Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-revie...
The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.
Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.
As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.
MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.
This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.
I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)
It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.
Not so much as bad jouirnalism
I very much disagree with that.
Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.
Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).
Some is heavy, some is not..
Find a mainstream (non-topic-specialized) publication that doesn't do that, and I'll be surprised.
It's disappointing that the only publications willing to tackle heavy issues are things like Vogue, The Rolling Stone and Vice Magazine. The rest seem content to sit back and take a more academic approach if they take one at all.
USA Today, like CNN, is utterly worthless.
The New York Times has suffered hits to its credibility, fake photographers, plagiarism and such, but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work done by their talented staff. There's still good work being done there despite those setbacks. It's a fallacy to instantly discount everything as without merit, putting it on the same level as Breitbart.
Like always you need to regard things with a critical eye.
While other publications have had lapses in journalistic integrity, rolling stones case is especially egregious. Along every step of the way, the writer and her editors violated the basics of journalistic integrity, like not fact checking and trusting one side.
[0]http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...
Yes. The "story" made specific criminal accusations.
> You must live in a world where nobody is credible.
Publications are held to a different standard.
> New York Times... but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work
It just means you can no longer trust the publication.
> putting it on the same level as Breitbart
Here we go. Tell me what's wrong with Breitbart?
Every story they run on climate change is a pile of innumerate, scientifically illiterate crap? Those are the only stories I see from them as they get quoted for amusement value sometimes on the Sea Ice forums.
But maybe their sports coverage is good or something. Who knows.
You, apparently, since you talked of "the same level as Breitbart", though don't apparently know what that is.
Also, if you have specific knowledge of a subject area, you might be inclined to a kind of reversal of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: judging a publication on you area of expertise alone, when publications may differ in their relative strengths.
On the other hand.. You answered for them? Only astrodust can know what problem astrodust has with Breitbart...
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/14/media/breitbart-incendiary-h...
Just to pick one: 'A July article suggested that research revealed "women might just suck at job interviews."'
Is this claim false?
If you want a private conversation, then HN comments are the wrong venue.
I was asking astrodust specifically, and anyone else can see the answer; this would not be the case with a "private conversion".
https://notvice.com/fact-checking-vice-a-fiction-2d482100116...
In my opinion, Vice is nothing more than a clickbait machine that got somehow famous for being "edgy".
Yes, you need a few people willing to go through the filth, but you will get a better online presence out of it.
Demonstrate the cost/benefit advantage of having to police these garbage piles and maybe I'll buy it. But I don't believe that most people read the Times or CBC or WaPo for the comment section. More likely they read those outlets despite them.
I agree with Vice. Leave the discussion to dedicated services like Reddit, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and focus on core competencies: producing top notch content.
Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.
(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)
I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).
You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.
Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...
Hence, trolling.
Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump).
None gets solved by polling trolls.
I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.
Actually, a few journalists who spent serious time hitting the streets outside London concluded that Brexit would win or at least was quite likely, just by talking to people. They were largely ignored because they weren't "experts", just people talking to other people. John Harris being an example of that.
No one addresses the obvious weaknesses, they just say "this is the best we have", but then act with confidence in the predictions, rather than admit we don't know.
Those were not shocking events. People wanted a prediction with more confidence than those sources of prediction were able to provide. Faced with the hard limitations of existing predictive tools, people that should damn well know better started listening when they found someone to tell them "Nate Silver has Trump at 25%" really meant "Hillary will win."
It would not have been irresponsible to account for the possibility of the less likely but still possible outcome. In fact it would be irresponsible to NOT be prepared for it.
>Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.
We're never going to be able to predict the future with total accuracy. The question is how we want to face them limitations of that accuracy. People who don't take "no" for an answer will read too much into unreliable predictions and attempt to rebuild systems for more predictable results regardless of externalities. The question should be how we adapt to that reality.
Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.
Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.
But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.
I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.
e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content.
My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.
The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.
The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.
Can you explain your reasoning behind that?