A Brief History of the End of the Comments
wired.com
wired.com
I've always found that the commenters are the core of the community and they will come back time and time again to discuss the issues and add extra context and meaning. They give sites life. Life is messy, but we deal with it. These sites seem to think they can offload the work to Facebook, but all they are doing is losing their community, the people, and the spark. They should know that Facebook doesn't care about their community -- it only cares about Facebook, and will screw them as soon as it can.
By 2014, there were thousands of high schoolers in Asia being paid tiny amounts of money to sit in Internet cafes and create accounts and post spam comments as fast as they could. The only solution was constant, manual moderation, which is very expensive.
And for what? When we went back and reviewed our recent comments data, we found that commenters were no more likely to return to the site than anyone else. Engagement metrics like time on site and pages per view were not significantly better for commenters. Commenters talked to each below stories, but persistent connections were rare; mostly it was a one-time conversation between strangers. Essentially, it seemed like the vast majority of comments were just people blowing off steam and then leaving.
This coincided with a shift in traffic sources. In 2007 it was largely search engines, other content site referrals, and email newsletters. By 2014 the clear leader was Facebook, with Twitter in the top 5 too.
To me it was clear what happened: people now establish one or more "home bases" on community-first sites like social media or aggregators like HN. From there, they jump out to read articles that other members of the community posted. This was the reverse of 2007 and earlier.
The challenge therefore today is: how does a site hold onto that social media "snack" traffic. One thing that doesn't work: community features. There's already plenty of community on Facebook (and Twitter, and HN, and Reddit, etc.), so that's not a compelling reason for a visitor to stay.
In those cases the volume was rather low and expats were just glad to have a forum so they were more forgiving. It wasn't as if they had an alternative source for copy-pasta news translated to English. So they were a more or less captive audience, regardless.
At a site like CNN, etc. The volume is too large and the kind of moderation people would put up with would be different. So their decision is different.
[edit] you'd need more than one person going thru the firehose at CNN and you'd have a backlash if the pruning displease any of the constituents.
So maybe they could NOT moderate there? How about totally free speech? (which shouldn't need a qualifier such as "totally" in the first place)
People enjoy writing in the comments, including those involved in flame wars (especially those: else they wouldn't participate message after message).
But we've seen the result of that. It's not some sort of blindingly beautiful laboratory of democracy, it's a whole bunch of barely-literate people chanting slogans at each other between the trolls.
There's a fundamental structural problem here. Imagine a full stadium of people all trying to talk to each other about the same thing, on the same topic, through the same pipe. What do you expect to happen? No real-world conversations work like that. The Internet can scale conversations up to real-world-absurd sizes, like the one we're having here, but there's still limits, and sites like CNN blast right through them. Not through any fault of their own, they're just too large to host any sort of reasonable conversation.
To have reasonable conversations, you need something else, some sort of segmentation, by interests, by personalities, by who happened to show up at some obscure website, something to make it not just a few thousand people trying to shout into the same tin can.
This has little-to-nothing to do with "free speech" or ideological issues of any kind... it's an engineering problem. I'd call it social engineering, but that has the entirely wrong connotation for this problem. But it's still some sort of community engineering problem more than anything else. I've had the hobby of watching those sorts of things for about 15 years now and I've never seen even a hint of technology that a site as large as CNN could use to have some sort of robust, interesting debate. The incentives are all wrong, for all the participants, including CNN. Even the best tech I've seen breaks down at what is easily one order of magnitude below what CNN gets, if not two.
So? Who has the right to tell those people they shouldn't be discussing?
And with what moral authority? (apart from the sheer power of "I'm the owner of this site, and I will close the forum down").
>There's a fundamental structural problem here. Imagine a full stadium of people all trying to talk to each other about the same thing, on the same topic, through the same pipe. What do you expect to happen? No real-world conversations work like that.
Few real-world stuff works like tech-stuff works. That's kind of the point. You don't have to engage with everybody in the same pipe anyway -- you can just focus on the comments you find interesting.
Besides, I've had wonderful conversations on Slashdot, and Reddit and other places, even places like 9gag.
As for the crap, well I can ignore trolls and bypass opinions I consider uninformed or bad. I can also (if I'm bored and want to pass the time) engage with them.
And that's important too. Not hiding unpopular opinions and people we consider "uninformed" under the carpet and pretending they don't exist, because those are parts of life too. Dealing with these is still better than living in an echo chamber.
Who is?
Not expending resources to actively provide a forum is in no sense "telling people they shouldn't be discussing a thing". That's an absurd standard.
"Few real-world stuff works like tech-stuff works."
Nope, that's oversimplifying what I said to the point that it's simply not what I said. What I said is that there is nothing I know that works at CNN scale and produces anything remotely sensible. It won't produce a "community", it won't produce a "conversation", it won't produce "democratic debate", it won't change anybody's mind about anything, it's just too darned big to produce anything other than a tumult.
"Besides, I've had wonderful conversations on Slashdot, and Reddit and other places, even places like 9gag."
What does that have to do with anything? They're not CNN. They're external fora. If you're happy with those, you shouldn't have said anything at all; they exist, they will continue to exist, nobody is talking about shutting them down. What's your problem then? The whole point of this conversation is CNN and NYT and Wired (eventually) shutting down comment sections, not anybody else. What do you think you're defending, exactly?
With all due respect, you seem to be so sure you already know what other people are going to say, you don't bother actually reading what they do say. For someone advocating the importance of user comments, that's sort of ironic.
It's not the same as commanding them not to discuss in general anywhere, but IT IS shuting them up from discussion in your (the site owner's I mean) premises. Essentially the message is "I don't like how you are discussing, and I'm stopping you from discussing here anymore".
The thing is that that's (a news site comment section) is the only place that all readers of it can discuss it as a community -- the only place that's not disjointed (each own's blog, some social news link site, etc) and the place that guarantess more than any other that readers of the same news piece have a chance to see those comments, and that the writer and outlet will see them too (and publicly).
>What does that have to do with anything? They're not CNN. They're external fora. If you're happy with those, you shouldn't have said anything at all; they exist, they will continue to exist, nobody is talking about shutting them down.
You missed the point. I didn't say Reddit was closing its forum like CNN. I gave it as an example of a place that's often considered very bad for its comment threads, to say that even there one can have great discussions.
My comment meant: "You think the CNN forums are bad? Hey, people knock down Reddit even more, but you can have great discussions there".
>What's your problem then? The whole point of this conversation is CNN and NYT and Wired (eventually) shutting down comment sections, not anybody else. What do you think you're defending, exactly?
I'm defending NOT closing active comment sections in general, from any site that has them. I'm defending having comment sections in news sites.
Why? Because I think discussion on the news, and directly on their source, is important. In fact it was hailed as a big revolution when this web came out -- that readers have a voice to respond to journalists and not just curated "letters to the editor" and disjointed replies from their own website/blog.
>With all due respect, you seem to be so sure you already know what other people are going to say, you don't bother actually reading what they do say.
Why does it have to get to name-calling? Did I say anything ad-hominem? .
Yeah, but they don't owe anyone that. You're positing some duty to provide space for conversation, apparently based on the fact that some sites have provided that space in the past. That's essentially an appeal to tradition while ignoring the actual reality of comments on the internet, which is that A) they almost never contribute meaningfully to a site, B) the only way we've found to create meaningful comment sections is through labor-intensive human moderation that most sites don't want to pay for (and have no duty to pay for), and C) in place of meaningful discussion, most un- or lightly-moderated comment sections are full of terrible people saying terrible things.
I'm going to repeat something I said downthread, but no one is preventing anyone from having a voice online. They're just saying that they don't have to publish your voice if they don't want to. You're arguing that the NYT/CNN/$FILL_IN_ORG have some moral duty to provide a space for people to have conversations on their site, about their content, without putting any limits on what is said. You're not describing it that way, because once you confront the reality of that, it becomes ridiculous. Comments, in that sense, aren't "a letter to the editor", they're "I get to tell the editor to publish something and he can't decline." And yeah, having to go read it on your own blog might make the reading experience "disjointed" (whatever that means - clicking a pingback link is about as low-friction as I can imagine in terms of finding pieces responding to the original, especially placed in any kind of historical context), but that's your problem, not the person or organization publishing something. They don't owe you engagement; if you want to engage, make your own site and build your own audience. You don't just get to piggyback on someone else's success to broadcast your thoughts because you want to.
On these forums commenters are essentially the producers and the operators harvest the commenters' input.
News organizations and other outlets of information where the production is inhouse, or at least, the content is more resource intensive, I think don't have the same obligation. One of their needs is to keep their news and their bias and story (sorry, narrative) prominent, which is their prerogative.
I can see them however having "approved" or heavily moderated comments, but, again, at their volume, it might not make economic sense, unless they ship that function off to the Philippines or mechanical turk, but then they have to lay their biases bare in outlining their guidelines.
People may enjoy participating in flame wars, but they don't bring much value to the reader. Judging by the number of upvotes, comments tend to be read by far more people than participate. Often insightful and well thought out comments are a pleasure to read. Flame wars? Less so.
Maybe I'm coming from a very different point of view though. By far my favourite discussion websites are the ones with agressive moderation policies and a financial barrier to entry. That seems to do wonders to encourage thoughtful and interesting comments.
Or it would lead to people learning to finally handle those things.
The problem with bullying in real life is the physical threat. You can't ignore that guy at the bar or the school bully. On the internet you very much can.
>People may enjoy participating in flame wars, but they don't bring much value to the reader.
Those people participating are also readers. As for readers not interested in that, they can skip the comment section (in most websites those are hidden behind a button or in the bottom of the page, after ads, etc).
>By far my favourite discussion websites are the ones with agressive moderation policies and a financial barrier to entry. That seems to do wonders to encourage thoughtful and interesting comments.
I like to talk with people that think in a different way than me, including people from other cultures, political affiliations, etc. So something like that would not work at all, it will be a self-selected echo chamber for the most part.
For some things thats OK (e.g. HN is a tech-focused site, so you want to keep discussion to those areas). But for general news stories (something like Medium or CNN), no.
Unless they send a SWAT team to your house that shoots you, or publish your information all over the web so that your creepy stalker ex can find where you live now and people can steal your identity and ruin your credit, or tell lies about you to your work and get you fired, or overwhelm you with thousands of hateful messages threatening personal harm to you, or do any of the other thousand things that people do, constantly, to other people on the internet that cause them harm in real life.
Seriously, we're on a site that has news in the name. You read tech news and have been on the internet for a while, right? How is this still a confusing phenomenon?
We're talking about comment sections. Obviously your "creepy stalker ex" already knows you who are in the first place.
But you DO know you can use a handle and NOT use and advertise your real name and address in CNN (or any other place) comment section, right? To quote you "how is this still a confusing phenomenon to people?".
For the rest, I'm not from your parts of the world.
For 96% of the world's population, getting "SWAT team to your house that shoots you" or "creepy stalker ex" who somehow doesn't know where you live (because you've changed states or whatever), is not a thing. The same way we don't get much (if any) police shootings, or much (if any) pubic shootings in general for that matter.
Online harrassment is a thing. It is a thing that caused me a lot of stress and anxiety, and I think I probably received a fairly mild dose of it. Unmoderated forums can be vicious and brutal places, and for that reason nobody should be obligated to run one.
Usenet was invented 35 years ago. Do you really think that if we (as a society) are going to learn to "finally handle" unmoderated discussion boards when the evidence clearly points to the fact we haven't thus far?
There's nothing that says that a moderated discussion forum only allows people who think in a particular way. In my experience the kind of moderation that leads to the highest quality and most interesting discussion (often from people with radically different points of view) is the kind that bans personal attacks and comments which are clearly designed to bait or otherwise incite a flame war. That moderation can happen in an open and visible way.
In my humble experience, some sites with comment sections also don't want you to engage if you're not on their side. And I think that's more problematic, especially on news sites, because you could get the impression that the comment section was representative of the readers.
Just as an anecdotal example, a couple months ago, I tried engaging in a discussion in the comment section at welt.de, online outlet of one of Germany's largest newspapers.
My comments were all short, on-topic, and never personal. I provided some sources but generally a different point-of-view than the (until then few) other comments, all right-wing barroom clichés, even celebrations of refugees drowning.
None of my comments was cleared, while very vile and unfounded comments continued to pour in.
I tested for a while and experinced the same behaviour on almost all newspaper websites. (On some others, I was immediately attacked personally for my opinion, and that is with moderation in place.)
I since blocked disqus and never looked back. Twitter has been a good alternative for me so far.
Make a screen capture video (or a few screenshots) of that happening, post it up on a competitive news site to them, and enjoy their embarrassment and backtracking...
(and help change their bad ways in the process).
If it's so easy why is it the case that well meaning website after website decides to give up? I'll suggest that it's actually quite hard, that trolls and astroturfers will modify their behavior in accordance with whatever rules you put up but they are still not commenting in good faith and will tend to derail and dominate conversation.
On a popular website that's a round-the-clock job. How much do you think a media organization should budget for this?
Alternatively, you could have commenting-as-a-service, where users opt into commenting on arbitrary URLs.
I read a lot of blogs which disallow comments. Their engagement comes through linking other blogs and responding, or linking tweets.
I wouldn't call it arrogance to disallow comments. It's a matter of encouraging people to create their own platforms from which to respond.
(That said, I have nothing against comments and think comment-first sites like this one are valuable. But not every site needs to provide a platform for engagement or risk being called arrogant.)
I don't think this is really about trolls for trolling's sake. I think this is about being called out on sloppy content.
We all know that online journalism is a seriously tough business, especially for anyone trying to maintain some sort of reputation for quality. For these guys, it's economically infeasible to make sure every article is high quality because the headline is <insert very big number here> times more important than the body and there are plenty of competitors taking advantage of that.
So when a site starts publishing empty content because they feel that they have to, comments are rightfully merciless on calling BS. Writers get demoralised and publications look for ways to save face. As pointed out, removing a comments section is far preferable to heavily moderating against unfavourable comments. But still, I hate the trend we're seeing.
The Verge is an interesting one. They selectively open comments but many articles remain closed. It's not entirely clear how they decide which articles to open but there at least seems to be a tendency to open comments on the longform stuff they're proud of.
Longer term, everyone is looking for a model where quality is rewarded or at least some sort of rebalancing for the internet publishing economy. Blendle wrote a nice article about their experience getting consumers to pay: https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-principles...
That approach actually seems enlightened--commenters own their own comments, readers own their filters, and if Mozilla wishes, it can curate the best of the best and amplify (say, with retweets or something like Storify).
On Facebook, it's not an item on the Firefox Facebook page, so you can't comment there.
Vine and Instagram have #BlockParty hits, none of which have anything to do with Mozilla.
Nothing on the Mozilla Governance mailing list.
"news.mozilla.org", Mozilla's USENET server, seems to be broken.
As a way to discuss the subject, this was a total fail.
Of course, no one will say that is why their own comment section is going away. There is always some high-minded reason why they shouldn't have comments. It doesn't hurt that comments aren't advertiser safe. Protecting a brand runs counter to having open comments.
I am OK if they just handle over the IT cost to social media, and just simply swap their original comments section UNDER EACH news pieces to facebook/Twitter.
But if they give up the comments at all, then why not just shutdown the whole site and open a twitter account to post news.
I think punting to social media is... uninvested. I enjoy twitter more as an index of links, rather than actual convo. Facebook, meh. It's facebook - a conversation mediated by an ever-shifting overlord that I don't care to participate in. But neither of them are lauded as interlocution par excellence, last I checked.
The big question for me is how the issue of engagement plays out. Comments update in realtime, letters assume you're familiar with the antecedent article.
Either which way, I think it's about time we saw more experimentation in this area.
(I'm glad I had the opportunity to read a page full of people projecting their own egos, conspiracies, and neurosis on this very article.)
I think the interaction provided by comments is one of the strongest advantages of news and blogs with respect to traditional media and removing it is a step backwards.
Relying on solutions like Twitter for the comments isn't the same thing. Apart from the 140-character limit that I've never liked, tweets are ephemeral and are soon lost in the information sea, apart from depending on a third party that could decide to delete them or restrict access when they like. I prefer the comments to reside with the news, where they belong.
That said, it's a little bit different. When you plan to buy something, the advice of past buyers is really helpful. But when you read something, you usually don't need other people advice to extract value from what you read.
In other words: something that the most active readers of a website enjoy and others can just ignore is taken out by online publications.
A general solution to the problem has got to happen, but it's been tried many times before and always failed. (Biggest failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki). Godspeed to whomever does it right.