9 ms·

Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major

Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story. Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for likes of course. Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.

deleted 9y ago
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dionidium 9y ago
I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.
- richforrester 9y ago
  That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I really just don't believe you can determine the truth content of an comment by how it is written, but maybe that's years of reading good sounding but factually inaccurate comments on HN and Reddit. There's an art to writing psuedo intellectual bullshit, and most people aren't capable of (or aren't as good as they believe they are) at judging complex issues outside of their domain. Would just as soon not give armchair phd a platform. There's some research (don't feel like pulling it up - bullshit?) that talks about how the decline of valuing expertise has had some negative social consequences, but that's probably obvious.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    I pretty much do the same with HN.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I think you two are thinking of different things, and missing an important point: Comments are only as good as the community that's writing them. YouTube comments are the kind of comments you don't want to read, HN comments are the kind you skip the article for. Whether comments are valuable very much depends on the kind of people you have writing them, and I believe it's worth trying to maintain a good commenting community.
    - richforrester 9y ago
      I kind of agree and disagree. Yes we might be thinking of two different things. But I think it's not about the URL, but about the content. There's plenty YouTube videos that are intelligent, with intelligent responses to it. But that was kind of my point; by looking at the way a response to a piece of content is written, you can judge its merit somewhat accurately. For example, on a video about the way the Suicide Squad movie was edited, you might see: - "BRILLIANT 100% agree!" - "While I think you're right, there might be a couple of things you missed out on [...]" - "FU M8 DA MOVIE WAS AWESUM!!!1@2" Each of these comments tells you something different. And yes, some say more about the audience than the content ;)
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Similar, I skim the article and read the comments. In some cases, I just read the comments. Though, I don't do this on any direct media sites, like online newspapers. At Slashdot, chances are that I haven't read the article. I go straight to the comments and read those. Curiously, I can't do that as often here on HN. Here, the quality of article is often higher and the comments are usually more on-topic and, often, more specialized. I do end up reading many more threads than I comment in. But, yes... I learn a lot more from the comments (frequently) than I ever do from the article. HN is particularly good at this, and it's one of the reasons I visit.
    - dionidium 9y ago
      We're not saying different things. As I said: I love the comments here (usually). I also learn a lot from them. I think "forums" like reddit and HN are fundamentally different from inline comments on news websites.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        Yes, I was agreeing with you and sharing my experience. That's why I said similar. Here, I am more inclined to read the article. HN people are just too smart for me to always be able to grasp it from comment context.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    I wonder if there is an algorithm to score comments vs the article so that you can warp the article toward something the commentator would approve. We have already seen examples where people run the same story on extreme left and extreme right web sites to get clicks and rage views and their toning, and changes are fairly algorithmic. That makes me wonder if you could build an echo chamber of one. So that what you read was always something you really agreed with, even if it wasn't written that way for anyone else. (same data and facts mind you, just slanting it toward the reader's preferences).
  - seanwilson 9y ago
    > That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. > Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. I'm similar. You could think of articles as one giant comment from a single person. I'd rather read comments from several people as it's much easier to spot bias and get a variety of viewpoints.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  I think reading the news without commentary is its own form of echo chamber. We will tend to pick a news source that slants to our liking and just experience that over and over again. Don't get me wrong, NYT is among the top newspapers I would want to use as a citation, but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism. So much so that after the election the NYT apologized for how it covered the election and rededicated itself to honest reporting. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-readers-from-the-publisher-and-executive-editor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade... > ...we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. I've taken a different approach, which I don't think is superior to yours, just more enjoyable for me... I intentionally watch openly biased news aggregators. For left wing commentary I will watch The Young Turks or Jimmy Dore. For right wing commentary I like Ben Shapiro. The truth usually lies somewhere in between.
  - dionidium 9y ago
    "but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism" Oh, I notice it. I think it's a fun game to root out the bias in the Times. It's really how the news is meant to be read (i.e. confrontationally).
Pxtl 9y ago
It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources. Then the hack: this is a newspaper. They have no reason to be fair. Give community moderators super-credibility. So they can upvote people and not just give their comment visibility, but by upvoting they incidentally give them credibility for future comments. And in turn, those commenters' upvotes are more powerful as well, thanks to the credibility lent by the community mods. It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- inetknght 9y ago
  What people want isn't necessarily what they need. When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that. So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.
  - laretluval 9y ago
    Do internet comment sections satisfy any need?
    - 52-6F-62 9y ago
      If they provide an avenue for topical and reasonable discourse, then yes. People (at least some people) tend toward the need for discourse to temper and test their ideas. I mean, you're commenting on HN.
      - brad0 9y ago
        What makes HN comments great that other comments systems don't have? It's the guidelines. By writing guidelines that promote useful discourse you allow everyone involved to learn more about their own biases and shortcomings. Every person that writes their opinion grows when reading the varied responses (as long as they're open to other people's perspectives).
outoftacos 9y ago
I mean that's sort of the NYT model in everything, so it's not surprising their comments are exclusionary and based around a heavily moderated clique of elite whites.
davesque 9y ago
It's funny that you mention that "Socrates" guy. I see him a lot. I also see a lady named "Chistine McMorrow." They're both frequently at the top of the readers' picks section. They must check the Times often for breaking stories.
- tmccrmck 9y ago
  Yeah he's everywhere. I remember that NYT did a featurette on their top commenters and he's actually Chelsea Handler's brother.
___bee___ 9y ago
There are other media organizations that decided to disable the comments' section. I remember reading something about it last week [1](https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on-aljazeera-com-a9ffbac61f10 https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on...). Instead of fighting Fake accounts, this company decided to allow comments only on social media platforms. Places where they cannot collect enough information to fight back "Fake commenters ". > We feel that rather than approaching the problem with a collection of algorithms and an army of moderators, our engineering and editorial resources are better utilised building new storytelling formats that resonate with our audience.
specialist 9y ago
I dimly recall one or two political blogs which grant daily rations. Something like 1 comment a day for noobs, more as you gain karma. I have no idea how well this worked.
dogruck 9y ago
I find that NYT comments accurately reflect the heavily liberal bias of NYT's reporting. Although I don't think that's wrong, I think there's room for constructive debate about the articles -- perhaps hosted on a different site.
- memeCrasher 9y ago
  It's not like it'd be difficult for NYT to have whitelisted commentator accounts run by NYT editors to game their own comment/vote system and drive a false consensus for readers. Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    The thing is that commenting on NYT is limited to paying subscribers so it's not like they need to defend from outside 'raids'. Then again, I would be shocked if PACs of all flavors didn't have pay groups of subscribers to crash the comments sections of the most prominent publications (NYT, WSJ, etc). Especially during the primaries last year. When you consider the amount of traffic they get, the top comment is valuable thought capital real estate during election season.
ridgeguy 9y ago
I agree with the shortcomings of NYT comments you note. But they're at least an order of magnitude better than those at WaPo because they have humans curating them. I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments. It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.
bpp 9y ago
I worked on the blog team for Barack Obama's '08 campaign. The comments section developed a culture of posting a link to their personal fundraising page as the top comment, and other commenters would then donate to it. Someone on the team got annoyed by this so for a while we would post the top comment before publishing such that they couldn't post their personal fundraising link. Then we ran some numbers and realized how much money it was costing the campaign (a lot). Moral of the story: comment sections are weird.
- brosirmandude 9y ago
  That's really interesting. Did you guys ever test adding a fundraising link in the top comment you post vs a users top comment?
loopdoend 9y ago
Your poem writer, Larry Eisenberg, is a national treasure: http://forward.com/culture/books/332712/how-a-96-year-old-limerick-master-became-a-new-york-times-top-commenter/ http://forward.com/culture/books/332712/how-a-96-year-old-li... I agree about Socrates. Overwrought.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dionidium 9y ago

I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.

richforrester 9y ago
That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I really just don't believe you can determine the truth content of an comment by how it is written, but maybe that's years of reading good sounding but factually inaccurate comments on HN and Reddit. There's an art to writing psuedo intellectual bullshit, and most people aren't capable of (or aren't as good as they believe they are) at judging complex issues outside of their domain. Would just as soon not give armchair phd a platform. There's some research (don't feel like pulling it up - bullshit?) that talks about how the decline of valuing expertise has had some negative social consequences, but that's probably obvious.
- sametmax 9y ago
  I pretty much do the same with HN.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I think you two are thinking of different things, and missing an important point: Comments are only as good as the community that's writing them. YouTube comments are the kind of comments you don't want to read, HN comments are the kind you skip the article for. Whether comments are valuable very much depends on the kind of people you have writing them, and I believe it's worth trying to maintain a good commenting community.
  - richforrester 9y ago
    I kind of agree and disagree. Yes we might be thinking of two different things. But I think it's not about the URL, but about the content. There's plenty YouTube videos that are intelligent, with intelligent responses to it. But that was kind of my point; by looking at the way a response to a piece of content is written, you can judge its merit somewhat accurately. For example, on a video about the way the Suicide Squad movie was edited, you might see: - "BRILLIANT 100% agree!" - "While I think you're right, there might be a couple of things you missed out on [...]" - "FU M8 DA MOVIE WAS AWESUM!!!1@2" Each of these comments tells you something different. And yes, some say more about the audience than the content ;)
- KGIII 9y ago
  Similar, I skim the article and read the comments. In some cases, I just read the comments. Though, I don't do this on any direct media sites, like online newspapers. At Slashdot, chances are that I haven't read the article. I go straight to the comments and read those. Curiously, I can't do that as often here on HN. Here, the quality of article is often higher and the comments are usually more on-topic and, often, more specialized. I do end up reading many more threads than I comment in. But, yes... I learn a lot more from the comments (frequently) than I ever do from the article. HN is particularly good at this, and it's one of the reasons I visit.
  - dionidium 9y ago
    We're not saying different things. As I said: I love the comments here (usually). I also learn a lot from them. I think "forums" like reddit and HN are fundamentally different from inline comments on news websites.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Yes, I was agreeing with you and sharing my experience. That's why I said similar. Here, I am more inclined to read the article. HN people are just too smart for me to always be able to grasp it from comment context.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I wonder if there is an algorithm to score comments vs the article so that you can warp the article toward something the commentator would approve. We have already seen examples where people run the same story on extreme left and extreme right web sites to get clicks and rage views and their toning, and changes are fairly algorithmic. That makes me wonder if you could build an echo chamber of one. So that what you read was always something you really agreed with, even if it wasn't written that way for anyone else. (same data and facts mind you, just slanting it toward the reader's preferences).
- seanwilson 9y ago
  > That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. > Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. I'm similar. You could think of articles as one giant comment from a single person. I'd rather read comments from several people as it's much easier to spot bias and get a variety of viewpoints.
Consultant32452 9y ago
I think reading the news without commentary is its own form of echo chamber. We will tend to pick a news source that slants to our liking and just experience that over and over again. Don't get me wrong, NYT is among the top newspapers I would want to use as a citation, but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism. So much so that after the election the NYT apologized for how it covered the election and rededicated itself to honest reporting. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-readers-from-the-publisher-and-executive-editor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade... > ...we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. I've taken a different approach, which I don't think is superior to yours, just more enjoyable for me... I intentionally watch openly biased news aggregators. For left wing commentary I will watch The Young Turks or Jimmy Dore. For right wing commentary I like Ben Shapiro. The truth usually lies somewhere in between.
- dionidium 9y ago
  "but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism" Oh, I notice it. I think it's a fun game to root out the bias in the Times. It's really how the news is meant to be read (i.e. confrontationally).

Pxtl 9y ago

It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources. Then the hack: this is a newspaper. They have no reason to be fair. Give community moderators super-credibility. So they can upvote people and not just give their comment visibility, but by upvoting they incidentally give them credibility for future comments. And in turn, those commenters' upvotes are more powerful as well, thanks to the credibility lent by the community mods. It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
inetknght 9y ago
What people want isn't necessarily what they need. When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that. So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.
- laretluval 9y ago
  Do internet comment sections satisfy any need?
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    If they provide an avenue for topical and reasonable discourse, then yes. People (at least some people) tend toward the need for discourse to temper and test their ideas. I mean, you're commenting on HN.
    - brad0 9y ago
      What makes HN comments great that other comments systems don't have? It's the guidelines. By writing guidelines that promote useful discourse you allow everyone involved to learn more about their own biases and shortcomings. Every person that writes their opinion grows when reading the varied responses (as long as they're open to other people's perspectives).

outoftacos 9y ago

I mean that's sort of the NYT model in everything, so it's not surprising their comments are exclusionary and based around a heavily moderated clique of elite whites.

davesque 9y ago

It's funny that you mention that "Socrates" guy. I see him a lot. I also see a lady named "Chistine McMorrow." They're both frequently at the top of the readers' picks section. They must check the Times often for breaking stories.

tmccrmck 9y ago
Yeah he's everywhere. I remember that NYT did a featurette on their top commenters and he's actually Chelsea Handler's brother.

___bee___ 9y ago

There are other media organizations that decided to disable the comments' section. I remember reading something about it last week [1](https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on-aljazeera-com-a9ffbac61f10 https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on...). Instead of fighting Fake accounts, this company decided to allow comments only on social media platforms. Places where they cannot collect enough information to fight back "Fake commenters ". > We feel that rather than approaching the problem with a collection of algorithms and an army of moderators, our engineering and editorial resources are better utilised building new storytelling formats that resonate with our audience.

specialist 9y ago

I dimly recall one or two political blogs which grant daily rations. Something like 1 comment a day for noobs, more as you gain karma. I have no idea how well this worked.

dogruck 9y ago

I find that NYT comments accurately reflect the heavily liberal bias of NYT's reporting. Although I don't think that's wrong, I think there's room for constructive debate about the articles -- perhaps hosted on a different site.

memeCrasher 9y ago
It's not like it'd be difficult for NYT to have whitelisted commentator accounts run by NYT editors to game their own comment/vote system and drive a false consensus for readers. Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  The thing is that commenting on NYT is limited to paying subscribers so it's not like they need to defend from outside 'raids'. Then again, I would be shocked if PACs of all flavors didn't have pay groups of subscribers to crash the comments sections of the most prominent publications (NYT, WSJ, etc). Especially during the primaries last year. When you consider the amount of traffic they get, the top comment is valuable thought capital real estate during election season.

ridgeguy 9y ago

I agree with the shortcomings of NYT comments you note. But they're at least an order of magnitude better than those at WaPo because they have humans curating them. I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments. It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.

bpp 9y ago

I worked on the blog team for Barack Obama's '08 campaign. The comments section developed a culture of posting a link to their personal fundraising page as the top comment, and other commenters would then donate to it. Someone on the team got annoyed by this so for a while we would post the top comment before publishing such that they couldn't post their personal fundraising link. Then we ran some numbers and realized how much money it was costing the campaign (a lot). Moral of the story: comment sections are weird.

brosirmandude 9y ago
That's really interesting. Did you guys ever test adding a fundraising link in the top comment you post vs a users top comment?

loopdoend 9y ago

Your poem writer, Larry Eisenberg, is a national treasure: http://forward.com/culture/books/332712/how-a-96-year-old-limerick-master-became-a-new-york-times-top-commenter/ http://forward.com/culture/books/332712/how-a-96-year-old-li... I agree about Socrates. Overwrought.