The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve | Hacker News Reader

The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve

theguardian.com

35 pointszimpenfish51 comments

Whenever I read an article on the Guardian and think "wow, this is an extremely one-sided perspective" I can almost guarantee the comments will have been disabled.

In fact, the presence of comments against an article has begun to act as a signal of quality. I assume that on some level the writers realise that well-argued articles backed with facts and figures mostly dissuade idiots and trolls even when comments are switched on.

While the quality of comments on the Guardian and many other news websites are generally low, if an article gets 100s of comments the top voted comments will often be decent rebuttals or positions overlooked by the main article.

A relatively decent way of reading the news is to understand the gist of an article and then head straight to the comments to see if there is a punchline. The value of comments on major media sites is to keep you open-minded and to help you spot naturally-occuring biases.

Please provide some examples of this behaviour.

Almost every second article written by Jessica Valenti, or many others that argue regressive (anti-free speech) leftist (pro-social justice) viewpoints.

I checked out Jessica Valenti's posts[1] on The Guardian. All of them have comments.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jessicavalenti

Y'know, I don't entirely disagree with your opinion, but "leftist" doesn't equate with "pro-social justice".

Of course not, but normal "leftist" policies (e.g. higher taxes) are nowhere near as controversial and divisive as "social-justice" topics.

I think you just proved their point.

I normally breathe a sigh of relief as sieving through the crap to find the few insightful comments can be more effort than it's worth.

Utterly foul (and pointless) language is completely acceptable in 'Comment is Free' but if you make a non-abusive factual point couched in moderate language which the moderators don't like, you won't see it. It's all one with the hypocrisy involved in this newspaper's funding.

When I read about a topic I'm not very familiar with, I often go to the comments to see other perspectives. If an article leaves me with a nagging suspicion that the author's evidence is weak, that's a strong predictor that I won't get to see what other readers thought.

It seems like they want an 'agreement section', not a comment section

I noticed, however, that they've added sorting by "Recommendations" (i.e. "likes"/"upvotes") recently. That's something that was sorely missing earlier.

I still don't understand why the default sorting order is "Oldest", which is basically the most useless - sorting by "Recommendations" gives best user experience, sorting by "Newest" allows new comments to be rated, what does sorting by "Oldest" do?!

IMO, the best way is by rating weighted by time. The top comments are the ones that have a lot of points or were posted very recently. That way, new comments have a chance to get upvoted. A lot of sites (e.g. Reddit, YouTube) do this.

I wholeheartedly agree, I think that the decay weighted algorithms are such a neat and useful tool. Not the author, but I found this nice little repo that covers the HN + Reddit algos: https://github.com/clux/decay

All this just creates an echo chamber. Reasonable discourse at the end of the day is limited discourse. The real spectrum of thought however includes abuse and profanity and perhaps aggressive tones.

IMO the best way to deal with this is to train an AI to recognize each of these elements and then make the author reformulate the comment until it's civil enough to be posted.

Give feedback like, the tone of this seems harsh, or it seems like you are using ad-hominem attacks, etc.

If the AI is trained by humans, the AI will have the humans' biases. Such an AI would likely censor politely-worded yet counter-hegemonic views.

Part of an open process is to make this information public, like what comments were rejected and for what reason given by the AI, I guess it would probably use a scoring system or something like that. If you made the process public then it would not be a problem of it censoring anything that people could not agree should be censored.

Creating an all powerful AI to control speech...

massage speech.

I think you are wildly overstating the value of a comments section. As a counter example, take Breitbart. Purely one sided posts with thousands of comments. And yet all those comments do nothing to change the one sided nature of Breitbart.

That's true, but that's probably due to the highly polarised content of niche political sites.

What I am saying applies to sites that attract a mixture of people with different politics, gender, age, class, skills, etc. There are many different kinds of people that read the Guardian, and I'd bet that very few of those that disagree are actually 'trolls' - they're just people with different perspectives and experiences to the main audience.

On sites such as the Guardian and Hacker News you can often find an opposing viewpoint to the main article - just like you provided here.

I find Breitbart's comments interesting, it's pretty much an outlet for people who are discouraged from voicing their opinion in standard news outlets. Though I don't go there on purpose... in the same way as I rarely visit The Guardian.

I used to run sites for years and to me, removing the ability to comment or purposely hiding it is a sign of a publication that's failing its readership.

The UK and world news writing in the Guardian is world class, but its social commentary and feature sections are rather left-leaning/progressive (or whatever words we use these days), to put it mildly. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that their output is pretty politically polarised. They have a target audience that enjoy their politics, and indeed that's who they sell to.

But of course people from other political camps are obviously going to be clickbaited and take issue from time to time, so comments on divisive articles are going to get heated and fraught.

If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and the right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might find things simmer down.

The way the paper is describing the current situation is that they only print virtuously correct articles, and then get mobbed by angry trolls. I look at it slightly differently ... they publish heavily politically biased articles that appeal to their readership, and in doing so troll differently politically minded folk. They reap what they sow, and either way they get clicks and sell ads. Fretting about online harassment is all part of the performance.

>> "If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and the right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might find things simmer down."

I think it would just get worse. Currently you have liberal articles that conservative trolls attack in the comments. Balance that with conservative leaning articles and now the liberals have a comment section to troll in. The solution in my opinion is to do away with the comments. I have never seen anything useful in the comments on The Guardian and I read it quite often.

I don't know that it would, I have more faith in humanity than that. If the ideas the Guardian championed were blind to overt politicisation and consistently based on objective merit, rather than ideology I think the strength of those ideas would be plain for people to see.

I find the coincidence of complaining about a comment section on the internet in a comment section on the internet delicious.

I understand your point, but if offering opinions from one political camp is viewed as 'trolling' by the others, then I would say we need to fix our approach to discourse.

From my point of view, if the articles are consistently always going to have the same sort of political bias, then a subset of those articles are going to have taken an unreasonable position - and it's those unreasonable articles that will troll people all the more. Unless, that is, the specific political bias chosen results in many more objectively reasonable and correct articles, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet with modern small-L liberalism.

At least some of the "fixing of discourse" has to come from the media outlets themselves. They can't continue to pit political camps against each other by outputting biased content, and then just point the finger at whichever political side they're unaligned with.

The way the paper is describing the current situation is that they only print virtuously correct articles, and then get mobbed by angry trolls.

This is unfortunately exactly their thought process though -- if you are not "progressive" like they are in their values, you are a caveman and need to be enlightened. Such values are deemed the correct ones to have ("because it's CURRENT_YEAR") so of course anyone with a differing opinion is not just wrong, but morally bankrupt.

This is also the general thought process of the New Radical Left, personified by the college students and sniffy intellectuals that do populate most of mainstream journalism and educational institutions. Reporting is no longer enough, one has to be an "agent of change".

The Guardian staff are just butt-hurt that people have woken up to their proselytizing and won't let them get away with being an authority when they are desperately biased in their articles.

And yet no one cries foul when right leaning papers post articles suggesting LGBT people are mentally incompetent or morally depraved barbarians that'll eat your babies for breakfast. It just seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously by folks on the opposite end of the political spectrum then the right needs to do itself a favor: stop vilifying LGBT and other minorities categorically. It's not that hard, really.

You have to look at it in the context of the UK broadsheet market though. On the right, the Times (usually) and the Telegraph and if you'd consider it a broadsheet, the Daily Mail too.

The Guardian is the only consistently left-leaning quality paper at least in England and I don't blame them for sticking to their guns.

The Guardian is bourgeois establishment, not left-leaning. It's been consistently hostile to genuine left-leaning views for at least a decade - probably longer. Its editorial policy reliably paints anyone to the left of Tony Blair as a lunatic extremist.

Unfortunately this includes most paid-up members of the Labour party, whose perfectly legitimate views it reliably tries to marginalise.

And it runs campaigns like this one, which seems to be part of an attempt to conflate honest debate and criticism with the worst excesses of abusive online trolling.

It's true it's marginally to the left of the printed mainstream, but that only shows how far the Overton Window has been pushed away from moderate centrism in British politics.

It's not just people being clickbaited, some of their most prolific commenters obviously disagree with their entire output and go in to stir the pot.

> we want to create spaces on the Guardian for particular conversations and particular groups to speak - with each other and with us.

It would be interesting if they'd expand on why they want to create these 'spaces'. There are two things I want from a news organisation:

1. Accurate and insightful news, even if it's a bit later than the BBC

2. A channel to make corrections to the published articles by those with first-hand or expert knowledge.

I don't want to 'engage' any more than I engage with my ISP or electricity company. Just give me a good, reliable product and a way to let you know when you're not delivering that.

From my experience, comments pointing-out corrections don't feed back into the article ( the editors and journalists are busy working on the next story ) so it ends-up like Usenet with people arguing at each other and the story sitting like an immutable monolith at the top of the page. What does the Guardian gain from this? More ad views?

>we want to create spaces on the Guardian for particular conversations and particular groups to speak - with each other and with us.

Sounds like they just want an echo chamber.

My experience with The Guardian has been very positive. There was a user "ChangingWorld" who was a complete anti-vaxxer and no matter what you said ignored all reasoned discussion and reverted to personal attacks.

After a fair bit of discussion, I got sick of the personal attacks on anyone who tried to engage with her and who didn't hold her view, so I started flagging her abusive comments.

The Guardian moderators, to my great surprise, took notice and actually started deleting posts that violated their policies. The tone of debate, needless to say, took a turn for the better! No longer were participants held to ransom by manipulative and personal attacks and no longer were articles about vaccinations derailed.

She eventually stopped commenting after I posted the following:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/14/california-se...

Good on them for trying. I feel like we've been trying to do this on the web since the 1990s though. Somehow it just never works.

>>And we are working to make our comment spaces more welcoming and more connected with our editorial work

Are there any sites that have really good comment spaces? How did they do it? Seems like moderation works, to a point, with a large enough user base. What else is there?

(I'll add other than HN, this is the one place I come to actually read the comments)

Ars Technica has the best model, imo.

Promote excellent comments to the article page and have the discussion on a separate one.

Ars unfortunately suffers from the hivemind problem. They attached voting buttons a few years back, and unpopular enough opinions will be buried under a torrent of votes and be hidden.

But the idea of promoting useful comments is a good one, so long as the promotion is a mark of insight, not agreement with the author's politics. Ars doesn't suffer much from this, but given some of the polemic I've read on Guardian, I believe they may

Yes comments with lots of up votes and downvoted should be highlighted as provoctresting.

Metafilter. Which works by charging a one-time only $5 membership and a one-week waiting period before you can post. Small enough for someone interested not to worry, large enough to make the trolls go bye-bye.

The guardian comment section used to be excellent (10 or so years ago), there was a community of admittedly left-leaning commenters and the odd article would get ridicule but there was more discussion.

It started to go downhill when they changed their commenting software so that you saw far fewer comments (about 10 per page rather than 50) and for a time would only sort most-recent or least-recent.

It was then very hard to actually have a discussion.

Slashdot created their moderation (funny, insightful), metamoderation and tagging and karma and thresholds and filters how long ago?

https://slashdot.org/faq/ https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

Everyone just ignores their accomplishments. Sites consider the solution too complicated to implement. You end up with reddit style up/down/report/gold and best/top/hot/controversial which isnt rich enough metadata to let users sort comments in powerful ways.

The answers to these problems have been around for long over a decade. Yet no one has even come close to one upping slashdots system.

You're very right that Slashdot developed an underappreciated system for community moderation. Too many people treat this like a new problem when it's one of the oldest out there (see, for example, http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... )

That said, I've always assumed the Slashdot system was too elaborate and hard to understand for anything other than the highly technical, highly dedicated (in its heyday) Slashdot community. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think tagging your upvote/downvote with metadata describing WHY you voted that way is not complicated.

Upvote - important

Upvote - funny

Upvote - informative

Upvote - consensus

Downvote - spam

Downvote - rude

Downvote - inaccurate

Downvote - disagree

Randomly assigned metamoderation as civic duty is not too much to ask of readers and contributors.

I also think the complication should reside in the algorithm and not be handed to the userbase. If metamoderation algorithms can figure out which moderators I agree and disagree with, let me favor the data those moderators i prefer contribute to the system.

A well written algorithm will be able to figure out when a person is polluting the system with noise and trying to watch the world burn. Disagreeing with consensus moderation is different than being disruptive. That is a challenging and complicated prospect, but that complexity lies on the backend, not the user facing interface.

Sure, but commenters are going to ask questions like "who is moderating me" and "why am I allowed to moderate sometimes but not other times."

On Slashdot, the answers to these seemingly simple questions are quite complex, but generally understood and embraced by the audience. I'm not sure that would be the case on a site like the Guardian.

That said, you may be right that the benefits outweigh the confusion and that this could work fine at Guardian. (Although, even as a longtime Slashdot user, I have no idea what "upvote - consensus" means...)

fresh accounts woundnt experience metamoderation

upvote - consensus = i agree

poor wording maybe

Related story, different content:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478361

Slightly modified cross post from another thread.

If you really want to understand the Guardians motivation, look at when they realised that the vast majority of their left-leaning readers strongly disagreed with them regarding Islamic terrorism and the refugee crisis. Closed comments on certain articles due to “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.[0]

At least they didn't even pretend that it wasn't because the majority of their readership disagreed with them.

It seems like they are trying to change their approach to convince people censorship is the right path. Perhaps straight out telling the majority of their loyal readership that their opinions are wrong/bad/racist/evil wasn't the best approach.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers...

I wonder if it’s worth having any media organisation run a comments section. With so many commenting platforms that are available for the masses (Twitter, Medium, Reddit, etc.), I wonder if a comments section is more or less a relic of days when there wasn’t a plethora ways of getting your opinion across.

>Building a community is a difficult endeavour even under perfect conditions, and changing the way a community works once it has been established is even more difficult.

Very interesting - a friend forwarded me a piece about another online community, The AV Club, which is quite relevant to this discussion. It looks at the nature of Community, Cliques, and Cesspool behavior. Might be a good companion, informal study to consider:

https://medium.com/@LongTimeLurker1stTimePoster/the-av-club-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com