>>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)
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.
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.
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.
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...)
upvote - consensus = i agree
poor wording maybe
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.
Promote excellent comments to the article page and have the discussion on a separate one.
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