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Must answer questions before posting comments to prove you understand news
- protomyth 9y agoI expect there will be some mockery of the questions if they are not careful. Imagine questions written by MSNBC & FoxNews for the same story. I can see the questions setting up an echo chamber effect.
- fruitcake 9y ago> Imagine questions written by MSNBC & FoxNews for the same story. As far as I can tell from briefly viewing them, the MSNBC and Fox News web sites don't allow comments.
- protomyth 9y agoI was using them as examples of two groups that would write totally different questions both with a prejudice towards a particular worldview.
- spencerflem 9y agoThey would also write articles with a different worldview.
- icebraining 9y agoAre you sure you're not blocking scripts? A random Fox News story showed me plenty of comments: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/07/30/us-allies-ready-to-use-overwhelming-force-in-north-korea-general-says.html http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/07/30/us-allies-ready-to-u... From the source, it seems they're using Adobe Livefyre.
- pharrington 9y agoThe cool thing about this kind of filter is that it specifically has nothing to do with what the potential poster is about to post. As long as the questions remain about the facts in the article, intuitively it seems terrible for virality (as it extends the time frame between casual emotion and action), so I doubt any large news outlet would actually implement this.
- tomjen3 9y agoIt can at most be about the facts of the article as understood by the writer (Murray Gell-Man applies here), which the commenter may very well know better than the writer.
- kurthr 9y agoAs long as they are facts stated in the article (and the article has been read), I don't see an issue. However, a good NLP might still make automated spam posting possible.
- everdev 9y agoThe example they give is correctly stating what an acronym in the story stands for. The trouble starts if you have to answer questions like "Which Senators are pro-life" or "Who threatened to exit the EU" which can be leading or misleading or have multiple correct answers depending on your world view.
- yorwba 9y agoThen turn the questions into factual "Which Senators are named as pro-life in this article?", "Which country's representative threatened to exit the EU?". Even when you disagree, you should be able to give an accurate account of the opinion you disagree with.
- protomyth 9y agoThe problem is if you disagree you get another confirmation of the leanings of the organization. I agree with everdev, you really need to stick with indisputable facts. Your first question is problematic because you might dispute the characterization regardless of what the article says.
- yorwba 9y agoWhat is the problem with confirming the leanings of the organization just before you are going to comment about completely disagreeing with the article's characterization? If the article mentions that "Senator X of the pro-life camp said ..." you answer the quiz question with "X" (because it's an indisputable fact that the article calls X pro-life) and then you are free to comment how "pro-life" is a biased term, or that X is a shill for Y who supported murdering babies in the past, or whatever. You don't have to agree with the article's stance to know how to answer the questions, you just have to know what the article's stance is.
- cl0rkster 9y agoAccording to the AP stylebook, "pro-life" would need to be replaced with "anti-abortion" because that is more neutral and carries fewer weighted connotations with it. I would suspect a large population would disagree with the AP conclusion, but it goes to show how difficult it is to avoid bias even in a simple fact-based question.
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- MrTonyD 9y agoI've often thought that those who make decisions for society should be required to pass a test to show they understand all sides of an issue. It is absurd to me that politicians are currently allowed to make the wide variety of decisions that they make. I don't think anybody really wants to vote for them to do that. (There was an old episode of Star Trek that had officer candidates use the holodeck to be exposed to a wide variety of situations and outcomes. I would think that whatever we could do to emulate that should be a requirement for making associated decisions.)
- averagewall 9y agoThe danger there is that the people who write the test end up having some power. They can choose a biased set of questions or even demand wrong/biased answers. Being political issues, often nobody knows the right answers anyway. So we'd need elections to choose who writes the tests and then who gets to vote for them? The great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people. It's a way to thrash out difficult decisions where the people deciding are the same people who end up affected by them. There are gaps in this idea of course, like persecuting minorities and voters being more concerned about their tribal membership
- caseysoftware 9y agoYou're very correct. In the US, we've had variations of that in the US under the guise of a literacy test.[1] Promoting "understanding" sounds like a great idea until the test itself is made a weapon against groups that are considered "undesirable" by the majority of the populace. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
- warrenm 9y ago> great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people In the abstract, this is true. In the perception, it's always the leaders that screwed up - or whomever they can blame. In democracy, as with most politics, perception is reality
- warrenm 9y agoIf that actually worked, the noise to signal ratio might not be infinite
- kristopolous 9y agoI was under the impression that comments on news sites were mostly to divert the readership from directly contacting the author or the company through channels that are listened to; merely a solution to keep the wacko segment of the readership occupied and satiated. At least in practice, this is how it appears to function; they're almost exclusively 3rd party plugins and nobody that works for the news organizaion seems to ever engage with them.
- spoiledtechie 9y agoOn point. I would add that this is a false sense of the commentor getting their two cents in so they no longer care to participate any further.
- personlurking 9y agoOne might say the same for elections every 4 years.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoMy pet theory is that the purpose of the USA 2016 do was to keep a large disaffected segment inside the tent. (Inside pissing out instead of outside pissing in, as the phrase goes. Until they go away or whatever, that's another day's problem.)
- kristopolous 9y agoIt split the tent. A ten thousand year old idea. Now poor screwed over urban dwellers and poor screwed over rural dwellers are fiercely blaming each other for messing everything up. Setting up a cycle of blame among the powerless disenfranchised groups is so old and still works so well.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt works well but it does not always end well. Civil wars have been started in this way.
- mtl_usr 9y agoSimple fact trivia won't do anything to demonstrate a person has understood the article, merely that he read it. It's the fundamental difference between functional illiteracy and "plain" illiteracy. This difference shows up all the time when analyzing data because some jurisdiction will only report the illiteracy number while some other will include the functional illiteracy as well.
- gleenn 9y agoI think you're ignoring that many people might not even read the article at all. Proving comprehension sounds incredibly hard; proving someone has at least tried would probably be a huge step in the right direction compared to the mayhem which is most comments online.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago> I think you're ignoring that many people might not even read the article at al I rarely read the articles posted on HN. The discussion is frequently much more interesting and often more enlightening. I generally only read the article if the filter of other people's comments suggests that it would be worth my time. I think I am probably not alone in this.
- warrenm 9y agoProving real comprehension would be (is?) hard/impossible in a constrained format such as this would have to be (pointy-clicky multiple choice). Proving someone "tried* is also [nearly] impossible here: just take standard test-taking strategies for standardized tests of reading comprehension, and apply them to this context (because that's all this is, but not even done by people whose entire job is to make "good" tests)
- warrenm 9y agoIt's like learning how to answer standardized tests: the "reading comprehension" questions are usually among the worst offenders. The questions are asked in the order they appear in the passage (eg, the third question will not cover something prior to the first question, chronologically in the passage, unless it is an over-arching question). You can dramatically increase your "reading comprehension" scores by knowing things like this: and the same would be true of "questions about about the article" before commenting - just know to skim for the handful of pertinent keywords, answer, and move on. I have fantastic reading comprehension from a standardized test point of view - I was always able to finish the section well before the time limit. But I also knew I didn't have to actually follow the directions - I didn't need to read the passage, I needed to find the answers: a very different, and far simpler, task. That's what this would become.
- Myrmornis 9y agoGreat, now how about extending this to voting rights?
- hashmal 9y agosomeone will quickly sneak in stuff like "is global warming real?" in the questions.
- Myrmornis 9y agoTrue, but maybe there could be some sort of democratic consensus system to establish the questions (one which by design avoids the superficial circularity).
- GoToRO 9y agoAsk questions that a 5th grader could answer. The level does not hove too be that high for it to be effective. Or... just ask science questions: "Is planet Earth flat?".
- ivanbakel 9y agoThat just tests the ability to stick to consensus - what happens when you get the equivalent of "does the Sun orbit the Earth" in a society before Copernicus and Galileo? You also move away entirely from the original point of the questions - someone with scientific knowledge doesn't necessarily know anything about society and politics. They're separate worlds.
- GoToRO 9y agoIn a society before Copernicus and Galileo that question would have been cutting edge science. So just stick to well understood things.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoEven that is apparently fraught because a few people (though no sects I'm aware of) profess belief in a flat Earth for religious reasons. For example, Biblical literalists interpreting Job 38 as implying a flat Earth ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? [...] Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof").
- libeclipse 9y ago> Google announced last week, for instance, that it had built an artificially intelligent tool that can read through comments and identify whether or not they are "toxic". Censorship at its finest.
- KekDemaga 9y ago"Censorship + Math != Censorship" evidently.
- kurthr 9y agoWe seem to have a choice between that and S#1T Posting and Spamming. Now, I suppose Poe's law could limit some sarcasm, but I'm not sure that would be a real loss either.
- anthonybullard 9y agoI'm Interested in knowing if you see submission guidelines/terms of conditions to be censorious as well then. The sensible approach when dealing with speech protections is that censorship can only come from the State since its muffling of speech is universal throughout a society and is backed by an implicit threat of violence. There is no inherent right to a soapbox upon which to stand on. A private party being in a position where they must broadcast any speech from any source is actually in this arrangement an abridgement of their own speech. Now that being said, there is a reasonable point of view that says while it should not be legally mandated, private party filtering and editing of content acquired from third parties through some sort of public accommodation _seems_ dishonest. But the truth is, publications writ large exist to transmit a particular experience, whether that be cultural, ideological, or technical(in the sense of the mechanics of conversation a la HN). While this would not be ideal if taken to a no-exceptions type extreme, as long as State censorship is fought off and defended successfully, there types speech that gets muffled through one publication can and will find a light through another.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mtl_usr 9y ago
- Overtonwindow 9y agoThis reminds me of a literary test to vote. In this case it's: "Here's our news story. Answer some questions to be sure you understand OUR point of view, the words and ideas WE want you to acquiesce, in order to express your so-called opinion." Ungood.
- anotheryou 9y agoReally depends on the wording. "What does this remind him of? - a literary test to vote" vs "This is like a ...? - literary test to vote"
- pmarreck 9y agoWould you really want illiterate voters, though?
- ice109 9y agoare you like totally ignorant of how literary tests (and poll taxes) were used to disenfranchise minorities
- pmarreck 9y agoif all the literate people were male and all the illiterate people were female, requiring literacy would not necessarily be sexism. you're conflating 2 different things. as did they. perhaps it did exclude more recently-emancipated black people. oh well. requiring literacy for something as important as an election is not obstructionist, IMHO The fee you mentioned, however, is, IMHO. if I had to hire a scientist for a job and the only applicants that were qualified enough were white males, hiring a white male would not make me a racist sexist. i look forward to the day when people just stop trying to correlate everything both positive and negative to race, gender, age, and any other attribute other than "are you a good person" and "can you do this job well"
- warrenm 9y agoIf it were universally applied, evaluated identically each time, and then used a clear pass/fail manner, you would be right. For example, the mathematical answer to "1 + 1 = ?" can be evaluated objectively. But those "literacy" weren't anything even close to similar.
- michaelfeathers 9y agoI wonder whether another way of approaching the problem would be to have to two commenting sections for a site. One would be moderated algorithmically and the other wouldn't. People could choose according to their tolerance.
- loomer 9y agoI think that would only hinder conversation. The original idea of questions also seems dumb to me, since it feels like even many good posters who actually read the article would be too lazy to answer the questions, and if there was another comment section which didn't require answering questions, they'd just post in there. It also seems like having two comment sections would divide the conversation.
- kurthr 9y agoI'm not sure it would be laziness. A good poster who bothers to understand the article and compose an interesting response probably isnt lazy.
- nthcolumn 9y agophil1edinburgh1 asks 'what does NKRbeta mean?' - not sure if he is being sarcastic or hasn't actually read the article :/
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoNext in line : voting at elections. My dream of having people answer 5 simple questions to be allowed to get a voting card would come true. Example of questions: name three neighbour countries, who is the current president, is France in Europe or Asia, what was the last world war,... I understand that this will unfairly remove people who are illiterate, or had a difficult childhood, or are simply dumb but they are expected to make a choice which will impact the whole country. If they do not know anything about this country and the world it is in then sorry, they are not in a poisition to choose.
- munchbunny 9y agoUnfortunately, in the US, there's a pretty ugly historical precedent for this practice, and it doesn't leave much faith in people's ability to actually write the questions fairly.
- jessaustin 9y agoEverywhere anything like this has been done, it has been a travesty. Elitists should have the courage of their convictions, like e.g. ancient Athens had. At least there's less bullshit that way.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoIs it being elitist to require someone to know wher your country is located? Or who your president is? It is not a shame to be illiterare or dumb, or mentally unfit. This does not mean that the future of a country should be put in these people hands. I will never be a pilot because of health issues. I do not see it as discrimination but just the pragmatic reality of this world.
- jessaustin 9y agoEveryone knows where my country is located and who "my" president is. (I didn't vote for him!) Which country's location and/or president concerns you? If you say "Slovenia" or "Bhutan", then yes it is elitist to think any voter should have to know that location or person.