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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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