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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 c

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?
- showerst 10y ago
  I think that incentive idea is great, and is a smart move to build a community, particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. I like how some of the Ask<X> reddits do it, by flagging people with verified advanced degrees. People think that news sites are afraid of conflicting opinions, but in my experience that's nonsense, it just has to be well thought out and not "DEATH TO <ISRAEL/ARABS/SUNNI/TURKS/AMERICA>", which is the vast majority. It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried. I'll err on the side of caution with revealing employee counts, but in my experience many of the FP/Atlantic/Mother Jones/Weekly Standard/Pick your midrange site are running on a single digit to low double-digit number of web production staff, many of whom are also trying to make a writing, article layout, or fact-checking quota. The suggestion that these magazines can either get those staffers to moderate tens of thousands of comments per day, or quadruple their web staff just to improve the comments ignores the business reality. User moderation in the normal HN/Reddit way doesn't work well on news sites, it's too easy to game or brigade, and news sites can't or won't give add unpaid moderators to be gatekeepers. That's what's hard; creating comments is scalable, filtering them is not. Leaving them unfiltered doesn't work either.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Thanks for your reply! >I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters, and short, simple points are often more percussive. Vetting credentials is a very good option IMHO for certain forums but not for others. Reddit's /r/askscience is an example of a forum in which it works well. >It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried. I wonder if this problem can't be solved through the use of machine-learning to classify comments into high-versus-low quality by grammatical and semantic analysis. This kind of first-pass filtering could, at the very least, help throw out the obvious trash and pre-select candidates for recognition. Such a system can be tuned to minimize false-alarms (shitpost getting flagged as good), which I think represent the most problematic of classification errors. This is a nice problem-space for ML because the increase in misses implied by a bias against false-alarms doesn't degrade the service much: not having one's comment select for re-publication is unexceptional. Thoughts?
cloudjacker 10y ago
"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." Those were your users.
- epoxyhockey 10y ago
  Aside from [bot] spam, I agree with the statement of Those were your users. What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.
- showerst 10y ago
  Assuming you're trolling, but at the risk of feeding: Someone who posts "Sir your magazine and Hillary Clinton are tools of Israel and should be killed by Hamas, God willing", on all every story about the State Department, or "Oh $WRITER I see you live in DC and went to $COLLEGE, maybe I'll come pay a visit to the next alumni event and teach you some respect for $COUNTRY" isn't the target user for a major American publication. It doesn't want those kind of abhorrent sentiments to live alongside its brand on its website, and is under no obligation to give voice to their ideas. They're an exceedingly small percent of total readers (when they're even real readers), but a much larger percent of online commenters, hence the problem in the first place. Even in the non-bot non-astroturfing case, the people who make those comments may be actual readers (although they're exceedingly unlikely to be paying subscribers), but they definitely fall into the bucket of 'can be filtered out, to no appreciable loss'. They're users in the sense that the website is free, and anybody can be a user, but not in the sense that the publication has a duty to them, in exchange for their money or attention.
kinofcain 10y ago
While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric. It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it. If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.
- edraferi 10y ago
  Perhaps micro-transactions could slow new posts down enough to make a difference. Maybe use the funds to pay people for high quality comments.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content. HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.
- hx87 10y ago
  Which articles are you reading? I have yet to see a single article where that has happened.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like that.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting. Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches. On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible. Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something like: 1) Ugh, another one. Let's check the comments.. 2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article.. 3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? Flag.
      - guard-of-terra 10y ago
        Doesn't make the issues not relevant. Do you argue that we're incapable of dealing with these issues for all eternity? "Who voted this up?" is the community rift.
notadoc 10y ago
I agree, this is an unsolved problem for the web. Unfortunately at least 90% of internet comments are trolling, vitriolic, ignorant, generally useless, poorly written, unhelpful, add nothing to the topic, and basically serve as web pollution.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
> "these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges" But suggesting people engage instead on Facebook brings a whole new set of ethical concerns. (1) Facebook manipulates users. (2) Facebook reorders feed. (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. And lets not forget that Facebook is probably outsourcing moderation anyway. Plus, Facebook commenters can be just as bad as regular site commenters.
- showerst 10y ago
  Yup. It's basically saying "we can't afford this, so we'll make it not our problem." FWIW FP briefly used an embedded facebook widget, and a nonzero percent of their livefyre users logged in via FB. It did little to nothing to stop abusive comments. The HN crowd cares a lot about what sort of history follows around our names and our handles. Many others, both in the western world and abroad, do not.
  - tater_sent_me 10y ago
    no we dont. internet points are stupid.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  > (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/information-about-trending-topics/amp/ https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in... Of course no one ever asks why he wanted to pick a controversial site to highlight instead of say a boring straight forward wires service report like the AP. Of course the story still appears, and the Brietbart could appear in slots 2-N by the personalized ranking algorithm, so it's not like it surpressed. He just wanted to shove it into the I personalized slot 1 where everyone would see it.
  - 10y ago
legulere 10y ago
There's a german blog that used to be popular (blog.fefe.de) without comment function. So some people built a website that offers the same blog just with a comment function. They built in a captcha function, that fails with a the probability that your comment is a troll comment. Here's the talk about it (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA
- colinprince 10y ago
  See also http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/ http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/ - a chrome extension
kuschku 10y ago
A solution a German blogger did was kinda funny. For every post you made, you had to enter a captcha. Then, if your comment had words that were likely to be hateful, it’d show your comment again to you, and force you to enter the captcha again. The worse the likely quality of your comment, the more captchas you’d have to enter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA
latj 10y ago
Yes, I think using FB login pretty much solves the problem as it is today. Take a look at civilbeat.com a regional news site by Pierre Omidyar (The Intercept). I'm fairly certain they only allowed comments via FB login for years. It meant a lot fewer comments than they would have gotten but they were all legit. Now it looks like they allow FB, Twitter, or local auth. But the comments are still mostly ok. Maybe they are looking for more activity by easing the requirements and believe they've built a culture of good commenting?
- Esau 10y ago
  So the solution is a unethical, privacy invading, profile building company run by a guy who thinks his users are "dumb fucks"? No thank you.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  I'm not sold on it because a lot of newspaper web sites use facebook comments and any topic about politics, race, or gender seem to be full of people making hateful comments.
  - rogerdpack 10y ago
    Seems like it was quite "better" than the alternative (basically anonymous user logins making comments) for my home towns recent transition to fb comments, for what it's worth... The one place I've actually found awesome comments was "the economist" (well, HN isn't bad either), and the ny times is kind of OK. Everywhere else feels pretty iffy...
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  I think describing FB login as "solving" the problem is definitely overstating it by a lot. I've seen plenty of dumpster-fire comment sections that allowed only FB users to comment.
- godshatter 10y ago
  It solves the problem for me, I guess. I won't be commenting anywhere you have to log in to facebook because I don't want them tracking me all over the web. While a facebook account gives some legitimacy, I also like sites where you can post anonymously or at least pseudonymously.
Yhippa 10y ago
Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system? Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_. That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the highest quality comments of their userbase at the time.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 At one point I actually helped design something somewhat better (which was implemented in part). I've had further ideas since. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
- michaelt 10y ago
  Slashdot's moderation still had some problems - which might be inevitable, I don't know. There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50. And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.
- mahranch 10y ago
  > That community had one of the highest quality comments. One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak. This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.
intended 10y ago
Don't have time to elaborate - but moderation tools actually link to many other deeper problems in meat space, and IMO lead to the kind of tools which-should-not-be-made.
someguydave 10y ago
The only solution is for trusted commenters to rate cryptographically signed comments. And they would only do so if they felt like doing so.

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?

showerst 10y ago
I think that incentive idea is great, and is a smart move to build a community, particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. I like how some of the Ask<X> reddits do it, by flagging people with verified advanced degrees. People think that news sites are afraid of conflicting opinions, but in my experience that's nonsense, it just has to be well thought out and not "DEATH TO <ISRAEL/ARABS/SUNNI/TURKS/AMERICA>", which is the vast majority. It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried. I'll err on the side of caution with revealing employee counts, but in my experience many of the FP/Atlantic/Mother Jones/Weekly Standard/Pick your midrange site are running on a single digit to low double-digit number of web production staff, many of whom are also trying to make a writing, article layout, or fact-checking quota. The suggestion that these magazines can either get those staffers to moderate tens of thousands of comments per day, or quadruple their web staff just to improve the comments ignores the business reality. User moderation in the normal HN/Reddit way doesn't work well on news sites, it's too easy to game or brigade, and news sites can't or won't give add unpaid moderators to be gatekeepers. That's what's hard; creating comments is scalable, filtering them is not. Leaving them unfiltered doesn't work either.
- omginternets 10y ago
  Thanks for your reply! >I think that incentive [is good], particularly when you're trying to draw subject matter experts. You bring up an excellent point. One of the fundamental problems with comments, I think, is that it creates a space in which ignorance and expertise are equally-weighted. In fact, it's often worse than that for reasons we all know: interesting issues are hard to distill into 300-or-so characters, and short, simple points are often more percussive. Vetting credentials is a very good option IMHO for certain forums but not for others. Reddit's /r/askscience is an example of a forum in which it works well. >It still doesn't solve the problem that for someone to _find_ those great comments, they have to _read_ them, and stop them from getting buried. I wonder if this problem can't be solved through the use of machine-learning to classify comments into high-versus-low quality by grammatical and semantic analysis. This kind of first-pass filtering could, at the very least, help throw out the obvious trash and pre-select candidates for recognition. Such a system can be tuned to minimize false-alarms (shitpost getting flagged as good), which I think represent the most problematic of classification errors. This is a nice problem-space for ML because the increase in misses implied by a bias against false-alarms doesn't degrade the service much: not having one's comment select for re-publication is unexceptional. Thoughts?

cloudjacker 10y ago

"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." Those were your users.

epoxyhockey 10y ago
Aside from [bot] spam, I agree with the statement of Those were your users. What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.
showerst 10y ago
Assuming you're trolling, but at the risk of feeding: Someone who posts "Sir your magazine and Hillary Clinton are tools of Israel and should be killed by Hamas, God willing", on all every story about the State Department, or "Oh $WRITER I see you live in DC and went to $COLLEGE, maybe I'll come pay a visit to the next alumni event and teach you some respect for $COUNTRY" isn't the target user for a major American publication. It doesn't want those kind of abhorrent sentiments to live alongside its brand on its website, and is under no obligation to give voice to their ideas. They're an exceedingly small percent of total readers (when they're even real readers), but a much larger percent of online commenters, hence the problem in the first place. Even in the non-bot non-astroturfing case, the people who make those comments may be actual readers (although they're exceedingly unlikely to be paying subscribers), but they definitely fall into the bucket of 'can be filtered out, to no appreciable loss'. They're users in the sense that the website is free, and anybody can be a user, but not in the sense that the publication has a duty to them, in exchange for their money or attention.

kinofcain 10y ago

While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric. It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it. If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.

edraferi 10y ago
Perhaps micro-transactions could slow new posts down enough to make a difference. Maybe use the funds to pay people for high quality comments.

guard-of-terra 10y ago

Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content. HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.

hx87 10y ago
Which articles are you reading? I have yet to see a single article where that has happened.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like that.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting. Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they always degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches. On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible. Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something like: 1) Ugh, another one. Let's check the comments.. 2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article.. 3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? Flag.
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
      Doesn't make the issues not relevant. Do you argue that we're incapable of dealing with these issues for all eternity? "Who voted this up?" is the community rift.

notadoc 10y ago

I agree, this is an unsolved problem for the web. Unfortunately at least 90% of internet comments are trolling, vitriolic, ignorant, generally useless, poorly written, unhelpful, add nothing to the topic, and basically serve as web pollution.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

> "these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges" But suggesting people engage instead on Facebook brings a whole new set of ethical concerns. (1) Facebook manipulates users. (2) Facebook reorders feed. (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. And lets not forget that Facebook is probably outsourcing moderation anyway. Plus, Facebook commenters can be just as bad as regular site commenters.

showerst 10y ago
Yup. It's basically saying "we can't afford this, so we'll make it not our problem." FWIW FP briefly used an embedded facebook widget, and a nonzero percent of their livefyre users logged in via FB. It did little to nothing to stop abusive comments. The HN crowd cares a lot about what sort of history follows around our names and our handles. Many others, both in the western world and abroad, do not.
- tater_sent_me 10y ago
  no we dont. internet points are stupid.
jonathankoren 10y ago
> (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites. I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/information-about-trending-topics/amp/ https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in... Of course no one ever asks why he wanted to pick a controversial site to highlight instead of say a boring straight forward wires service report like the AP. Of course the story still appears, and the Brietbart could appear in slots 2-N by the personalized ranking algorithm, so it's not like it surpressed. He just wanted to shove it into the I personalized slot 1 where everyone would see it.
- 10y ago

legulere 10y ago

There's a german blog that used to be popular (blog.fefe.de) without comment function. So some people built a website that offers the same blog just with a comment function. They built in a captcha function, that fails with a the probability that your comment is a troll comment. Here's the talk about it (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

colinprince 10y ago
See also http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/ http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/ - a chrome extension

kuschku 10y ago

A solution a German blogger did was kinda funny. For every post you made, you had to enter a captcha. Then, if your comment had words that were likely to be hateful, it’d show your comment again to you, and force you to enter the captcha again. The worse the likely quality of your comment, the more captchas you’d have to enter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

latj 10y ago

Yes, I think using FB login pretty much solves the problem as it is today. Take a look at civilbeat.com a regional news site by Pierre Omidyar (The Intercept). I'm fairly certain they only allowed comments via FB login for years. It meant a lot fewer comments than they would have gotten but they were all legit. Now it looks like they allow FB, Twitter, or local auth. But the comments are still mostly ok. Maybe they are looking for more activity by easing the requirements and believe they've built a culture of good commenting?

Esau 10y ago
So the solution is a unethical, privacy invading, profile building company run by a guy who thinks his users are "dumb fucks"? No thank you.
jccalhoun 10y ago
I'm not sold on it because a lot of newspaper web sites use facebook comments and any topic about politics, race, or gender seem to be full of people making hateful comments.
- rogerdpack 10y ago
  Seems like it was quite "better" than the alternative (basically anonymous user logins making comments) for my home towns recent transition to fb comments, for what it's worth... The one place I've actually found awesome comments was "the economist" (well, HN isn't bad either), and the ny times is kind of OK. Everywhere else feels pretty iffy...
wutbrodo 10y ago
I think describing FB login as "solving" the problem is definitely overstating it by a lot. I've seen plenty of dumpster-fire comment sections that allowed only FB users to comment.
godshatter 10y ago
It solves the problem for me, I guess. I won't be commenting anywhere you have to log in to facebook because I don't want them tracking me all over the web. While a facebook account gives some legitimacy, I also like sites where you can post anonymously or at least pseudonymously.

Yhippa 10y ago

Nobody old enough on here to remember Slashdot's moderation system? Not everybody could promote or demote comments. You got randomly assigned the ability to moderate comments so when it came your turn you took it _seriously_. That community had one of the highest quality comments. Then somewhere in the mid-2000's it got super anti-Microsoft and anti-anything-not-F/OSS. I'll give them credit; it probably reflected the highest quality comments of their userbase at the time.

dredmorbius 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308662 At one point I actually helped design something somewhat better (which was implemented in part). I've had further ideas since. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
michaelt 10y ago
Slashdot's moderation still had some problems - which might be inevitable, I don't know. There was a big bias towards early comments - moderators had to see your comment before they could upvote it to the top of the page, but once it was at the top more people would see it and keep it there; so a comment that would score well if posted as comment 10 would score nothing if posted as comment 50. And karma tended to reward /popular/ comments, which were often things the hive mind agreed with, rather than high-effort comments. Discussion about DRM? Get in early with "DRM is impossible because" or "format-shifting should be a right" for a quick high score.
mahranch 10y ago
> That community had one of the highest quality comments. One of the biggest differences between slashdot, and a site like reddit is simply size. Reddit is now the 8th or 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa, it's getting as big as Twitter, and is larger than Netflix. Slashdot at it's peak popularity wasn't even a drop in that ocean of traffic & pageviews. When you get that big, your problems are of a different sort, requiring different solutions. Hell, I think reddit has single subreddits that are bigger than Slashdot was at its peak. This is important because it's easy to have "high quality" when your traffic is low. It's easy to moderate and easy to keep people on-topic. I speak from experience -- I moderate one or more default subreddits on reddit, as well as smaller subreddits, and the smaller ones are much easier to handle. They're virtually on autopilot with minimal moderation required. The larger ones on the other hand... It's like a non-stop war.

intended 10y ago

Don't have time to elaborate - but moderation tools actually link to many other deeper problems in meat space, and IMO lead to the kind of tools which-should-not-be-made.

someguydave 10y ago

The only solution is for trusted commenters to rate cryptographically signed comments. And they would only do so if they felt like doing so.