Welcome to 'the worst job in the world' – my life as a Guardian moderator
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
As a someone who has been a reddit default moderator for 6+ years (I help out in more than 1 default subreddit), I'd say they're still small time. It's so bad over on reddit that even with a fully active staff, we have to utilize bots to automate much of the work. Without those bots, it would be impossible to have a community at the sizes we're talking. We simply wouldn't exist.
He overstates how bad the job is because they've never experienced "true" bad... The author should see if he could intern for a month on one of reddit's busier subreddits. If he asks, I'd be more than willing to give him an inside peek into one of our subreddits. Weekly 4chan raids, intra-subreddit brigades, people (spammers, SEO types, marketers, etc) trying to game us to reach the front page for profit, and then to add on top of that, we have all the same trolls and racists and psychopaths theguardian has to deal with. That's actually not true, they're not the same, there are more of them on reddit. Many, many more.
I know this isn't a competition, but I look at the average comment there and I can get a feel for what moderating there must be like. And I have to say, it looks like paradise compared to reddit. It would be a vacation and even that would probably be an understatement. Though, TheGuardian is the 128th largest website in the world while reddit is 28th (9th largest in the U.S). That's quite the discrepancy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're seeing in the comment section of the Guardian is AFTER moderation has taken place – both longterm (blocking trolls) and short term (removing/blocking comments). So obviously it doesn't look as bad as what you're seeing WHILE moderating reddit comments and you can't really compare that.
It's like I'm saying "moderating reddit is easy, I barely see any spammers or trolls there" (as a user).
And in the article, the chap says that removing the spammers and swivel-eyes is easy. What's hard is curating the discussion. If you read the comments on this article and on similar articles recently, this is the area that attracts the main criticism of the Guardian moderation.
My guess wrt Reddit is that it's a much more difficult job to remove the spammers and front-page optimisers. The curation of a sub-reddit, if it happens at all, is probably easier as there'll likely be little or no real need to be subtle about it.
Except since I have 6 years experience, I truly can get a feel for what their "before" looks like just by looking at the "after". That's what I meant. I can get a pretty good baseline on what their before looks like because at one point, our subreddits were smaller and had a similar baseline. Their comment system is about what reddit's was like circa 2011-2012. Coincidentally, I think reddit was approximately the same size traffic-wise.
Contrasting this with moderation and comments on HN and well run subreddits is instructive. Those sites aren't perfect but at least they recognise the value of comments, and that some commenters will know more about the story than anyone, they might even be involved in it as witnesses or protagonists, as opposed to journalists who typically know very little about a subject. In addition your readers can be the best moderators if you empower them and keep steering them with a light hand. The guardian lets readers vote up only and then does nothing with it.
Maybe it's time for a new kind of journalism without journalists or ads, with a focus on primary sources, and empowering interested communities to report and verify for other readers. It's unlikely to emerge from old media though.
Where it doesn't work well, on HN or news sites, is where the article is intended to influence debate. Whether it's a monad swinging contest on HN or an analysis of the lighter side of Jeremy Corbyn, comments rarely seem to reduce the polarity.
I think this is more of an issue for news sites simply because there is less reporting and more influencing done, somewhat ironically.
I don't know, but it sounds a lot like you're describing reddit.
Unfortunately Reddit is still a popularity contest, so in that sense it doesn't always surface the best content, just the most superficially popular.
So more something that would be invaluable to a historian 100 years from now trying to write about a topic, or a person reading about a subject for the first time.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler...
They are however in the 'eyeball' game and the content quality reflects this lowest common denominator ethos.
Sure jumping out of your tree-hugging everybody-love-everybody mindset is probably a shock, but there's plenty of hatred in the real world.
I can't help but wonder why the author attempts to describe anything he doesn't like, in his moderator role, as trolling. This seems to be a general trend in newspaper people describing their comment sections.
"They are comment-thread poison – men’s rights activists who act as if articles about women’s issues are their gender’s single biggest problem, climate change deniers who will drag any conversation about energy policy into murky pseudo-science, and borderline racists for whom there is no issue that cannot be pinned on immigration (UK) or black people (US)."
...incidentally these are all people strongly opposing (perhaps to an extreme) some political positions of The Guardian. Not a single example of people strongly supporting (perhaps to an extreme) some political positions of The Guardian - these could never become "comment-thread poison."
> climate change deniers who will drag any conversation about energy policy into murky pseudo-science,
That is activism using derailment and off-topic tactics. Not saying that that shouldn't be deleted. Just that it isn't trolling.
Great to have you in this discussion, did you realize you were drawing an exaggerated conclusion from weak evidence when you wrote your comment? Do you realize it now? Would you consider your comment to be one with an agenda as the author theorized or do you have a different motivation?
As to what I think of my comment - I think it shouldn't be removed by a forum moderator, nor should your (IMO tremendously biased) comment be removed by a moderator, and neither comment constitutes "trolling" or "comment thread poison." A moderator removing either and doing similar things consistently is creating a forum I would not like to participate in either as a reader or a commenter.
That is a straw man argument, as you can see nowhere I claim that he chose his examples randomly. Quite the opposite as you quote directly, I think he chose his example to speak to his target audience.
> again, come on, his target audience will be familiar with their fellow extremists' arguments just as much as it will be familiar with the other side's extremists.
Perhaps, but this is a writing style issue. Anyway sure, it's a valid point you could ask of the writer to always perfectly balance his examples between minority and majority viewpoints of his readership. I don't think the "come on" is warranted though, do you really feel it's that obvious that the author should consider this instead of considering for example the sting the nice black/white examples that he uses give?
As to what you think of your comment, I didn't ask what you thought about your comment. I asked whether you realized your argument was exaggerated. I didn't downvote your reply nor do I think a moderator should remove it. I was just curious as to why you would be artificially polarizing this discussion.
It's a trend with the majority of people. There was a case recently where a UK police force (Cambridge) decided to post pictures of poorly-parked bicycles on Twitter. Many people responded by posting images of poorly-parked cars. They were branded "trolls" by the police. Apparently, peacefully, relevantly and sensibly responding to something is now called "trolling". By the police, of all people.
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Twitter-spat-erupts-Cambridg...
Words (and phrases such as "begging the question") mean what they're understood to mean by the majority, much though those of us who understand their "proper" definitions might like to fight those tides.
Sure, you can still use the lesser-known or overtaken meanings in particular scenarios when you know your audience has a shared understanding, but that's true of all jargon or less-common definitions
"Troll" is rapidly coming to mean "person who behaves offensively, abusively or objectionably online". Of course the Guardian will have a different definition of what those behaviours are to, say, the Daily Mail. Or to HN!
I think the overall meaning of his comment is basically "Languages evolve." And I agree with him. It's as inevitable as death and taxes.
Are these people trolls? Depends on your personal ideology.
They certainly are left-aligned: they are famous (and notorious) for it. The "Guardian-reading lentil-munching sandal-wearing lefty" is a popular caricature, I've even seen people criticised during debates for being a "good Guardian-reader" (i.e. a part-time socialist).
But they do publish articles on relevant topics, and are prepared to stick their collective neck out for important stories like the Snowden case. They are probably a few notches above the open sewer which characterises much of the rest of the UK press, and it's clear that many people on HN find them relevant, if not always correct.
I find some of these caricatures interesting. Like how many leftists are vegans or vegetarians, and how many libertarians are meat-lovers. You would perhaps think that diet should have no correlation with political opinions, but it certainly seems to have.
Or take clothing. Among leftists, there seems to be more people wearing stuff like sandals, colorful clothing, dreadlocks, piercings etc. than among right-wingers or libertarians. When I see pictures of libertarians or right-wingers, they often seem to be wearing conformist looking clothes, such as suits. Is there a reason for this?
In order to do well economically, you probably need to be careful not to offend other people, so you cannot express yourself too much. People who express themselves more (wear what they want to, rather than what is inoffensive), are probably more likely to become economic losers. And if you're an economic loser, I guess left-wing politics (tax the rich!) is appealing.
A lot of modernist architects have espoused socialist views, but someone like Mies van der Rohe also built some work for the Nazi regime. The modernist architect Philip Johnson was a notorious Nazi sympathizer.
There's an article here that starts to unpick the architecture/politics relationship in relation to one architect's work: http://archinect.com/features/article/4618/peter-eisenman-li...
Since architecture requires significant wealth and organization, it's rarely, if ever, something that comes out of anarchism. So statism or philanthropy is often behind it.
On the other hand, preserving old traditional buildings tends to be a leftist cause, while wanting to bulldoze them and replace them with new modern buildings tends to be a right-wing cause.
One axis is economic, the other social, with the traditional left-right divide being mapped to the social axis.
Here is the tricky bit, that once you start mapping liberal and conservative on the economic axis things tend to reverse compared to the social one.
So quite often social conservatives end up in the economic "liberal" (or laissez-faire) end.
That is, in itself, an appalling caricature, albeit some left-wingers might be in that category. It's like saying all libertarians/right-wingers are Gordon Gecko "greed is good", devil-take-the-hindmost callous money-grubbers.
Isn't simply a case of advertising that you are part of a particular social grouping (or at least aspire to it) by conforming to the styles used by that group?
NB My own favourite example being spotting genuinely posh people by the colour and state of their cords trousers... (is it an ex-army thing?).
I'd probably describe it as economically Liberal (in the non-American sense), pro-safety net/NHS, and pro-legal enforcement of civility. Basically the non-angry upper-middle class. Anti-petty bourgeoisie. Fabian.
Unfortunately Yes. I've been thinking about a way to take multiple articles on the same subject from different sources and separate facts from opinions and narratives in an automated way. I wonder if such an app already exists. By comparing multiple sources from different political sides / locations , it should be possible to eliminate bias (unless all sources are biased the same way).