Hacker News Reader

Comment by erdojo | Hacker News Reader

Mistake #1: thinking reporters should be moderating comments (see quote below). Mistake #2: Sending their readers elsewhere on the web to comment on stories. Media outlets are looking for a revenue stream/value-added features. Web companies are all about engagement. What an opportunity they are missing! Why? Because they are scared of a little honest feedback?

User-generated commentary can be done right. it can be done in a way that minimizes trolls.

"I think that our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more reporting than attempting to police a comments section in the hopes of marginally increasing the number of useful comments."

View on HN

Part of the problem is that many people don't have (or want) any reputation on most sites they might comment on and creating accounts is generally trivial.

I tend to worry, though, that what people label as trolling ranges from the idiots who spam bigoted nonsense to anyone who doesn't believe what the moderator does. I think it's better to moderate only incivility, bigotry and the like, as bans on "trolling" appear to have morphed into bans on dissent at some point, possibly due to some corollary of Poe's Law, even though what used to be labelled as trolling is still just as present and obnoxious.

I say that as someone who moderated quite a lot of different forums and who has banned all manner of spammers, flamers, etc., but I'd never ban someone for expressing, in a civil manner, why they did not agree with me and I've been left feeling in the minority in that regard.

Since bigotry lately means "anything the person that call the other bigot don't likes" it is still quite broad.

A direct insult is easier to enforce.

The reason trolling succeeds is that it is extremely easy to induce powerful cognitive dissonance into people with strongly held unprovable beliefs. (Human life has value, god exist, humans are equal and the likes) And the only answer is aggression. The right are as easy pray as the left - mostly because there are large logical holes in any ideology.

That is because we use some axioms when we build our social order - but any attack on the axioms leave us unsecure and that the virtual tribe is under attack.

The more a person has allowed himself to degrade to a single identity - the powerful the potential blow is.

Probably one of the best (unintentional) trolls I have done is reducing old communist to tears by stating the rumors that Che was betrayed by Fidel with Raul as the organizer of said betrayal.

It's also sad to see how people on either side of the debate on basically any issue what so ever are becoming more and more intrenched in their ideologies. It used to be that people were right wing or left wing. Now you have ideologies about everything, a cell phone you use, a car you drive, the type of food you eat or don't eat.

With grater availability of free expression that can reach many people, the arguments that used to be civil and intelligent quickly devolve nowadays into shouting matches, where the messages shouted are the most extreme, and often the most idiotic, version of any given side's message.

It's true on any board nowadays, even something like HN. It's very sad to see well meaning and intelligent people devolve to this, especially considering how ineffectual the actual messages people are shouting are.

I generally try to form my own opinion about things. Which basically means that my views are generally hated by both sides in this increasingly polarized society. To the left I am a bigot and to the right I am a morally deprived tree hugging liberal.

Not sure if comments are to blame exclusively though. Perhaps another lesson to take out if it would be the quote from one of the cinematic masterpiece of this century, Harold and Kumar: "There is no reason to get riled up every time a bunch of idiots give you a hard time. In the end the universe tends to unfold as it should."

I go by the 'hate' metric. The more someone is motivated by hate, the less I tend to agree with them.

I'm sure someone might say, "what if I really hate Nazis?" in reply to that, but then I'd have to point out that the Nazis hated others to the point of mass-murder, which is a lot more than they're hated and say that I balance things out that way.

In other words, some hate is just blowback and how willing you are to harm others for disagreeing with you is something to take into account when figuring out what people to socialize with.

Well if someone says that he really hates Nazis and is younger than 60 years, he is probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer... which is a huge red flag. Same with loving them - both require some form of temporal closeness.

Edit: Hating or Loving the Nazi ideology is another beer - ideas are immortal.

I have a friend who admitted to me he'd made up a right-wing persona to troll people on the Guardian comment section.

He found it funny how irate people would become with his extreme views.

I convinced him to knock it on the head when I found out he was posting from work, and warned him his work will be recording that it was him, but it's a good example of how pointless anonymous comments can be.

Boredom is a very powerful thing. If someone has time on their hands they can wreak a lot of misery through anonymous comments.

So would you have a problem with the exact same comments he was leaving, being left by someone who genuinely held those views? He's essentially just playing devil's advocate which can play an important role in discussion. The number of people with enough time on their hands to adopt a fake persona will be trivially small compared to those who are treating the service 'seriously' or those who are abusing it using far easier methods.

Concern trolls are civil and can do very great harm to a community.

What is concern trolling exactly? Trying to change a community more to your liking because you dislike its rules and want your rules to reign supreme, by expressing concern about the ways of the community.

Concern trolling uses gentle methods to create havoc and discord.

Those methods usually involve "asking questions" about meta stuff. Some forums exist in uneasy balance between a group who'd ban a lot more people and another group who'd ban many fewer people. A skilful concern troll destroys that balance and has those two groups arguing.

Any community that cannot survive being questioned is automatically suspect to me. I have trouble understanding why responding to questions with censorship could ever be appropriate.

If you're weary of answering the same questions over and over, you can make a FAQ. I've made plenty of those myself. But if your community has questions that have to remain unasked that you're hiding from, I have to believe that's a problem with your group, not with the questioner.

So I have to disagree: I would prefer to be up front and answer questions, rather than hide from them by banning people.

I agree - so many people have the following reaction to being asked questions: either clam up, or insult you and call you a name for "not getting" the point they are making. It's always suspect to me when someone cares enough about something to comment or post about it, but then doesn't want to answer questions about it.

That's not what concern trolling is.

I am having a hard time reconciling that with your comment downthread about banning people and the samples one might find - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll

---

the term "concern troll" focuses not on what the person is actually saying, but on some alleged agenda. Thus, if misused, it is the perfect refuge for someone who has no counter to the actual argument: simply ignore the points made, allege some other position, and then accuse the other person of lying if they deny that that is what they're really saying. It's a combination of straw man and argumentum ad hominem: make up something to attack, and ignore their actual points on the basis that since the points were made by someone acting in bad faith, they need not be addressed.

---

So no, I wouldn't ban them. I might disagree with some burdensome "reform" on the basis of it being burdensome or of questionable value, but I would not hesitate to answer those concerns with argument rather than by questioning the motives of anyone who might question me.

If the question comes up too often, it's a good candidate for a FAQ, not a ban.

> I think it's better to moderate only incivility, bigotry and the like, as bans on "trolling" appear to have morphed into bans on dissent at some point

This is a built-in problem (the built-in problem?) with censorship. There can not be community oversight of the censor's work because the censor's work is to hide things from the community. The result is that the censor is free to extend its power at will.

Which is why I like HNs approach, showdead - off by default

So engagement is important, but not engagement with the author of the article (the person who, y'know, might actually be able to answer the questions people pose in the comments section)? And honest feedback – you mean like the honest feedback you see at the bottom of YouTube videos?

Perhaps you would be kind enough to share with us, the way to do user-generated commentary right? A few examples, or just a single, would go a long way.

See the url in your address bar, and then look at the comments below.

Reddit used to be amazing. Before that slashdot. But both have become meme generators and in jokes. I guess if this site attracts more people then it too will fall to crappy comments and poor quality stuff voted to the front page.

Then maybe the trick to get user-generated commentary right is to avoid attracting a large audience of meme generators and buffoons?

It's a hard trick to pull off.

Slashdot didn't seem to be run by morons, the stories were filtered by editors the user moderation was complex and nuanced yet it still succumbed to the lowest common denominator.

Yes, that's one possible natural progression of a site that becomes popular; although in the meantime, Slashdot gave us a decade or more of valid insights.

Maybe the fate of all online communities is to die of popularity, or die by its users abandoning the site and it devolving into a clique of a few unconditional regulars; the key is to make good use of them while they last.

I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for about 15 years and I haven't noticed any obvious change in the quality of discussions in that time. You say "it succumbed to the LCD" but that's pretty subjective. My own experience suggests it's pretty similar to how it always was.

The biggest drops in Slashdot quality have been due to botched rollouts of badly implemented features not changes in the commenters.

Reddit is still pretty amazing if you visit the right sub-reddits. Most of the default subs are pretty bad though.

Reddit can still be amazing, just stay away from the default subreddits. The more mainstream a subreddit is, the worst it gets over time. Some of them refuse to be set as a default for that very reason.

Although, they have started down the path of censoring stuff they don't like and promoting stuff they do like, so it'll likely start withering away as people start finding alternatives.

How is HN any different than any other places? What's "right" about it?

It's just the general audience here is different but the technical details about commenting are exactly the same. You bring the mainstream audience here and you will end up with Reddit.

Attracting the right audience is a big part of making a good comment system...

Technical solutions are not enough by themselves to solve social problems. However, the threaded system, user moderation, and aggressive reputation enforcement are useful tools for keeping a healthy environment with a controlled volume of regular readers.

I'm not saying that this site could survive going mainstream - but right now it's an example of working user-generated commentary.

Indeed.

But the thing is, of course, that you are framing your answer to not include the original case. In my book that is just a non-answer.

You even started out with "a funny" saying "look at this site you're reading". You didn't care if it fitted the case, you just wanted to say something clever. Very Reddit-like (and I do like Reddit).

But in what we could call an open environment where people do not care about their reputation - such as Vice - what can you do?

> You are framing your answer to not include the original case

That's your interpretation. I interpreted the original claim by erdojo that "User-generated commentary can be done right" as a general assertion that there are ways to achieve meaningful conversation, just like the one we're having now.

> In what we could call an open environment where people do not care about their reputation - such as Vice - what can you do?

Now you are framing the answer. If you want to know how to build a good comment system, my answer is "don't create an open environment where people do not care about their reputation".

If you find this to be a non-answer, maybe it's because I didn't reply to what you thought was the question - but that question had not been made explicit, so there was leeway in how to address it.

It's so very different. Most comment sections don't have peer-moderation. Those that do (e.g. the Guardian) tend to not really penalise comments - in fact, the Guardian doesn't even have a 'downvote' concept. Even genuine rivals to HN (reddit, slashdot) tend to be much less strict on quality of comments. HN will punish you if you write too many comments that don't get strongly upvoted, and it's that kind of approach that helps to guarantee productive commentary.

Still, unless it's political.

Then half the "side" is upvoting, and the others are downvoting. Pick a topic like Taxes or regulation, and watch from the woodwork.

>It's just the general audience here is different

It's not even the general audience. It's the subject matter, which is carefully selected.

HN is the best place on the internet for discussing a specific kind of subject, mainy technical matters, programming and the like. But post anything half-way political, and the comments look no better or more informed than anywhere else on the web. Which is why the moderation doesn't allow it.

"Resources" means money, not reporters. Every professional community manager that Vice does not have to pay, is a new reporter that they can hire. And the question is, what brings people to Vice, the content or the comments? The answer is clearly the content. So that is where the resources should be deployed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com