5 ms·

That actually makes me sad: good automoderation tools are decades (plural, yes) old and yet most website haven't caught on the fact that you need some sort of r

by Iv 6y ago

That actually makes me sad: good automoderation tools are decades (plural, yes) old and yet most website haven't caught on the fact that you need some sort of ranking to filter out spam or bots. Thing is, newspapers as their business model currently is, have zero incentives in having quality comments. Negative incentives actually. Journalism is 20% facts reporting, 80% comments and that's generous: comments are the cheapest to write, some news website/papers are closer to 99% comments. If you have quality comments by your readers, what are you selling then? We need to move to a business model where facts reporting and facts checking (careful: talking about facts checking, not analysis checking) are the primary services that journalists would get paid for. Comments, even quality comments can be done through a good enough moderation system and a big enough community.

euske 6y ago
This makes me wonder: how can forum sites (like HN or Reddit) can actually make a money. I guess that HN isn't trying to, but I don't know its balance sheet. Likewise, I believe that Reddit is selling ads and app subscriptions. How do they even stay in business? And what are the fundamental difference from their business model and that of news sites?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Hacker News sells inline advertising. Job posting adverts crop up pretty much daily on here which are adverts. It's a recruiting tool. As for expenses, HN seems like a lean site and likely doesn't require a ton of resources. I think there is only 1 full time moderator, dang. I have no idea whether YC makes money on HN or not, but I'd be surprised if it didn't at least break even.
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    Also the free advertising for the brand of Y-combinator. With the reach HN has these days having your name out there right in the domain means that the on balance positive reputation of HN rubs off on your enterprise. It's basically a huge 'sponsored by' byline. This doesn't necessarily translate into a net positive for a company, but in this case I am willing to bet it does. It's honestly a fairly transparent transaction, and much preferable to the opaque world of on-line targetted advertising. I like how my ad-blocker just sits here twiddling its thumbs.
- LordDragonfang 6y ago
  Reddit also sells super-upvotes (called "awards") that you can buy individually or as a component of a premium (ad-free) subscription. Not sure how much revenue that produces compared to ads, but it's definitely a component.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Forums don't require much resources from a technical point of view - most of it would be for moderation, but even then, there are usually enough passionate community members out there to do it voluntarily for free. You can make enough money to sustain the thing with a one-time joining fee or unobtrusive, directly-negotiated advertising. You just can't make unsustainable VC-level money.
ogre_codes 6y ago
There is crap in every comments feed everywhere. There is crap on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube. If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.
- strken 6y ago
  In this case, "hard" doesn't mean it's an unsolved problem with a lot of complicated variables, it means "expensive". If you charged your commenters $1 for 10 posts you'd be able to throw batches of comments into MTurk and clean out most of the garbage.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    If people have to pay you'd have much less bad content to begin with - only the very dedicated trolls would actually put real money on the line to get their shit posted. The problem is that we are both approaching this as a problem that needs to be solved, while in reality it only needs to appear like one. Social media companies make their revenue out of "engagement", and posts breaking the rules often generate the most of it, so properly moderating them would actually hurt their bottom line by more than just the cost of said moderation. These companies are incentivized to leave as much "bad" content up as they can (as it generates engagement) while making it look like they are taking action as to not risk bad PR or legal consequences. Same goes for deterring or punishing offenders - long-term bans are trivial to implement and would significantly deter breaking the rules, but would also decrease "engagement".
    - repartix 6y ago
      If these companies set the wrong metric of success (in other words, if there can be better incentives) and these companies don't follow the better incentives, then better companies will arise.
yarcob 6y ago
The problem is not spam or bots, the problem is that most commenters just post worthless shit. I mean, even on HN, which I consider above average, you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts. 99% of comments are from highly opiniated people with little subject matter experience and no concern for subtlety. It's just not a very good value proposition. I have a newspaper subscription and like reading editorials, because they often have interesting people talk about relevant topics. Usually the "professional" comments are a lot less divisive, and a lot more fact based than the simplistic bullshit that tends to be upvoted in comment sections. I still like reading user comments, but I don't think they are a replacement for good journalism or professional writers.
- nosianu 6y ago
  I believe a huge problem of sites like reddit or HN is that from my, a comment writers PoV, it is just not worth it to spend much time on a comment. Even when I feel like writing one, I still only spend a fraction of effort. The big problem: All comments have a half-life of half a day at most, and even during that short time they are buried in a mountain of other comments. If a story is popular (many potential readers that I could reach) there will also be hundreds of comments, mostly low quality, that make finding good ones hard. If there only a few comments so a good one will stand out more there won't be many readers. Writing a blog post has a much higher chance to be found over a larger period of time. Probably, depending on the blog. A choice between getting attention (by borrowing the fame of reddit or HN to draw in readers) for a very short period of time, or be easier to find over longer periods but then it depends on the fame of your own blog. So it is not worth spending a lot of time and effort trying my best because I only reach a handful of people in the first place, but even if it's hundreds, they are all just story- and comment browsing randomly for their daily does of entertainment. That means whatever I write will be forgotten pretty quickly because in the end it's not all that important. Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there. What I mean by that is that only when you actually end up using what you read in a practical way does it really matter and you remember. Everything else, even if it's really great wisdom, if you have no practical application for it in our own life your brain does not put any priority on retaining the content. Even apart from comments, I for example took loads of courses (edX, Coursera) outside my own field, at the time I spent a lot of effort and even became a community TA in some of those courses (chemistry, statistics, biology). However, I forgot soooo much by now, because in the end none of it has any practical implications for me. With some completely random (all kinds of topics!) comments, even when they are good, it's much worse. Therefore I don't expect such comment sites to ever rise above what we have now. It just does not really matter for either readers or writers. The quality will always just be "good enough" (on the low side). PS: Oh and by the way, in my long reddit and HN experience, what gives the most "Likes" rarely is the quality technical stuff - but rare personal anecdotes.
Nextgrid 6y ago
This isn't limited to journalism. Advertising-based business models are inherently toxic and completely reverse the incentives between the website and their users. In a typical paid product, the provider provides a service to the users who are paying the provider for said service. In this case, the provider is incentivized to deliver the best version of that service so that users keep paying, whether it's great journalism with added value (a high-quality comments section would be a plus here) or software. With advertising, this changes completely. Broadly speaking, the profits negatively correlate with how much value is delivered to the user. There is no incentive great journalism and moderate the comments section while you can churn out inflammatory clickbait and leave comments unmoderated - the latter will actually net you more profit because outraged people barking at each other in the comments is a great source of "engagement" which is what advertising-based business models profit from.

by Iv 6y ago

euske 6y ago

This makes me wonder: how can forum sites (like HN or Reddit) can actually make a money. I guess that HN isn't trying to, but I don't know its balance sheet. Likewise, I believe that Reddit is selling ads and app subscriptions. How do they even stay in business? And what are the fundamental difference from their business model and that of news sites?

ogre_codes 6y ago
Hacker News sells inline advertising. Job posting adverts crop up pretty much daily on here which are adverts. It's a recruiting tool. As for expenses, HN seems like a lean site and likely doesn't require a ton of resources. I think there is only 1 full time moderator, dang. I have no idea whether YC makes money on HN or not, but I'd be surprised if it didn't at least break even.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Also the free advertising for the brand of Y-combinator. With the reach HN has these days having your name out there right in the domain means that the on balance positive reputation of HN rubs off on your enterprise. It's basically a huge 'sponsored by' byline. This doesn't necessarily translate into a net positive for a company, but in this case I am willing to bet it does. It's honestly a fairly transparent transaction, and much preferable to the opaque world of on-line targetted advertising. I like how my ad-blocker just sits here twiddling its thumbs.
LordDragonfang 6y ago
Reddit also sells super-upvotes (called "awards") that you can buy individually or as a component of a premium (ad-free) subscription. Not sure how much revenue that produces compared to ads, but it's definitely a component.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Forums don't require much resources from a technical point of view - most of it would be for moderation, but even then, there are usually enough passionate community members out there to do it voluntarily for free. You can make enough money to sustain the thing with a one-time joining fee or unobtrusive, directly-negotiated advertising. You just can't make unsustainable VC-level money.

ogre_codes 6y ago

There is crap in every comments feed everywhere. There is crap on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube. If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.

strken 6y ago
In this case, "hard" doesn't mean it's an unsolved problem with a lot of complicated variables, it means "expensive". If you charged your commenters $1 for 10 posts you'd be able to throw batches of comments into MTurk and clean out most of the garbage.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  If people have to pay you'd have much less bad content to begin with - only the very dedicated trolls would actually put real money on the line to get their shit posted. The problem is that we are both approaching this as a problem that needs to be solved, while in reality it only needs to appear like one. Social media companies make their revenue out of "engagement", and posts breaking the rules often generate the most of it, so properly moderating them would actually hurt their bottom line by more than just the cost of said moderation. These companies are incentivized to leave as much "bad" content up as they can (as it generates engagement) while making it look like they are taking action as to not risk bad PR or legal consequences. Same goes for deterring or punishing offenders - long-term bans are trivial to implement and would significantly deter breaking the rules, but would also decrease "engagement".
  - repartix 6y ago
    If these companies set the wrong metric of success (in other words, if there can be better incentives) and these companies don't follow the better incentives, then better companies will arise.

yarcob 6y ago

The problem is not spam or bots, the problem is that most commenters just post worthless shit. I mean, even on HN, which I consider above average, you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts. 99% of comments are from highly opiniated people with little subject matter experience and no concern for subtlety. It's just not a very good value proposition. I have a newspaper subscription and like reading editorials, because they often have interesting people talk about relevant topics. Usually the "professional" comments are a lot less divisive, and a lot more fact based than the simplistic bullshit that tends to be upvoted in comment sections. I still like reading user comments, but I don't think they are a replacement for good journalism or professional writers.

nosianu 6y ago
I believe a huge problem of sites like reddit or HN is that from my, a comment writers PoV, it is just not worth it to spend much time on a comment. Even when I feel like writing one, I still only spend a fraction of effort. The big problem: All comments have a half-life of half a day at most, and even during that short time they are buried in a mountain of other comments. If a story is popular (many potential readers that I could reach) there will also be hundreds of comments, mostly low quality, that make finding good ones hard. If there only a few comments so a good one will stand out more there won't be many readers. Writing a blog post has a much higher chance to be found over a larger period of time. Probably, depending on the blog. A choice between getting attention (by borrowing the fame of reddit or HN to draw in readers) for a very short period of time, or be easier to find over longer periods but then it depends on the fame of your own blog. So it is not worth spending a lot of time and effort trying my best because I only reach a handful of people in the first place, but even if it's hundreds, they are all just story- and comment browsing randomly for their daily does of entertainment. That means whatever I write will be forgotten pretty quickly because in the end it's not all that important. Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there. What I mean by that is that only when you actually end up using what you read in a practical way does it really matter and you remember. Everything else, even if it's really great wisdom, if you have no practical application for it in our own life your brain does not put any priority on retaining the content. Even apart from comments, I for example took loads of courses (edX, Coursera) outside my own field, at the time I spent a lot of effort and even became a community TA in some of those courses (chemistry, statistics, biology). However, I forgot soooo much by now, because in the end none of it has any practical implications for me. With some completely random (all kinds of topics!) comments, even when they are good, it's much worse. Therefore I don't expect such comment sites to ever rise above what we have now. It just does not really matter for either readers or writers. The quality will always just be "good enough" (on the low side). PS: Oh and by the way, in my long reddit and HN experience, what gives the most "Likes" rarely is the quality technical stuff - but rare personal anecdotes.

Nextgrid 6y ago

This isn't limited to journalism. Advertising-based business models are inherently toxic and completely reverse the incentives between the website and their users. In a typical paid product, the provider provides a service to the users who are paying the provider for said service. In this case, the provider is incentivized to deliver the best version of that service so that users keep paying, whether it's great journalism with added value (a high-quality comments section would be a plus here) or software. With advertising, this changes completely. Broadly speaking, the profits negatively correlate with how much value is delivered to the user. There is no incentive great journalism and moderate the comments section while you can churn out inflammatory clickbait and leave comments unmoderated - the latter will actually net you more profit because outraged people barking at each other in the comments is a great source of "engagement" which is what advertising-based business models profit from.