4 ms·

I posted this in a previous discussion about NPR getting rid of their comments. http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/npr-website-to-get-ri

I posted this in a previous discussion about NPR getting rid of their comments. http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/npr-website-to-get-rid-of-comments http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/n... 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.

autotune 10y ago
The whole appeal about reddit is it's not just one "community," it's multiple subreddits with different rules and different types of comments. If a subreddit becomes too negative, just hit the unsubscribe button and find a better one.
- overcast 10y ago
  I understand what Reddit is about. Here was my response to someone making a similar comment in the previous thread. You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    ...So why not hang out in /r/politicaldiscussion, a subreddit created for exactly what you're asking for and that is heavily moderated to keep it on-topic? I definitely agree that many subs - and particularly front page ones - can be a cesspool, although amusingly they don't quite get as bad as just about every news and newspaper site I've seen. But really, /r/upliftingnews is just too toxic for you? /r/changemyview is too negative? There's lots of great, very low-toxicity subs on Reddit. Abandoning the site because you're trying to discuss political issues - touchy in any arena, online or in person - seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
    - overcast 10y ago
      Politics was just an example honestly, I avoid politics in any form of discussion. Believe me when I say my day to day life is better without sitting on Reddit and the like.
  - rm999 10y ago
    >What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash. What you're looking for are strictly moderated subreddits with a clear set of rules. I've had good luck with r/NeutralPolitics and its sister subreddit r/NeutralNews. Reddit isn't a community so much as a tool for people to form communities. The people who realize this get way more out of reddit than the people who don't.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    Well that's part of the problem, stick to less popular subreddits, and you'll get less of the 'riff raff', to quote Basil Fawlty. And when they start getting popular find an even less popular one. I've been a part of many forums and internet communities and chat rooms, and they always tend to go the same way: The people who have been around for awhile get increasingly annoyed by the newcomers and their lack of decorum or 'idiotic statements' or whatever, so that segment of the group starts posting in a new more secluded place and use the other place less and less. Eventually more and more people find out about the 'secluded place' and it becomes more and more cluttered with 'undesirables', (often a few people from the previous group are now part of the old farts, or have become the new old farts), so a chunk of them break off from that community or forum and start posting somewhere even more secluded. And eventually it happens again. And again. And it's turtles all the way down. I saw the same exact shit happening in real life too with Meetup.com. People stopped posting stuff to meetup groups because they didn't want certain people to come, then there's a smaller group that's secret from the others, then either some people find out about it that shouldn't or one of the people in the secret group starts acting in a way that the other people don't want to deal with them anymore (for example, one time it was because they started dating someone who was a real jerk), so a new, smaller secreter group is formed, and so on...turtles all the way down again.
    - overcast 10y ago
      Do you think it's right that the good standing users, have to go out of their way to find alternative routes to use the product? Start at the source, and clean up the problem. All you're doing is letting the trash take over, and the current system encourages it. The Meetup scenario is depressing. Thankfully the one Tech Meetup I attend every so often is positive.
      - cableshaft 10y ago
        When you get the admins to clamp down, they're probably going to clamp down on some people or behavior that was tolerated or used by even the 'good' people because of some positive thing, and then those people start another group and take a bunch of those people with them, and it effectively becomes the same thing as before. I think it only works if you always had the rules in place, and even then, there will be some well liked people that will see how much they get away with, get removed, post a fit "I was ONLY doing blah and blah" and everyone else in the group gets mad and demands you let them back in, and blah, and blech. The meetup thing started innocently enough a couple times (with a couple people I was told explicitly they didn't want certain people to come), it's like 'we found some people we like hanging out with now thanks to meetup and now we're just inviting them over to our place', but eventually they stop posting their normal stuff on meetup and it gets harder and harder to keep the group going. I was a forum admin for way too long. Kinda glad I'm out of that now. Although now I'm an organizer for a meetup group, and it's not much different.
- jkeat 10y ago
  It's still worth pointing out that bigger subreddits where people feel more anonymous have lower quality discussions.
- smhinsey 10y ago
  This is what people continue to say and it was true in the early days 5+ years ago but I'm a skeptic on this point today. Unless you're talking about one of the ultra moderated places like AskHistory you can count on the toxic bullshit constantly seeping in around the edges of just about every discussion. Sometimes it's shut down and voted into oblivion, sometimes the wind is right and your innocuous discussion is suddenly derailed into alt-right land.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
ihuman 10y ago
> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic The trick with reddit is to avoid the default subreddits. Everyone is subscribed to them at first, so the toxic comments are mostly there. If you just subscribe to niche subreddits about topics you like, you will not find toxic comments.
- overcast 10y ago
  What if there are no niche subreddits, for example a game? No one makes separate "mature" areas, because why bother. You further segment everyone out, and it gets no traffic or discussion. Someone smart needs to seriously overhaul the commenting systems of the world. I don't know what the answer is, but there needs to be some type of accountability beyond simple voting.
  - ihuman 10y ago
    What do you mean by accountability in this context?
    - overcast 10y ago
      Accountability for what someone posts as a comment. You want to cause trouble, you should be flagged as such, to the point where you can no longer do it anymore. Commenting should be earned. Right now, someone can just be a troll on one topic, start the ball rolling, maybe get downvoted, and then move onto the next topic. Over and over. There needs to be a signal to noise ratio that prevents them from ever going any further.
  - uola 10y ago
    Many smart people have made studies about online communities since the Internet became mainstream. It's just that publishers, and maybe developers especially, don't understand or value these types of problems.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    That's what moderators are for. Most subreddits dedicated to particular games that I frequent have pretty well-behaving communities (with varying level of tolerance for memes).
467568985476 10y ago
I like Metafilter's discussion as well. I think the key is having fairly heavy handed moderators who are involved in the community. That keeps discussions civil and on track, and it also tends to drive away the "harassment-as-free-speech" people who create a lot of the toxicity you see in places like reddit and twitter.
bluedino 10y ago
>> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic Why not just ignore the comments and just read the linked articles? I find the comments are more informative or more interesting than the articles most of the time, just like here.
- overcast 10y ago
  The other half of my decision was that it's a waste of time. So between time wasting and negativity, I decided Reddit, and other sites like it, were over for me. HN is my last "social" type interaction on the web.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kefka 10y ago
In all honesty, Reddit is a webified Usenet with many downsides. Fortunately, a well moderated group is only as good as the mod team. There are well-maintained groups on reddit. None happen to be any of the defaults, however.
- ihuman 10y ago
  I don't think any of mods of well-maintained subreddits want to be default, since that will dump a larger amount of new users onto the subreddit than normal, making it harder to maintain the quality.
  - kefka 10y ago
    Absolutely. The difference between default and not is 4 million users... It doesn't matter how good the mod team: its just not tenable with the hordes. Anyways, I have ecletic interests, where the communities are small and well behaved. The worst I see is a spammer or 2. And they are reported and deleted rather quickly.
frik 10y ago
> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. Not just Reddit, HN stories about Microsoft are very toxic as well. These company sponsored trolls are like poison for the great HN community. It's completely unbelievable what's going on, and what some invest to destroy such a great community. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 HN is about venture capitalists, startups and Silicon Valley. How does their toxic behaviour fit in - any startup who uses expensive software for a startup is heading the MySpace way and has already lost. Their PR is offtopic and their corporate trolls toxic. Their usual tactic on HN is to overflow the comment section with blurb comments to increae the comment count. As soon as the comment count is higher than the story vote count, it acts like a flagging. (Plus the flag/downvote all non-flavour able comments.) IMHO a huge flaw with the current HN algorithms.
- overcast 10y ago
  Agreed, while HN does attract more intelligent discussions, there needs to be more ruling with an iron fist. Warning the first time, ban the second.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    No! That is part of why HN is great: you can say something and get corrected with a few downvotes. I'm all for correctional downvotes even if I get them myself sometimes. Your proposal however will is likely to encourage unnecessary cowardice and political correctness from old accounts and a landslide of throwaways.
    - overcast 10y ago
      There is a difference between political correctness, and just acting like an asshole. You can state your mind, without blatantly saying something just to get a rise out of everyone else. That's called a debate, not an argument. Throwaways wouldn't get anywhere, because their status needs to be earned through time, and peer review.
mancerayder 10y ago
I'm similar except I don't like the word 'toxic' to describe my revulsion to Reddit-like sites. See, it's not the negativity that gets me, or the political incorrectness. Neither of those things is ever truly a turn-off. It's the regurgitated slogans, and in particular the one-liner quip ad hominems. If I see a comment section and it's a hierarchy of one-liners, that's a clear cut sign. I'm going to openly admit to being an elitist. I'd rather discuss a topic with an evil genius than an imbecile.

autotune 10y ago

The whole appeal about reddit is it's not just one "community," it's multiple subreddits with different rules and different types of comments. If a subreddit becomes too negative, just hit the unsubscribe button and find a better one.

overcast 10y ago
I understand what Reddit is about. Here was my response to someone making a similar comment in the previous thread. You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  ...So why not hang out in /r/politicaldiscussion, a subreddit created for exactly what you're asking for and that is heavily moderated to keep it on-topic? I definitely agree that many subs - and particularly front page ones - can be a cesspool, although amusingly they don't quite get as bad as just about every news and newspaper site I've seen. But really, /r/upliftingnews is just too toxic for you? /r/changemyview is too negative? There's lots of great, very low-toxicity subs on Reddit. Abandoning the site because you're trying to discuss political issues - touchy in any arena, online or in person - seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Politics was just an example honestly, I avoid politics in any form of discussion. Believe me when I say my day to day life is better without sitting on Reddit and the like.
- rm999 10y ago
  >What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash. What you're looking for are strictly moderated subreddits with a clear set of rules. I've had good luck with r/NeutralPolitics and its sister subreddit r/NeutralNews. Reddit isn't a community so much as a tool for people to form communities. The people who realize this get way more out of reddit than the people who don't.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  Well that's part of the problem, stick to less popular subreddits, and you'll get less of the 'riff raff', to quote Basil Fawlty. And when they start getting popular find an even less popular one. I've been a part of many forums and internet communities and chat rooms, and they always tend to go the same way: The people who have been around for awhile get increasingly annoyed by the newcomers and their lack of decorum or 'idiotic statements' or whatever, so that segment of the group starts posting in a new more secluded place and use the other place less and less. Eventually more and more people find out about the 'secluded place' and it becomes more and more cluttered with 'undesirables', (often a few people from the previous group are now part of the old farts, or have become the new old farts), so a chunk of them break off from that community or forum and start posting somewhere even more secluded. And eventually it happens again. And again. And it's turtles all the way down. I saw the same exact shit happening in real life too with Meetup.com. People stopped posting stuff to meetup groups because they didn't want certain people to come, then there's a smaller group that's secret from the others, then either some people find out about it that shouldn't or one of the people in the secret group starts acting in a way that the other people don't want to deal with them anymore (for example, one time it was because they started dating someone who was a real jerk), so a new, smaller secreter group is formed, and so on...turtles all the way down again.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Do you think it's right that the good standing users, have to go out of their way to find alternative routes to use the product? Start at the source, and clean up the problem. All you're doing is letting the trash take over, and the current system encourages it. The Meetup scenario is depressing. Thankfully the one Tech Meetup I attend every so often is positive.
    - cableshaft 10y ago
      When you get the admins to clamp down, they're probably going to clamp down on some people or behavior that was tolerated or used by even the 'good' people because of some positive thing, and then those people start another group and take a bunch of those people with them, and it effectively becomes the same thing as before. I think it only works if you always had the rules in place, and even then, there will be some well liked people that will see how much they get away with, get removed, post a fit "I was ONLY doing blah and blah" and everyone else in the group gets mad and demands you let them back in, and blah, and blech. The meetup thing started innocently enough a couple times (with a couple people I was told explicitly they didn't want certain people to come), it's like 'we found some people we like hanging out with now thanks to meetup and now we're just inviting them over to our place', but eventually they stop posting their normal stuff on meetup and it gets harder and harder to keep the group going. I was a forum admin for way too long. Kinda glad I'm out of that now. Although now I'm an organizer for a meetup group, and it's not much different.
jkeat 10y ago
It's still worth pointing out that bigger subreddits where people feel more anonymous have lower quality discussions.
smhinsey 10y ago
This is what people continue to say and it was true in the early days 5+ years ago but I'm a skeptic on this point today. Unless you're talking about one of the ultra moderated places like AskHistory you can count on the toxic bullshit constantly seeping in around the edges of just about every discussion. Sometimes it's shut down and voted into oblivion, sometimes the wind is right and your innocuous discussion is suddenly derailed into alt-right land.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

ihuman 10y ago

> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic The trick with reddit is to avoid the default subreddits. Everyone is subscribed to them at first, so the toxic comments are mostly there. If you just subscribe to niche subreddits about topics you like, you will not find toxic comments.

overcast 10y ago
What if there are no niche subreddits, for example a game? No one makes separate "mature" areas, because why bother. You further segment everyone out, and it gets no traffic or discussion. Someone smart needs to seriously overhaul the commenting systems of the world. I don't know what the answer is, but there needs to be some type of accountability beyond simple voting.
- ihuman 10y ago
  What do you mean by accountability in this context?
  - overcast 10y ago
    Accountability for what someone posts as a comment. You want to cause trouble, you should be flagged as such, to the point where you can no longer do it anymore. Commenting should be earned. Right now, someone can just be a troll on one topic, start the ball rolling, maybe get downvoted, and then move onto the next topic. Over and over. There needs to be a signal to noise ratio that prevents them from ever going any further.
- uola 10y ago
  Many smart people have made studies about online communities since the Internet became mainstream. It's just that publishers, and maybe developers especially, don't understand or value these types of problems.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  That's what moderators are for. Most subreddits dedicated to particular games that I frequent have pretty well-behaving communities (with varying level of tolerance for memes).

467568985476 10y ago

I like Metafilter's discussion as well. I think the key is having fairly heavy handed moderators who are involved in the community. That keeps discussions civil and on track, and it also tends to drive away the "harassment-as-free-speech" people who create a lot of the toxicity you see in places like reddit and twitter.

bluedino 10y ago

>> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic Why not just ignore the comments and just read the linked articles? I find the comments are more informative or more interesting than the articles most of the time, just like here.

overcast 10y ago
The other half of my decision was that it's a waste of time. So between time wasting and negativity, I decided Reddit, and other sites like it, were over for me. HN is my last "social" type interaction on the web.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kefka 10y ago

In all honesty, Reddit is a webified Usenet with many downsides. Fortunately, a well moderated group is only as good as the mod team. There are well-maintained groups on reddit. None happen to be any of the defaults, however.

ihuman 10y ago
I don't think any of mods of well-maintained subreddits want to be default, since that will dump a larger amount of new users onto the subreddit than normal, making it harder to maintain the quality.
- kefka 10y ago
  Absolutely. The difference between default and not is 4 million users... It doesn't matter how good the mod team: its just not tenable with the hordes. Anyways, I have ecletic interests, where the communities are small and well behaved. The worst I see is a spammer or 2. And they are reported and deleted rather quickly.

frik 10y ago

> I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. Not just Reddit, HN stories about Microsoft are very toxic as well. These company sponsored trolls are like poison for the great HN community. It's completely unbelievable what's going on, and what some invest to destroy such a great community. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 HN is about venture capitalists, startups and Silicon Valley. How does their toxic behaviour fit in - any startup who uses expensive software for a startup is heading the MySpace way and has already lost. Their PR is offtopic and their corporate trolls toxic. Their usual tactic on HN is to overflow the comment section with blurb comments to increae the comment count. As soon as the comment count is higher than the story vote count, it acts like a flagging. (Plus the flag/downvote all non-flavour able comments.) IMHO a huge flaw with the current HN algorithms.

overcast 10y ago
Agreed, while HN does attract more intelligent discussions, there needs to be more ruling with an iron fist. Warning the first time, ban the second.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  No! That is part of why HN is great: you can say something and get corrected with a few downvotes. I'm all for correctional downvotes even if I get them myself sometimes. Your proposal however will is likely to encourage unnecessary cowardice and political correctness from old accounts and a landslide of throwaways.
  - overcast 10y ago
    There is a difference between political correctness, and just acting like an asshole. You can state your mind, without blatantly saying something just to get a rise out of everyone else. That's called a debate, not an argument. Throwaways wouldn't get anywhere, because their status needs to be earned through time, and peer review.

mancerayder 10y ago

I'm similar except I don't like the word 'toxic' to describe my revulsion to Reddit-like sites. See, it's not the negativity that gets me, or the political incorrectness. Neither of those things is ever truly a turn-off. It's the regurgitated slogans, and in particular the one-liner quip ad hominems. If I see a comment section and it's a hierarchy of one-liners, that's a clear cut sign. I'm going to openly admit to being an elitist. I'd rather discuss a topic with an evil genius than an imbecile.