6 ms·

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 opi

by 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).
- notadoc 10y ago
  > We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide When done well, comments on the article form a discussion, debate, or some other meaningful exchange of knowledge. But with the modern web and social media, it's usually all bile and trolling.
- xemdetia 10y ago
  Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in. It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
  - edraferi 10y ago
    > It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole. Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.
  - mahranch 10y ago
    As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit. I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.
    - xemdetia 10y ago
      I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping. Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.
moby 10y ago
I've always appreciated the NYT's approach to flag their "Picks" as not just the ones receiving the most upvotes/recommendations, but those that represent a wide variety of opinions.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Think of it this way: Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard. Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  That's pretty much what Tay did with Twitter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
hodgesrm 10y ago
The German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ / http://www.faz.net http://www.faz.net) also has thoughtful comments. I used to think it was something about the community but at this point it seems more related to moderation. You don't see a lot of trolls on the site.
- neffy 10y ago
  Given that it's FAZ, I suspect all they need is a check that the comment is correctly punctuated, uses the subjunctive, and consists of 3 paragraphs written in 2 sentences :)
robwilliams 10y ago
The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.
- lucretian 10y ago
  i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens. as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances. this comment articulates it well: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html#permid=19427985 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc... "He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way. But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."
  - robwilliams 10y ago
    I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections. The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.
roywiggins 10y ago
Metafilter does moderation well. They have a team of paid moderators. It costs a token $5 to join, which means it's expensive to generate sock puppets and anyway the moderators keep your credit card on file so they can permaban you if they need to.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Having payment linked to a name goes a long way towards deterrence, IMO.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I think it's more than that; it's a psychological thing. You're not likely to shell out five bucks to spew an epithet at someone - you have to think about it. You have to get your payment info together. You have to think about your budget, even a bit in passing.
    - joezydeco 10y ago
      And, in Metafilter's case, there is a waiting period between payment and the ability to comment.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Metafilter is interesting in several regards. There's the token payment. It doesn't cost much to post, but it does cost to be an asshat. It's tiny. The userbase and total content volume are a small fraction of other social networks. Which I've objectively measured. The S/N is amazingly high. Better than all but the best paid-contribution (e.g., professional media) sites. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
Shivetya 10y ago
well some one's trash is another person's insightful comment. that isn't to say there isn't hate and trivial comments but far too many will simply dismiss any comment as ignorant that they don't agree with. This is most likely to occur with political or religious discussions.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  There's content which is simply disinformative. It's not only wrong, but makes the reader stupider for having read it. Objectively.
markdown 10y ago
> But Reddit is a toilet I've found just the opposite. Coincidentally, I all the subs I'm subscribed to have less than 40k subscribers.

by notadoc 10y ago

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).

notadoc 10y ago
> We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide When done well, comments on the article form a discussion, debate, or some other meaningful exchange of knowledge. But with the modern web and social media, it's usually all bile and trolling.
xemdetia 10y ago
Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in. It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
- edraferi 10y ago
  > It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole. Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.
- mahranch 10y ago
  As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit. I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.
  - xemdetia 10y ago
    I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping. Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.

moby 10y ago

I've always appreciated the NYT's approach to flag their "Picks" as not just the ones receiving the most upvotes/recommendations, but those that represent a wide variety of opinions.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

Think of it this way: Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard. Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.

alanwatts 10y ago
That's pretty much what Tay did with Twitter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

hodgesrm 10y ago

The German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ / http://www.faz.net http://www.faz.net) also has thoughtful comments. I used to think it was something about the community but at this point it seems more related to moderation. You don't see a lot of trolls on the site.

neffy 10y ago
Given that it's FAZ, I suspect all they need is a check that the comment is correctly punctuated, uses the subjunctive, and consists of 3 paragraphs written in 2 sentences :)

robwilliams 10y ago

The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.

lucretian 10y ago
i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens. as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances. this comment articulates it well: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html#permid=19427985 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc... "He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way. But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."
- robwilliams 10y ago
  I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections. The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.

roywiggins 10y ago

Metafilter does moderation well. They have a team of paid moderators. It costs a token $5 to join, which means it's expensive to generate sock puppets and anyway the moderators keep your credit card on file so they can permaban you if they need to.

joezydeco 10y ago
Having payment linked to a name goes a long way towards deterrence, IMO.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I think it's more than that; it's a psychological thing. You're not likely to shell out five bucks to spew an epithet at someone - you have to think about it. You have to get your payment info together. You have to think about your budget, even a bit in passing.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    And, in Metafilter's case, there is a waiting period between payment and the ability to comment.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Metafilter is interesting in several regards. There's the token payment. It doesn't cost much to post, but it does cost to be an asshat. It's tiny. The userbase and total content volume are a small fraction of other social networks. Which I've objectively measured. The S/N is amazingly high. Better than all but the best paid-contribution (e.g., professional media) sites. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

Shivetya 10y ago

well some one's trash is another person's insightful comment. that isn't to say there isn't hate and trivial comments but far too many will simply dismiss any comment as ignorant that they don't agree with. This is most likely to occur with political or religious discussions.

dredmorbius 10y ago
There's content which is simply disinformative. It's not only wrong, but makes the reader stupider for having read it. Objectively.

markdown 10y ago

> But Reddit is a toilet I've found just the opposite. Coincidentally, I all the subs I'm subscribed to have less than 40k subscribers.