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I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite co

I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

astrodust 10y ago
Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things. Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.
- duaneb 10y ago
  The comments on the New York Times seem to be high quality.
  - knieveltech 10y ago
    A strong indicator of intense moderator activity.
  - djtriptych 10y ago
    They employ people to moderate comments and select high-quality contributions. Not cheap.
  - danso 10y ago
    They also expend significant resources in moderating it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv... (a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)
    - sammermpc 10y ago
      FWIW, a move towards automated assistance is what motivated that article in the first place: "The New York Times is partnering with Google Jigsaw to create a new moderation system that will help us review incoming comments based on decisions our moderators have made in the past. Our moderators will continue to protect these discussions, but once this new system is launched, we will have robot helpers." I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).
    - monksy 10y ago
      I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage). You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.
      - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
        > a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.
  - stuart78 10y ago
    I think that is in part because they are highly moderated, both by their internal team and user votes. Such moderation is costly, but I tend to think it is worth it for the good of the community. http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercontent.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - vinhboy 10y ago
    The NYT is the ONLY high quality comment "left" on the internet. It's sad that we are letting extremists mute comment sections.
- newswriter99 10y ago
  Vice does nothing BUT write editorials and tries to pawn them off as objective journalism. Hence, trolling.
djtriptych 10y ago
Trolls are attracted to attention. Every popular site has this issue.
zzalpha 10y ago
But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. I very much disagree with that. Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.
- matart 10y ago
  CBC comments show you how horrible some people can be. It makes me think that we leave discussion to the discussions sites. Reddit, HN, etc. and just let the news tell the news.
  - stan_rogers 10y ago
    I've used the "block element" feature of uBlock Origin to completely remove the comments from CBC.ca. Frankly, the possibility that I may miss the one insightful comment posted every twenty thousand or so (before it's pushed into "show more" territory) doesn't seem like much of a loss.
- newswriter99 10y ago
  Vice is nowhere remotely close to journalistic professionalism. I'd argue they bait trolls.
  - sbarre 10y ago
    Are you thinking of Vice from 15 years ago when it was just a magazine? Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).
    - weberc2 10y ago
      I still see lots of partisan clickbait articles from Vice. Hopefully my sample isn't representative, but I doubt it's an anomaly.
danso 10y ago
I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0]. Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to. [0] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-reviews https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-revie...
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users. The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave. Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.
  - brennen 10y ago
    > The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave. As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement. MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus. This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine. I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.) It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.
toomuchtodo 10y ago
NPR also nuked their comment section. They're not what I'd consider a watering hole of ill repute.
- cydonian_monk 10y ago
  And the NPR comments section wasn't generally terrible, either. At least not on the articles I usually read. Still, I'd rather the money/time/energy required to properly maintain a comments section for NPR be spent on pursuits closer to their core purpose.
caseysoftware 10y ago
Considering how much of the media was shocked SHOCKED by Brexit, the election of Trump, Sarkozy's loss, the fall of Merkel, and the rise of Le Pen, maybe they should pay more attention to the comments..
- kuschku 10y ago
  The "fall" of Merkel? You mean, she went from approval rates of 74% to about 50%?
  - rokosbasilisk 10y ago
    Probably in reference to the reversal of hijabs and beginning of her reversing some immigration policies.
- thinkloop 10y ago
  Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions. Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump). None gets solved by polling trolls.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
ebbv 10y ago
This just isn't true. Every site I've ever seen get above a certain threshold of popularity has its comments site turn to utter garbage, if it wasn't terrible already. The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  HN, Slashdot and Reddit frequently have thousands of posts on a single story and many of the posts are excellent. The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.
sethish 10y ago
Uh, no? What about gamergate?
prawn 10y ago
You can write something completely reasonable and still attract absolute dickheads - the internet is pretty special like that. I think a more realistic position is about how your commenting system motivates better comments, not to avoid criticism but to create a better product for your audience. e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content. My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.
kevinburke 10y ago
I would recommend you read "The Internet of Garbage" by Sarah Jeong, which tackles this argument in a lot of depth. It's also very cheap for an e-book!
aphextron 10y ago
Nonsense. Literally any comment section on any news website will be filled with people spouting off their random insanity because it's simply a platform. The actual content of the article rarely even matters to these people.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  We can easily discern, with statistics, which political ideology is providing all the insane comments. But in places like HN, people will scream at you for being partisan if you mention it. I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.
ksk 10y ago
> But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice. Can you explain your reasoning behind that?

astrodust 10y ago

Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things. Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.

duaneb 10y ago
The comments on the New York Times seem to be high quality.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  A strong indicator of intense moderator activity.
- djtriptych 10y ago
  They employ people to moderate comments and select high-quality contributions. Not cheap.
- danso 10y ago
  They also expend significant resources in moderating it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv... (a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)
  - sammermpc 10y ago
    FWIW, a move towards automated assistance is what motivated that article in the first place: "The New York Times is partnering with Google Jigsaw to create a new moderation system that will help us review incoming comments based on decisions our moderators have made in the past. Our moderators will continue to protect these discussions, but once this new system is launched, we will have robot helpers." I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).
  - monksy 10y ago
    I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage). You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.
    - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
      > a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.
- stuart78 10y ago
  I think that is in part because they are highly moderated, both by their internal team and user votes. Such moderation is costly, but I tend to think it is worth it for the good of the community. http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercontent.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vinhboy 10y ago
  The NYT is the ONLY high quality comment "left" on the internet. It's sad that we are letting extremists mute comment sections.
newswriter99 10y ago
Vice does nothing BUT write editorials and tries to pawn them off as objective journalism. Hence, trolling.

djtriptych 10y ago

Trolls are attracted to attention. Every popular site has this issue.

zzalpha 10y ago

But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. I very much disagree with that. Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.

matart 10y ago
CBC comments show you how horrible some people can be. It makes me think that we leave discussion to the discussions sites. Reddit, HN, etc. and just let the news tell the news.
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  I've used the "block element" feature of uBlock Origin to completely remove the comments from CBC.ca. Frankly, the possibility that I may miss the one insightful comment posted every twenty thousand or so (before it's pushed into "show more" territory) doesn't seem like much of a loss.
newswriter99 10y ago
Vice is nowhere remotely close to journalistic professionalism. I'd argue they bait trolls.
- sbarre 10y ago
  Are you thinking of Vice from 15 years ago when it was just a magazine? Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).
  - weberc2 10y ago
    I still see lots of partisan clickbait articles from Vice. Hopefully my sample isn't representative, but I doubt it's an anomaly.

danso 10y ago

I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0]. Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to. [0] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-reviews https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-revie...

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users. The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave. Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.
- brennen 10y ago
  > The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave. As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement. MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus. This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine. I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.) It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

NPR also nuked their comment section. They're not what I'd consider a watering hole of ill repute.

cydonian_monk 10y ago
And the NPR comments section wasn't generally terrible, either. At least not on the articles I usually read. Still, I'd rather the money/time/energy required to properly maintain a comments section for NPR be spent on pursuits closer to their core purpose.

caseysoftware 10y ago

Considering how much of the media was shocked SHOCKED by Brexit, the election of Trump, Sarkozy's loss, the fall of Merkel, and the rise of Le Pen, maybe they should pay more attention to the comments..

kuschku 10y ago
The "fall" of Merkel? You mean, she went from approval rates of 74% to about 50%?
- rokosbasilisk 10y ago
  Probably in reference to the reversal of hijabs and beginning of her reversing some immigration policies.
thinkloop 10y ago
Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions. Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump). None gets solved by polling trolls.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

ebbv 10y ago

This just isn't true. Every site I've ever seen get above a certain threshold of popularity has its comments site turn to utter garbage, if it wasn't terrible already. The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.

zigzigzag 10y ago
HN, Slashdot and Reddit frequently have thousands of posts on a single story and many of the posts are excellent. The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.

sethish 10y ago

Uh, no? What about gamergate?

prawn 10y ago

You can write something completely reasonable and still attract absolute dickheads - the internet is pretty special like that. I think a more realistic position is about how your commenting system motivates better comments, not to avoid criticism but to create a better product for your audience. e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content. My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.

kevinburke 10y ago

I would recommend you read "The Internet of Garbage" by Sarah Jeong, which tackles this argument in a lot of depth. It's also very cheap for an e-book!

aphextron 10y ago

Nonsense. Literally any comment section on any news website will be filled with people spouting off their random insanity because it's simply a platform. The actual content of the article rarely even matters to these people.

vinhboy 10y ago
We can easily discern, with statistics, which political ideology is providing all the insane comments. But in places like HN, people will scream at you for being partisan if you mention it. I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.

ksk 10y ago

> But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice. Can you explain your reasoning behind that?