Approve or Reject: Can You Moderate Five New York Times Comments?

> "Women and their monogamy obsession. Why are they so insecure and try to fight biology?"

> "Reject"

> "We would have approved. Whether we agree with a comment, we want to provide a space for interesting interactions to occur. Put simply, the replies to this comment may prove to be enlightening for many readers. The comment does not criticize a specific woman, so it is not a personal attack. While it might be considered an insult against a class, alleging an "obsession" is not a particularly inflammatory insult. We don’t seek to police opinions, only to help as many people as possible express themselves on nytimes.com."

It was about calling women "insecure" besides "obsessive" in a two sentence comment in a pejorative tone. It is not about agreeing with the comment or not.

There appears to be a double standard between insulting a race or religion, and sex or sexuality... they appear to argue that insulting women or gay people is okay because such discussion is somehow in the public interest, but that insulting a race or religion (middle-eastern people and muslims in particular) is not in the public interest? Seems arbitrary.

Frankly, I don't think they've given you enough info to moderate according to their highly specific standards.

On the first one, I've read "Repiglicans" and "Rethuglicans", etc so many times that I didn't even notice "Repugnicans".

Anyone else who finished the quiz think that the comment moderation process is bonkers in terms of work load? 11,000 comments a day. I got 2 out of 5 and it took me 46 seconds, which means it would take me more than 28.1 hours to do a day's work.

Even split across a few staff members that's insane. But this is something they needlessly put on themselves by making comments hidden by default. An editor has to read every comment before approving it. This could easily be fixed by having it show-by-default, queue-after-flags/downvotes (which is how I assume HN mods act so quickly)

There are a few "trusted" users who are auto-approved. I complained that there doesn't seem to be any automated filters or heuristics. If they know "Repugnican" is a word used in name-calling, why isn't it blacklisted so that all such comments either get thrown out or just thrown to the bottom of the queue?

I've subscribed to the NYT paper edition for several years, which means I've paid at least $1000, nevermind the ad revenue they get form my page visits to the site. And yet I have to wait in the queue, usually 15 minutes to an hour, before my comment is approved, like any of the free registered users. I believe they have a million subscribers. I think it is a logical courtesy and efficiency to give paying members the benefit of the doubt. Not many people pay 3x a Netflix subscription just to be an asshole on the comment boards.

edit: Made it clear that even longtime paying subscribers are treated as untrusted commenters.

"And again if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrain'd will be no hindrance to his folly"

So, I get their broader point: It doesn't scale; too much human time and effort to read the comments and apply policy correctly.

What would scale, then? You'd want to a) use free labor from readers, and b) have a way to punish trolls.

I imagine something like:

1) Some central identity/commenter rep provider (CIRP) that shares rep across forums. (privacy issues discussed below)

2) If you're registered with a good CIRP at all, you get a big bump in visibility -- maybe even a trashed account appears before anons. The higher a rep your CIRP vouches for, the more visible your comment.

3) Readers upvote and downvote as before, but this doesn't directly affect visibility; it just decides probability of the comment being placed before a human reviewer, who can pass a more focused judgment on it.

4) If multiple, non-communicating human judges agree on good/bad, that users' rep is adjusted in that direction.

5) Privacy: the CIRP just signs a token indicating your rep (within a range), not your ID itself. (They don't even need to store your comments, just your login and rep, though comments are nice for later auditing.)

The advantage are:

A) If you establish yourself as having good comments on other forums, that carries over to the NYT (or whatever) comment section, creating an bigger incentive for good comments.

B) Humans can take the time to carefully judge your comments, since they only need to see a sample of them.

C) It has a nice hierarchy of checks and balances: forums can discount bad CIRPs; CIRPs can check that their judges are doing it right; judges validate other judges.

I understand the issues with comments but I feel publishers are making a mistake. NPR recently said their comments are non-​representative of their total listeners and are annoying to users and take time to moderate, so… they’ll remove them and let you comment on Twitter, Facebook, etc. But are people talking on Twitter, Facebook, etc always making delightfully erudite comments on shows? Are social media posters representative of all NPR listeners? Hell no. So publishers make this decision to send the user base and activity to other internet platforms, then they complain that all their traffic is being captured by and funneled through social media…

Maybe publishers should start competing head-​to-​head with internet platforms: going for network effects, monthly active users, making recommendation and personalization systems, that kinda thing. Not going “oh, some people don’t like reading our comments, so we deleted our user activity system.” At least the NYT is making an effort keep the comments in place and use tech to help with moderation.

5/5 in 35 seconds. It's mentally taxing. Some I wanted to reject, but i had to think of fairness. If I rejected everything I agreed with, I would probably have rejected them all. I would have to be paid at least $350,000/yr to do that everyday for hours. I would still hate my life.

And, here we see the problem with the whole system. None of these comments truly adds to the discussion, they are all aggressive, insulting, and biased. Yet it's difficult to achieve a level of moderation that doesn't seem overzealous without allowing some of this garbage into the conversation.

With the help of Google Jigsaw the results will look like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors

This is why reddit-style upvoting works well. Of all of the systems I've seen, reddit has hit enough critical mass such that the upvoted comments are truly great.

"You can partake in moderation in a limited fashion"

Didn't/Doesn't Slashdot do this?

I believe pretty strongly that commenting on articles is generally a waste of time and doesn't add much value for the reader, or the discourse in general. And no, I can't reconcile that with what I am doing at the present moment.

>> In response to an article that quotes the United States House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, criticizing her Republican counterparts for agreeing to pay for the legal defense of a federal ban on gay marriage: “This is so much political correctness. The family, men plus women = children is the basis of society. Scientific facts are not altered by political correctness and neither is the law and design of man by God. Two men can create a relationship, but not a child. This is not marriage. This is sodomy. Check out Sodom & Gomorrrah if you would like God’s opinion about it. A lie is not the truth. Stop it Obama.” <<

You should reject because it shouldn't be about Obama.

Note that it's just Jigsaw, not "Google Jigsaw."