Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit | Hacker News Reader

Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit

engadget.com

79 pointstwampss82 comments

Bold. This makes me really happy. Comments sections are the cesspools of the Internet, so it's great to see someone say "This is going away until you think about what you did wrong."

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least cesspoolish place I've found so far.

There's no real irony. While anonymous-account sites can have reasonable comments, that's a function of size, really.

Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess.

Similarly, Engadget used to be alright, then they grew and added the voting system... etc.

Frankly, what works for smaller sites doesn't scale. At their visibility, Engadget should either go comment-less or do subscriptions for early-access and comments. Anonymous comments just don't provide enough value with that much noise.

I browse slashdot at +4 and I think the comments are pretty good/insightful. They are a bit too slow on the news sometimes, though.

It seems to me that this solution also “doesn't scale”, though not necessarily in the sense of the grandparent: For there to be a sufficient supply of +4 posts that you can read, someone has to be going through, reading them, and promoting them above the dreck. Thus, only a limited number of people can pursue your strategy before it stops working.

Easy fix for this: If you have Slashdot mod points, browse at 0; if you don't and just want to read good comments, browse at +3 or 4.

This is an excellent point. I gave up on Slashdot as a comment site a long time ago, and now satisfy my commenting craving on Reddit and HN, where, effectively, you always have mod points; so I forgot that it didn't work that way elsewhere. Thanks!

That's pretty much the premise that sites like reddit and HN operate on at the link level, too - most people only read the first page or two, but some people are interested/obsessed enough to go through the dreck and flag up what's interesting. It seems to scale reasonably well so far.

s/interested\/obsessed/bored/

I get to page 5 or 6 on reddit, just because I get bored, and read fairly fast...

Agreed. What I do works for me and I'm glad there are others with the time/patience/masochistic-tendencies to view and moderate things to make them more pleasant for me. :)

I browse /. at +5 (and see only very good comments) except for the once a month or so when I get given mod points.

15 minutes a month of moderation per person seems to be sustainable/scalable, because it's been working for ages and I have noticed no real change in Slashdot's +5 comment quality.

Where that fails with HN is that we have infinite mod points all the time, which:

- Encourages point inflation as the community grows.

- Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time.

> Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I really like the HN system whereby upvotes are free, but downvotes are restricted. (Well, I assume that's the way it is --at least, it's easy for me to see how to do one, but not the other.)

This makes it easy for me to give a post a tiny bump up, so that I don't think much of it, but emphasises the cost of giving it the equivalent tiny bump down; and isn't that a good attitude to instill in a commenting community? Certainly I think the culture here is notably friendlier than just about anywhere public-facing site (LtU (http://lambdatheultimate.org) being perhaps a notable exception).

EDIT: I saw a mention of Metafilter elsewhere. I forgot it as an example of another site with a novel approach to the commenting problem; namely, make commenting not free by imposing a small, one-time cost.

"... Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess. .."

This tends to be perception only. I'd agree with @sjs382, a +3 browser here and I was surprised at the improvement in discussion from what I remembered. #2774

Comments really are a hard problem. 90% of the thought I expend on HN is devoted to saving the site from bad comments. Spammers and overt trolls are easy. The really hard problems are fluff comments and subtle trolls (people who are fundamentally nasty, but who are sophisticated enough to stop short of name calling).

If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of the topic.

Two useful links on the subject are http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html and http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/

One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.

You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because community doesn't scale

Absolutely true. Social Networks can scale but communities can't. You can scale a site with community functions, that looks like a community (youtube) but there will be no sense of community.

I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000

Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate moderator on the entire English-language internet, and has proven herself adept at training subordinates to follow in her footsteps.

pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.

A nice example would be this enormous thread (2mb of HTML), that drags on documenting the incendiary results of her 'moderation' on BoingBoing. Search for "TNH": http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Centu...

A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"

Metafilter also deletes too many comments.

You'd be surprised how little comment deletion there is outside of Ask Metafilter (where all comments have to answer the damn question). Pretty much the only comments deleted from the main site are personal attacks. There's an active backchannel for discussing such things where almost nothing is deleted.

They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts.

pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!

FWIW, I only read AskMe.

But I agree that Metafilter handles moderation better than HN. The way voting is here, it seems like it mostly depends on the time of day as to whether a comment of mine gets -4 or +30. (Usually this works out for me pretty well... but I can't help feeling dirty when I write something that gets upmodded that high.)

Well I also feel like a system which allows mob punishment tends to select "regulars" who are more homogenous in opinions, since they will fit into the thinking which defines the community.

But if you want a like-minded small community it's a tradeoff that's necessary.

Why do you feel dirty though?

Yeah... e.g. this poor guy, who got "auto-hellbanned" and has been talking to himself because the third comment he ever made was childish: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=efaith

If you want to run any kind of community on the web these days, you need a chief of secret police.

"Benign dictatorship" works. Anything short of it is asking to be rules-lawyered to death by trolls and griefers.

I think it's especially hard on HN due to the nature of the site. Since HN is a site dedicated to discussion, it becomes important to ensure that open conversations are happening. Strong opinions shouldn't be banned just because they get a little hostile, and weak opinions shouldn't be banned just because they're a little fluffy. There's such a huge gray area that it's an impossibly difficult problem.

Contrast this with Engadget, who can enforce discussion that aligns with whatever site policies they choose to adapt. Or you can take this even further, like on my blog, where openness means nothing and I can just delete anything that's not a question or an anecdote that adds to what I've written.

In an open discussion forum, your biggest problem will be always be open discussion.

I wish more blogs would take your view. People go to all the trouble of writing articles carefully, putting them on a dedicated domain with a nice design or template, and then I scroll down and there are:

"nice article I wrote one like it at http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org

and "HOW TO INSTALL THIS???!!!!!?!!! IT DOES NOT WORK!??"

Invite readers in, tempt them with an interesting article and then leave them in some internet shady backstreet area. It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they have been 'edited').

  > It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe,
  > edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they
  > have been 'edited').

Can you suggest a way of doing that without don it all "by hand"? What you suggest is what I'd like to do, but it doesn't scale. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as to a system like yours that does.

My blog is very low traffic, so it's not that big of a deal, but using disqus allows me to go through and respond with "delete" in the body when I get a spammy message. Takes about 10 seconds and I can do it from my phone.

Of course, I always end up missing some, so I tend to go through every few weeks and prune those that I missed. What we really need is gmail-esque spam filtering in disqus.

I hadn't really considered that it should scale, anymore than you would ask how to write the articles themselves without doing it all by hand.

Comments close after a period of time, so it shouldn't scale temporally, comments for a large site with lots of authors, well, they have lots of authors.

If you want commentors to be able to suggest corrections indefinitely, then either a wiki is a more suitable medium, or an "email me" link. Depending on what you want to achieve - a communally edited document or a personal reply.

As far as newspaper sites go, they go beyond 'comments'; hundreds of comments is in the realm of a forum and deserves some kind of moderators and so on.

You want to publish to the world and have the world able to reply to you while you aren't paying attention? That's not going to work. If you want to publish to the world and have the world reply to each other, well that's what people have their own blogs for, surely; why would you want to host that indefinitely?

And if you are going to have an abandoned corner of the internet where nobody 'in authority' checks what happens, then you need to rely on the passerby, hopefully give them some tools to step in and help, e.g. several downvotes over several days from different sources = autodelete. I doubt that's a solution; if you could automatically tell who to trust in the first place you wouldn't let the spammy comments be submitted.

The xkcd IRC channel instituted the Robot 9000, which mute-bans anyone making an unoriginal comment. Obviously this does not prevent trolling, but it does reduce some of the more low-hanging fruit of retardation: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

4chan also implemented Robot 9000 on one of their boards: http://boards.4chan.org/r9k/

Or leave off comments altogether (Kottke is an example of a successful blog without comments) and put other interesting entries in the article tail instead to keep people moving around the site.

And yet, as digital real estate, comment sections are among the most under-optimized sections of any content site.

A site with high-quality comments can increase the value of the existing content exponentially, but because there is a more removed connection to revenue generation it seems like the majority of comment sections (HN excluded, of course) are thrown in as an afterthought.

"Comments really are a hard problem."

Bit tangential, but has anyone (e.g., start-up) solved the problem of massive discussions? Anything over a hundred or two hundred comments becomes unmanageable in a hurry. Some of the larger sites (e.g., Huff Post) routinely have 2000-comment threads that would take days to plow through.

Is there a solution that combines karma, upvotes as a means of identifying the 'cream' as well as grouping of sub-discussions and points-counterpoints? I haven't seen any solution take a serious shot at a way of grouping sub-arguments and discussions.

The level of comments on the typical news article here in Australia is embarrassingly bad. Any discussion quickly becomes a confusing read without threading and a complete waste of time without persistent identities or moderation. Disqus has taken a crack at the basics, but is it much better for discussions over, say, 500 posts?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight (Making Light) is routinely in the 200-1000 comments-per-thread range. They manage okay, mostly due to have a strong sense of community and several moderators and having Teresa Nielsen Hayden to ride herd on it (one of the folks who moderated BoingBoing when they reinstated comments).

Here are her (very cogent) thoughts on how to moderate massive discussions:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html

I think it depends on context. Some blogs, like AVC, are more of a discussion with users, so the comments are integral. Some, like Engadget or TechCrunch, are much broader-interest, news-oriented sites, and the comment sections quickly devolve into unreadability.

Agreed. I think the lesson to be learned here is "feel free to disable comments". Not "you should never enable comments".

I forewent a comments section on my own blog for a philosophical reason: I feel there should be some greater investment to commenting than creating an account on a blog. To comment on anything anywhere, you're free to use the platform you feel is most appropriate for it, be it your own blog, your Twitter account... or perhaps a link submission to a news discussion site like HN.

I agree its a good move for the current situation, but just turning comments on and off won't solve the problem in the long run. When the next gizmo is launched they will face the same problem. I think they should take this time to implement a solution to the spam issue either through moderation or a voting system.

I am also not able to access old comments which if intentional doesn't seem to be a good move (imho).

For an example of blogs with very high quality comments, see, e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.... It's an essay describing the use of blogs and blog comments to solve a difficult open mathematical problem. The average quality of the comments made in that project - more than 800 comments in all - was extraordinarily high. Several strongly research-oriented blogs in mathematics and physics routinely have very high quality comments, e.g., the blogs of Richard Lipton, Terence Tao, Tim Gowers, and the n-category cafe.

(I should perhaps disclose that I'm one of the authors of the linked article.)

Well, the content of that particular blog has something to do with that. You need a certain level of sophistication to come up with something coherent to post, and most of the trolls out there know they'd be instantaneously obvious to everyone else on a topic like that.

Engadget has written 54 articles about the iPad in the last 12 days. I'm honestly surprised that they are surprised their audience are idiots.

The funny bit is that Engadget's commenting community seems to be vehemently anti-Apple, but the fact that Engadget keeps writing huge numbers of Apple articles implies that these generate traffic still (gut feeling: most of the non-commenting visitors).

This seems like complaining about a movie theater while sitting in the first row munching furiously on popcorn.

Apple gets so much press precisely because few people have the capacity for indifference toward them. Write a story about a new Microsoft product, and half the audience will yawn. Write a story about an Apple product, and the other half will be pounding their keyboards in fury.

54 articles about the iPad in the last 12 days

Reminds me of another website I know :)

After reading Siver's post (http://sivers.org/punish), this development seemed like a perfect data point (though I am unaware of the extent of threats etc which drove them to take the decision)

We haven't enabled comments on our blog precisely for this reason.

Are there any success stories or best practices for quality comments and discussions on blogs? What makes Hacker News commentary successful? User accounts required and therefore no anonymity? Guidelines?

the reason comments are good here is because the moderators are serious as a heart attack. you don't get to make many jerk-like comments before your account gets banned.

the other reason is that this community started out as extremely self-selected - people who got through a pg essay or applied to yc, and appreciated the quality that was here already w/o being turned off by the sparse visuals. As more people have joined, that quality is getting diluted, but there's a long way down before it reaches current reddit levels.

I wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts, and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to their comment.

They might be less likely to post lots of other stuff too, though. Do you really want any potential future casual acquaintance, boss, or what have you, to have instant, easy access to a transcript of every conversation you've had?

This would also rule out people like myself, for better or for worse, who refuse to use Facebook.

The biggest determining factor in my experience has been whether something has a community around it or not. Newspaper comment sections and YouTube video comments don't have a community--- they're drive-by comments by whoever shows up. Smaller forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels where everyone knows everyone else are sort of the best-case. As it scales up, it gets harder to keep quality high.

I think creating a link to a community site like HN or reddit at the end of the post so people can submit/comment on the community site rather than on the blog might help.

They're almost universally total garbage on engadget anyway (and not just recently). I don't see any loss of value in leaving them off permanently.

To be clear, I like engadget just fine, but the comments never seem to provide any insight/value.

I noticed a while ago Jeff Atwood did this on codinghorror.com too (I believe citing a technical reason, although they have not yet come back). Also, Seth Godin does not have comments on his blog either.

Is this a trend going forward? I'm not against it...

Kottke's blog is without comments also. More should follow their lead.

I think this should go a bit further. The next time Google or Apple announces something major-ish, the entire Internet should just be turned off for two days.

Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in the first place.

Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are so obnoxious.

I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.

Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles.

The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment threads are excellent reading.

Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real identities were tied to people's words.

Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is a great way to say what you actually think.

I just had to register on HN to say how much I completely agree with this statement:

"Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles."

Welcome to HN! Please take some time to go through the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. And hit upvote when you agree with somebody's comment.

A radio industry forum did that a few years ago - fed up of the vitriol being spouted anonymously, the forum owner closed it down and reopened it with a verified real name policy. You have to register with an employer email address and the forums are invisible to all but the registered users.

The result? The forum is quiet and discussions very boring - for a start, Google isn't picking up the topics to pull in new users and besides, no one wants to say what they think when they know either their current boss or a potential employer is reading it under their real name. (The British radio industry is a small place.)

Worse still, you get the odd threat. "I know such-and-such a radio boss and you're never going to be employed again if you keep posting that station X is pants." It's just not a pleasant atmosphere.

I couldn't agree more. I've lost count of the number of times I've read an interesting article on the Guardian website only to have hundreds upon hundreds of dull comments and irrelevant arguments squeezed down my meagre internet connection. I go to the newspaper website to read the newspaper's writing and opinion, not that of thousands of internet pundits. Every article about economic recovery, for instance, currently attracts hundreds of doom-laden comments. It's enough to make you slit your wrists.

It's the overwhelming volume of comments at the bottom of national newspaper articles that gets me. A Guardian piece can get anything from 100 to around 500 comments before it starts to fizzle out. Who has the time to read through all that? It's just a racket - noise at its worst catering to the very few participants and irritating the many readers. What was wrong with letters pages, with that same noise filtered and edited by editors for hundreds of years?

Can't you just not look at the comments for two days?

It's not just comments but every modern communication channel (twitter, fb, etc etc) which is totally overrun.

Don't look at twitter, fb, etc, etc. Don't see how that's hard, unless you somehow depend on facebook or twitter for vital information.

It seems every new open web community tries desperately to stave off its own Endless September. I think a scalable answer will probably look more like multiple layers of authentication. Only some actions can be completely public; you have to be respected before you are allowed progressively more reign. That is what our society does with kids and things like drivers licenses, college degrees, etc.

For anyone else who doesn't get the Endless September reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Wow nice. Reading sites like Engadget without comments is almost better than reading them without ads.

When I want to comment on something, I will come to a site designed for that. There, I have a single place to track replies, so I can actually discuss things, rather than which blog I commented on today.

I know for my own blog redesign, I will not allow comments. I just don't see the point.

Spam and flame wars are not at all a new phenomenon. The decline of intelligent conversation amidst the noise does seem pretty new.

I think this may be more related to the nature of these sites and the communities that form around them, rather than merely to the scale of the community.

Sites that go for a very broad appeal rather than targeting a specific, well-defined audience tend to have much lower-quality comments. Engadget is a great example - it is a consumer-oriented tech blog, and it's structured more like a traditional publication than an online community. The comments there are almost always not worth reading.

On the other hand, I visit sites like HN, Slashdot, and Ars Technica primarily for the discussions.

News Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress. Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to kick and scream more than before.

This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.

People need to chill-out their self-righteous and frequently hypocritical disgustometer. If you're gonna have a worldwide open discussion you're gonna have some trolls. How about thinking about how amazing it is? How about not having your emotions triggered by the trolls. There are things to learn on all sides.

How is it self-righteous to turn off a feature on your site that you feel is currently causing more harm than doing good? Are they in some way obligated to give the trolls a place to troll?

I'm responding more to the outburst of (self-)righteousness happening right here on HN right now.

Sorry, I misunderstood that then, my bad.

I'm not sure what was being said in the comments, but I always think its a bad choice to cut off the medium that your users voice their opinions on.

I love this. Absolutely love it. I've always kind of dismissed comments as mostly empty white noise on the internet, and have never figured out why so many CMS systems/Blogging software/Web apps/etc are so eager to add comments to EVERYTHING.

Give me the content, I can form my own thoughts on it, and if I actually feel like my thoughts are worthwhile for reading I can publish them myself.

You just added a comment to a story.

How is your comment on HN not exactly what you're dismissive of?

YES I REALIZE THE IRONY HERE

I will admit HN is one of those rare sites with a pretty good signal to noise ratio in comments.

There is no irony here. This is a discussion forum. If I check out a book from the library, I don't want to see comments scribbled in the margins, but I'm more than happy to join a lively discussion about it on HN or reddit.

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