never saw _anywhere_ else.
ebbv 10y ago
Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.) It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR to have an image hosting service.
brownbat 10y ago
Being good at content doesn't mean you're good at running a public forum. We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning. Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a "Comments on HN" link at the bottom of a post.
eplanit 10y ago
It's nice irony: This article, about a site removing commenting, now has more comments than upvotes (although such a ratio almost always indicates a flame war).
- jessaustin 10y ago
  I think they've relaxed the upvotes-comments threshold.
initram 10y ago
I totally understand why they're doing this. Their comments section was terrible. I'm not at all surprised by the findings that a couple hundred to low few thousand commenters are posting the vast majority of comments. I'm really surprised at the energy that the trolls on NPR spend. You'll see the same account posting rude comments on just about every article. Who has that kind of time?
gallonofmilk 10y ago
maybe the problem isn't comment moderation, but rather the expectation that anyone should be able to "control" the dissemination of human thought through mediums like the internet? the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance they stand in the future.
dmatthewson 10y ago
They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all comments on their entire system. I don't know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their comment system, but I will bid $500/month to handle those 2600 users comprising half of all comments, or $1000/month for all comments. All inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest system. My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.
- qu4z-2 10y ago
  Have you factored in that you need to serve the comments to every user, not just ones that comment? I mean, to be fair, you could probably serve staticish chunks of HTML and update-on-new-comment, but it's a consideration.
BadScience 10y ago
My guess is that this has nothing to do with the content of the comments and everything to do with resources. They used to outsource commenting to a third-party. They either decided that they couldn't afford to do this or that they could handle it in-house. Meanwhile, their social team, as of two years ago, was one person and sometimes an intern. NPR Digital does/did a great job at fumbling and half-assing products (like NPR One), user engagement and actually reaching/monetizing/analyzing new audiences.
dba7dba 10y ago
This is a shame. Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the article's author is advocating for. There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.
kev8us 10y ago
i think a good way to fix toxic comments is to have a "tag as troll" button. if enough people think a particular commenter is a troll then they lose their commenting privilege. it should be pretty easy to detect if a person is creating more accounts.
dredmorbius 10y ago
My first thought reading this is, well, "conversation doesn't scale very well", as David Weinberger said (regards some recent Reddit contretemps). Looking at NPR's own article, I'm findng the justifications given to be strongly suspect. NPR's focus on how many participants are engaging, and from what platforms, rather misses the boat. It's not that I feel the decision itself isn't without merits, but the merits given are exceedingly poor ones. I'm hoping they're not the ones actually used. I've done my own measurement of public user activity on large sites.[1] In the case of Google+, my and Stone Temple Consulting's independent analysis[2] showed that 0.3% of all users actually engage in public posting on the site. The real question isn't "how many users are commenting", but "what is the quality of the comments received?". Following critiques of my first study, I performed a second follow-up looking at where intelligent conversation was happening online, using the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list as a proxy for intelligent conversation, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashina", as its obverse. This gave the world the infamous FP:KK index -- the ratio of mentions of any of the FP Global 100 Thinkers per instance of a spin-off of the OJ Simpson trial fall-out.[2] A few results stood out -- Facebook's scale, Reddit's relatively high quality, Metafilter's phenomenally high S/N ratio, and the amount of high-quality material posted to blogs (though perhaps never seeing the light of day). I'd be interested in some further follow-up along these lines. One of the problems is that at Internet scale, Sturgeon's Law is far worse than six-sigma compliant.[3] Not only is there an awful lot of crud, but simple mechanics mean that no one person can see more than the tiniest fraction of what is transacted online daily. The simple acquisition cost and assessment of "is this worth reading or not" is absolutely prohibitive. Or as Clay Shirky says, what we've got isn't content overload but filter failure.[4] On the problem of idiots, my personal solution is simple and surprisingly effective: block fuckwits.[5] At scale, this evolves to the problem of figuring out who is and isn't a fuckwit. The ability for individual actions against specific authors and publishers to be applied generally strikes me as a useful tool. Not a complete fix (there are controversial voices who do deserve to be heard). But if the cost of being an asshat is being an asshat screaming into the void, part of the problem is addressed. (Yes, this means some form of 1) persistent reputation, 2) tools for applying reputation as filters, and 3) limitations on newly-created profiles. The idea of vouchers (again, with a reputation penalty applying) to bootstrap new identities may help. There's much in common to approaches against email spam in this.) NPR in particular are counting the fact that many messages come from desktop users as a failing of their system. I see that as absolute insanity. Desktop systems are hugely more useful than mobile devices for composing content. Especially thoughtful content. I know this because I've been trying, and losing, that battle myself, using a 9" Android tablet and Bluetooth keyboard -- one of the better mobile authoring configurations possible, and it still stinks. The six lines by 45 characters I can see in HN's edit box certainly don't help. I've written a long rant at Reddit on this specific problem.[6] Whilst composing this comment I've had Firefox/Android crap out from under me, continuously popped out of the edit box, and unintentionally navigated from the page. Thankfully persistence of user state in edit dialogs has improved slightly, but the experience is frustrating to say the least. I'd use a proper editing environment, say, vim, except that under Android, VimTouch doens't interact with the clipboard. I can neither copy content into* it, nor out. Termux's vim client is slightly better -- I can paste through the Termux clipboard, but copying out is virtually impossible, and doesn't capture more than one screen at a time. The fact that few people are entering thoughtful comments on mobile likely says far more about the state of mobile tech than it does about NPR's audience. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin... 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat... 4. http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload/ http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-no... 5. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm... 6. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/longform_selfposts_and_intelligent_discussion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/l...
bumbledraven 10y ago
"If there is hope, it lies in the comments threads." -- John Derbyshire
adrusi 10y ago
I think that maybe hosting comments alongside the original article isn't the best approach. Half the fun of internet comments is discussing with other commenters, but that works a lot better when you know the community that you're discussing with. You can't reasonably keep track of the dynamics of hundreds of different content provider's comment sections, nor can all content providers have interesting commenting communities. We need a standard comment syndication format like RSS so that sites like HN and Reddit can continue to provide good communities for discussion, but content providers can still display comments below their content to show off reader engagement.
jamiesonbecker 10y ago
Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or scorched earth flame wars.
perseusprime11 10y ago
Can we also use this time to talk about Live chat for Youtube? It is literally filled with scrolling garbage and promotes so much of negativity. What purpose is it solving when there 10K users throwing garbage at each other?

271 points by hampelm 10y ago

Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point.

mc32 10y ago
I think the main issue is that most comments (about npr news) are happening off nor properties and the only ones left commenting on their properties are a core not representative of their general audience.
jamisteven 10y ago
Left leaning sure, but i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times. If you listen to them regularly you would see that. The problem with most on the right is they hear one news outlet say something negative about the right and they turn off the channel and assume they are all on a right wing bashing spree. NPR is not this way in the least bit. This is coming from a republican.
- millermp12 10y ago
  "i have heard them blast people on the left plenty of times" I used to listen to NPR religiously (>4 hrs a week) before my apostasy from the Left. I could probably count on one hand the times they came down on someone on the Left e.g. bringing up to Coates his threat to assault his teacher and even in that case it was kind of a lob with no follow-up mean to allow self-exoneration (no push back in the absence of a mea culpa either). So, no. I think this statement is disingenuous.
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
  With NPR it's entirely possibly that your commute in the morning is different content than mine. I can't possibly listen to them all day but I know one thing for sure. In general, they have positions on topics and they run that INTO the ground basically assuming everyone must agree with it. Then it becomes part of their narrative. They are very picky when to put on dissenting voices. Often times when they are needed, you get none. And NPR is horrible to Trump when they'd get respect if they'd buck the trend of the rest of media.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
qaq 10y ago
With automated troll armies it's hard to have a reasonable comments section.
- omginternets 10y ago
  This is actually a very good point. There was an article a few months ago about Twitter bots influencing the Brexit vote (can't find it atm...)
- hx87 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure the trolls are still human, albeit employed by organizations. With that in mind, I wonder if it's possible to create sites that are nothing but trollbait (i.e. articles supporting/critical of Russia) to soak up and waste the trolls' time.
  - qaq 10y ago
    Depends if you take Russian Olgino as example (based on how things appear to be). Profile creation is automated, some of the content posting seams to be identical texts being posted by multiple profiles. None-automated content is posted by different people for identical profiles working in shifts. I would guess they have something like monstrous SMM marketing platform some posts are automated some manual.
- krapp 10y ago
  Unfortunately, one person's troll army is another person's truth brigade.
zardo 10y ago
Comments are a propaganda tool at this point. Commentary is bought and sold to support whatever narrative the purchaser wants.
- chippy 10y ago
  The same can be said of HackerNews comments. I'd imagine that it's a given that Reddit is gamed via comments and submissions, but is it a given that HN comments have similar value?
  - zardo 10y ago
    It's certainly happening on major news sites and Reddit, but I don't know how far it goes into smaller communities. But... Consider how many comments you could post if you built the tools to manage accounts, did a little automated comment generation, and had a few dozen writers employed cranking them out.
Fej 10y ago
Or perhaps they just realized that comments sections are awful places for discussion, and that the kind of vitriolic discourse that happens there might actually be harming the reader's experience instead of enhancing it?
Cacti 10y ago
This is exactly the type of nonsense comments they're trying to avoid.
- brandonl222 10y ago
  Yes, the truth does have a way of ruining a narrative...
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    Don't you feel a little disingenuous making a flippant deceleration of what is true without substantiating it?
    - omginternets 10y ago
      In all fairness, NPR's reporting is of exceedingly high-quality, by journalistic standards. I admit that the comment you're replying to is flippant, but NPR does check its facts quite well.
      - vectorpush 10y ago
        I'm not sure the GP would agree with your sentiments, however, NPR pretty clearly slants to the left. All their hosts lean to the left and the composition of their multi-guest panels usually include a balance of viewpoints that lean more to the left. Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.
        justinlardinois 10y ago
        Have you ever listened to NPR? A large portion of the content has nothing to do with politics.
boxy310 10y ago
News articles involve editorial intent, discretion, and several rounds of "filters". Comments sections largely do not, which is why they generally devolve into just arguments. Only with heavily-moderated communities that impose those filters (like Hacker News, or the NYTimes, as the article mentions) can you have any substantive commentary. It's easy to hitch an underrepresented and specifically suppressed view (like white nationalism, anti-semitism, sexism) into the comments section as a means of piggy-backing off the visibility of the main article. Given that some people go out of their way to ignore the actual content as a means of furthering their underrepresented message means that the comments section is being used to short-circuit the moderation loop most journalistic publications go through.
vectorpush 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?
- bordercases 10y ago
  Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?
  - omginternets 10y ago
    It's hardly bait. I'm interested to know what he considers to be "good journalism" as well, if not NPR.
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    I'm not trying to bait, I am genuinely curious. I think it's possible to recognize bias in NPR and also recognize bias in Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe they can recommend a news outlet that they view as more impartial, even if not perfect.
  - npizzolato 10y ago
    Conversation is impossible when you assume everyone is out to get you.
dublinben 10y ago
Thanks for demonstrating better than I possibly could, exactly why this is a positive change for NPR. Their online comments were only a detraction from their stories.
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
  Because you agree with their presentation of opinions. When you don't, you want to call them out, then and there. And they should hear it. They are after all paid in tax money and supposed to represent listeners and readers.
bovermyer 10y ago
I would accuse you of trolling, but I suspect you're actually serious. I find that immensely entertaining. You ARE aware that discussion of an article can happen on a different forum, right? Like, say, Hacker News. But then, I work at a news source, so what do I know.
omginternets 10y ago
The irony is that your comment is directly below this (equally useless) one: >I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"

MollyR 10y ago

With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

lazyjones 10y ago
> I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ? ... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.
- jchendy 10y ago
  > perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page. Genius sort of does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotator/ccaokncpmmjiakalbcfdbfmpcaiddjdn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/genius-web-annotat...
- tomjakubowski 10y ago
  I've been meaning to write a "Dark Souls"-style comment/annotation system for the web, via browser extensions, for some time now. What better use of the web is there than annotating a site like "goatse.cx" with the message "Be wary of but hole"? Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)
- codemac 10y ago
  Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been thinking of doing something similar in scheme. [0]: via mousehole http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMousehole12.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh... / http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...
dublinben 10y ago
Like reddit?

unethical_ban 10y ago

Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation. The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.

jchendy 10y ago
They readily acknowledge that cost is a major factor in the decision: > The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.
afarrell 10y ago
The argument that it is a very small minority of users who are commenting on the site itself, seems correct. I've visited npr.org fairly frequently over the years and I've read the comments every so often over the years. while I've not taken a statistically rigorous sample, the comments invariably had a lot of the same users and were generally poor quality.
mtberatwork 10y ago
> Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter... Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.
- unethical_ban 10y ago
  I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a public square is lazy and lacks vision. [1] http://idaretolisten.org http://idaretolisten.org

danso 10y ago

That's a shame, one of my favorite comments ever on a news site is from NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/mandy-patinkin-25-years-after-the-princess-bride-hes-not-tired-of-that-line#comment-674582040 http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/m... That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.

andy_ppp 10y ago
Amazing! I was at a play recently and Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) was outside during the interval... Inconceivable indeed! P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!

acbabis 10y ago

> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience. If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on them. People reading the comments should count too.

coldtea 10y ago
Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall US audience -- should it be shut down too?
- rexaliquid 10y ago
  Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles. No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?
  - acbabis 10y ago
    Some comment service providers like Disqus only load the comments if the user scrolls to them, while others only load if the user clicks on a button. If these services' analytics tools don't track this, they should. I'm much more interested in how many people interact with the comments section. This includes posting, lurking, voting, and flagging.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    > ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly ~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.
    - rexaliquid 10y ago
      Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet: http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf

showerst 10y ago

I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise. Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges. Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for the most part.

draw_down 10y ago
I know someone running a company that aims to solve exactly this problem, and they were attempting to sell to NPR, too. Last I talked to them about it, they said NPR seemed interested but has the typical years-long enterprise buying cycle. So, this news is really too bad.
- edraferi 10y ago
  What's the company?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
omginternets 10y ago
What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right. This seems to solve part of the problem by setting an established, if not mostly-objective, standard for comment quality: journalistic publication standards. As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation! Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand. To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?

andrewmcwatters 10y ago

You don't agree with it, so it's nonsense. Anything the left doesn't like has to be painted as absurdist. Better downvote him as well, so he can't downvote anyone with leftist views, keep that point distribution strong.

Cacti 10y ago
I wasn't referring to the OPs opinion, I was referring to the fact that all their comment contained was a generic and useless complaint that we've all heard about 10 million times about "the media." If you or anyone actually wants to post a comment that has a substantiative content to it, feel free. I'm sure if it's so obvious as to how NPR is slanted that there's plenty of objective resources you can draw on to enlighten us all...
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Your comment is strictly speaking, a generic and useless meta-complaint. Is the OP correct or are they not? If we want to have a discussion, let's start there.
  - mtberatwork 10y ago
    > Is the OP correct or are they not? No. 1) Their left leaning narrative can't take facts at this point. What facts can't they take? What's the narrative that NPR is trying to weave? As others have already mentioned, their coverage is often not favorable to the left. NPR syndicates content from hundreds of independent public radio stations, including other public and for-profit sources such as American Public Media, AP, Reuters, ITN, etc. Are they all conspirators in this narrative? 2) The sheer amount of lean really comes out of their choice of what to cover. Is OP suggesting that NPR and the hundreds of other public radio stations suppress topics so as not to appear "left"? Also, see #1. 3) They know it's easy to just offload comments onto another service. They are already offloading comments to Disqus. The problem is not technical but managing and moderating the vast deluge of spam, trolls and other bad actors. 4) Any news source w/o comments is basically propaganda at this point. This is just hyperbole.

carsonreinke 10y ago

I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"

formula1 10y ago

I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting as a president is one of "Fuck you, gov still pays me". They do not need to adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.

notadoc 10y ago
NPR gets about 90% of its funding from members, grants, foundations, etc. If you have ever listened to NPR, you know how frequently they solicit donations during funding drives. Only about 5% of individual NPR station funding comes from federal resources, and around 10% of CPB funding. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_about_np.php http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/dont_forget_the_facts_abo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
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dublinben 10y ago
Were NPR engaging in "mass censorship" before they introduced online comments in 2008? They are just returning to the status quo of the rest of their 38 year history. You are still free to comment on their stories in alternative venues, exactly as you are doing here.
- formula1 10y ago
  "They do not need to provide anything above and beyond". I find it fascinating how polarizing this thread will be. Ill have you know I love many of their shows but I should respect people to only respond to what triggers them

Johan-bjareholt 10y ago

They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social networks to compare with though. Still a incredibly stupid decision though.

bordercases 10y ago

Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.

rrego 10y ago

>There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.

jkeat 10y ago

Rude reader comments can warp people's perception of what was being reported. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-stinks.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-...

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity. I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging. On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue. I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.

clevernickname 10y ago
>On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue. When was the last time you used Facebook?
minimaxir 10y ago
Facebook Comments (e.g. TechCrunch comments) are a secondary product for them, with even fewer features for publisher control and worse spam detection than Disqus. Posting with your real identity does surprisingly nothing to stop trolls/flame wars; it arguably makes it worse as now there is a target.
rexaliquid 10y ago
Facebook isn't the only social option. Twitter replies are an opportunity for anonymous or semi-anonymous commentary. But, also an opportunity for garbage.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Twitter does not allow for conversations in the same page of the article, which is part of the appeal. (And Twitter's recent changes make it hard to track conversations even on the website)

losteverything 10y ago

I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in. What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?

notadoc 10y ago

95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution. The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read. Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.

bryanlarsen 10y ago
Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Sturgeon's law at Internet Scale is far worse than six-sigma compliant. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat... On the volume vs. time-to-assimilate basis, nobody can read more than a minuscule fraction of online content.
cookiecaper 10y ago
We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide. I believe HN is good because it serves a specific trade purpose and caters to a specific high-end niche audience. HN's participants are willing to cross a significant participation threshold to be part of the community here. I believe that kind of structure needs to be in place to get good community participation. I guess I'd summarize it with these points: 1. require significant investment from the userbase to participate successfully 2. promise to assist the userbase with something that is critically valuable to them in exchange 3. regularly deliver on 2 to keep 1 worthwhile 4. provide reputation tracking and management utilities so that the user can cultivate a profile that reflects the investments made in point 1 5. for recurring participation, provide variable rewards that trigger the brain's hooks for surprise, which translates to enjoyment. HN hits those points, but blogs definitely don't and don't want to. They want to bring in barely-interested readers from search, from anywhere on the web. Many of these readers won't even make it into the comment section. Thus, a good community tacked on to the bottom of their articles seems unlikely. If those principles are required to cultivate a worthwhile community, the community should always occur external to the publication of the article. The community needs to be the centerpiece, not the article. I use HN this way; the discussion is the primary thing, the articles are the subjects submitted for the community's discussion. The other caveat is that it's difficult to provide points 3 and 5 when you're just starting out. From what I've seen, it practically always has to be artificial until the momentum becomes self-driving (if there is a physical community that uses the online forum for spillover, this may not be applicable; this is basically what happened with HN). We need better solutions there. Since individual blog posts have certain quantities of Google juice, comment sections will be overrun with spa--err, "SEO professionals". Other participants are often low-effort drive-bys. If the community isn't the principal focus, participation will be spotty and it will be hard to develop elements fundamental to meaningful community engagement. Facebook and Twitter are normal people making normal comments on random stuff they see. These people generally feel a compulsion to let their feelings out and Facebook/Twitter provide it. I believe this is probably what was originally intended for blog comments, but because Facebook/Twitter are real, stable communities, the participants are inclined to leave comments there instead of on the target article itself. These comments are often loose and instinctive, which is not necessarily to say they're invalid or worthless, but a community won't form around individual postings because there's no common unifying dictum (point 2 is unfulfilled, and point 1 is minimal on random FB/Twitter posts).

wangchow 10y ago

It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.

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frankc 10y ago

I propose the following system for commenting on news sites: -comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.

overcast 10y ago
I like it.
- exodust 10y ago
  Why can I only downvote some comments here? I don't downvote much, but any time I see a comment such as "I like it" it really deserves a downvote for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained.
  - alayne 10y ago
    There's an eight hour downvote window.
205guy 10y ago
I really like this. When I think about the most interesting comments, they are the ones where a reader adds something to the article, whether an anecdote, a correction, an educated opinion, etc. This system preserves that and removes the mud slinging. It also preserves the page views, as people are encouraged to return and read--perhaps with some "remind-me" mechanism. I could see other permutations of his idea as well: you can only reply to the article, once you view the comments, it no longer accepts a comment from you; keep comments open but delay comments by one or two days--allows slow back and forth, not flame wars. Or allow replies, but only one comment per user. There are a lot of mechanisms to explore here.
sevensor 10y ago
I like it the idea of an interval between publication and comment! However I don't think back-and-forth is necessarily bad. I'd modify your proposal to include two or three rounds of rebuttal, each at a 3-day interval. You'd have to be seriously invested in the discussion to participate, and there's very little room for a flamewar to develop.

davesque 10y ago

Don't they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?

mynewtb 10y ago
It would be sad if they let a(nother?) third party spy on their users.
CM30 10y ago
Pretty sure Disqus is often set up so comments are also stored in the site's database. That's how it worked when I used it for a WordPress site. So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with Disqus.
- ec109685 10y ago
  That isn't how Disqus works. It is a centrally hosted widget.
  - CM30 10y ago
    Not quite: https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data-synchronization-for-local-storage https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data... At least for the WordPress plugin, the default functionality is to sync the comments in the database with those on Disqus servers.

mrweasel 10y ago

We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them. It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments. What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.

Nagyman 10y ago
> What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit Isn't reddit a forum site? Confused.
empath75 10y ago
4chan is a cesspool.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be depressed check your local paper's comment sections.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    They're full of people who just have to get things off their chest, but at least they don't have cheerleaders encouraging them to be even more asshole than they already are.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  Depends on what boards you go to. The topic boards are mostly good for serious discussion. Just avoid /v/ (neckbeards), /mu/ (circlejerk), and /pol/ (racists).
astrodust 10y ago
4chan is so toxic I'm surprised it hasn't been declared an EPA Superfund site.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc. Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable. In short, allowing comments != community.

Grue3 10y ago

I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.

justinlardinois 10y ago
Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment section before you start reading?
- mynameishere 10y ago
  All the time. For many websites, the very first comment is a succinct and correct refutation of the article or blogpost itself. And that is why comment sections are disappearing. People really don't mind "trolls" or whatever all that much. They do mind being proven wrong.
jessaustin 10y ago
Doesn't Medium have comments?

gnicholas 10y ago

Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much smaller percent.) Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-r....

intopieces 10y ago

>But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not that fake accounts don't get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on). I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.

mosburger 10y ago

In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to "engage" with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for not having comments on his site). But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have "Letters to the Editor," which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every article?

incogitomode 10y ago
I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on. Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content. Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author? Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).
welanes 10y ago
> what purpose do they serve? You tell me, we're doing it right now, albeit by proxy. A return to a read-only web outside of Twitter and Facebook would make articles less insightful, sites less accountable and the web a little more boring. For example, I have saved dozens of comments from The FT and The Economist which added brilliant addendums as well as counter-points to the article topic. It would be dull without these mini-communities below the line. Sure, some comments are toxic - it's a reflection of society and a consequence of everybody having access to the web. How about a 'show comments' button like some websites have? Make them opt-in.

misingnoglic 10y ago

Of course not a lot of users comment - the comment section is more or less hidden on the articles...

atombath 10y ago

That would make sense that Disqus/Livefyre charge by the volume of comments. The amazing torrent of ignorant circle-jerk comments that flood Fox News articles has a silver lining now. I've wondered why they haven't just done away with their comments and implemented a chat room.

hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago

I have found comment sections on news websites to be reliably awful. It seems every discussion thread deteriorates into an attack on the other side's politics even when the link to get there is non existent. ("Thanks Obama") That being said, I love reading all the comments. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I often spend more time reading NPR's comment section than I do reading the actual content. I don't think this change will cause me to consume less NPR content, but I'll definitely spend less time on their website.

millermp12 10y ago

Safe spaces come to NPR.

overcast 10y ago

This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

gr3yh47 10y ago
>Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.
- overcast 10y ago
  I think it's prohibitive enough to not allow things to spiral out of control in some crummy argument. I feel it's more of a peer review system. State your comment on what you've read/seen, and move onto the next thing. Which honestly is fine with me.
- e40 10y ago
  Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?
    - 10y ago

jccalhoun 10y ago

I always liked slashdot's comment system back in the day. It allowed you to adjust what you saw and how many points a "funny" post got vs how many an "informative" one got and then set a point threshold based on that. Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either it wasn't working or they just didn't see it as worth reimplimenting when they moved away from their old code base.

mbreese 10y ago
And it wasn't just that - it was the complex system of meta-moderation. How you moderated posts was also scored. One downside was that it could lead to a complete hive mind where your karma was dependent upon how much you thought like others.
- plasticsyntax 10y ago
  Meta-moderation was indeed a big part of it, and something I never saw _anywhere_ else.

ebbv 10y ago

Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.) It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR to have an image hosting service.

brownbat 10y ago

Being good at content doesn't mean you're good at running a public forum. We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning. Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a "Comments on HN" link at the bottom of a post.

eplanit 10y ago

It's nice irony: This article, about a site removing commenting, now has more comments than upvotes (although such a ratio almost always indicates a flame war).

jessaustin 10y ago
I think they've relaxed the upvotes-comments threshold.

initram 10y ago

I totally understand why they're doing this. Their comments section was terrible. I'm not at all surprised by the findings that a couple hundred to low few thousand commenters are posting the vast majority of comments. I'm really surprised at the energy that the trolls on NPR spend. You'll see the same account posting rude comments on just about every article. Who has that kind of time?

gallonofmilk 10y ago

maybe the problem isn't comment moderation, but rather the expectation that anyone should be able to "control" the dissemination of human thought through mediums like the internet? the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance they stand in the future.

dmatthewson 10y ago

They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all comments on their entire system. I don't know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their comment system, but I will bid $500/month to handle those 2600 users comprising half of all comments, or $1000/month for all comments. All inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest system. My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.

qu4z-2 10y ago
Have you factored in that you need to serve the comments to every user, not just ones that comment? I mean, to be fair, you could probably serve staticish chunks of HTML and update-on-new-comment, but it's a consideration.

BadScience 10y ago

My guess is that this has nothing to do with the content of the comments and everything to do with resources. They used to outsource commenting to a third-party. They either decided that they couldn't afford to do this or that they could handle it in-house. Meanwhile, their social team, as of two years ago, was one person and sometimes an intern. NPR Digital does/did a great job at fumbling and half-assing products (like NPR One), user engagement and actually reaching/monetizing/analyzing new audiences.

dba7dba 10y ago

This is a shame. Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the article's author is advocating for. There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.

kev8us 10y ago

i think a good way to fix toxic comments is to have a "tag as troll" button. if enough people think a particular commenter is a troll then they lose their commenting privilege. it should be pretty easy to detect if a person is creating more accounts.

dredmorbius 10y ago

My first thought reading this is, well, "conversation doesn't scale very well", as David Weinberger said (regards some recent Reddit contretemps). Looking at NPR's own article, I'm findng the justifications given to be strongly suspect. NPR's focus on how many participants are engaging, and from what platforms, rather misses the boat. It's not that I feel the decision itself isn't without merits, but the merits given are exceedingly poor ones. I'm hoping they're not the ones actually used. I've done my own measurement of public user activity on large sites.[1] In the case of Google+, my and Stone Temple Consulting's independent analysis[2] showed that 0.3% of all users actually engage in public posting on the site. The real question isn't "how many users are commenting", but "what is the quality of the comments received?". Following critiques of my first study, I performed a second follow-up looking at where intelligent conversation was happening online, using the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list as a proxy for intelligent conversation, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashina", as its obverse. This gave the world the infamous FP:KK index -- the ratio of mentions of any of the FP Global 100 Thinkers per instance of a spin-off of the OJ Simpson trial fall-out.[2] A few results stood out -- Facebook's scale, Reddit's relatively high quality, Metafilter's phenomenally high S/N ratio, and the amount of high-quality material posted to blogs (though perhaps never seeing the light of day). I'd be interested in some further follow-up along these lines. One of the problems is that at Internet scale, Sturgeon's Law is far worse than six-sigma compliant.[3] Not only is there an awful lot of crud, but simple mechanics mean that no one person can see more than the tiniest fraction of what is transacted online daily. The simple acquisition cost and assessment of "is this worth reading or not" is absolutely prohibitive. Or as Clay Shirky says, what we've got isn't content overload but filter failure.[4] On the problem of idiots, my personal solution is simple and surprisingly effective: block fuckwits.[5] At scale, this evolves to the problem of figuring out who is and isn't a fuckwit. The ability for individual actions against specific authors and publishers to be applied generally strikes me as a useful tool. Not a complete fix (there are controversial voices who do deserve to be heard). But if the cost of being an asshat is being an asshat screaming into the void, part of the problem is addressed. (Yes, this means some form of 1) persistent reputation, 2) tools for applying reputation as filters, and 3) limitations on newly-created profiles. The idea of vouchers (again, with a reputation penalty applying) to bootstrap new identities may help. There's much in common to approaches against email spam in this.) NPR in particular are counting the fact that many messages come from desktop users as a failing of their system. I see that as absolute insanity. Desktop systems are hugely more useful than mobile devices for composing content. Especially thoughtful content. I know this because I've been trying, and losing, that battle myself, using a 9" Android tablet and Bluetooth keyboard -- one of the better mobile authoring configurations possible, and it still stinks. The six lines by 45 characters I can see in HN's edit box certainly don't help. I've written a long rant at Reddit on this specific problem.[6] Whilst composing this comment I've had Firefox/Android crap out from under me, continuously popped out of the edit box, and unintentionally navigated from the page. Thankfully persistence of user state in edit dialogs has improved slightly, but the experience is frustrating to say the least. I'd use a proper editing environment, say, vim, except that under Android, VimTouch doens't interact with the clipboard. I can neither copy content into* it, nor out. Termux's vim client is slightly better -- I can paste through the Termux clipboard, but copying out is virtually impossible, and doesn't capture more than one screen at a time. The fact that few people are entering thoughtful comments on mobile likely says far more about the state of mobile tech than it does about NPR's audience. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin... 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat... 4. http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload/ http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-no... 5. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm... 6. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/longform_selfposts_and_intelligent_discussion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/l...

bumbledraven 10y ago

"If there is hope, it lies in the comments threads." -- John Derbyshire

adrusi 10y ago

I think that maybe hosting comments alongside the original article isn't the best approach. Half the fun of internet comments is discussing with other commenters, but that works a lot better when you know the community that you're discussing with. You can't reasonably keep track of the dynamics of hundreds of different content provider's comment sections, nor can all content providers have interesting commenting communities. We need a standard comment syndication format like RSS so that sites like HN and Reddit can continue to provide good communities for discussion, but content providers can still display comments below their content to show off reader engagement.

jamiesonbecker 10y ago

Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or scorched earth flame wars.

perseusprime11 10y ago

Can we also use this time to talk about Live chat for Youtube? It is literally filled with scrolling garbage and promotes so much of negativity. What purpose is it solving when there 10K users throwing garbage at each other?