This site is making readers pass a quiz before commenting | Hacker News Reader

This site is making readers pass a quiz before commenting

niemanlab.org

69 pointsGargoyle17 comments

Javagaming.org has one for registration. Normally one of the hard looking programing problems that are easy, or a find the mistake that is keeping the program from running. Enough to look like a hard problem, even though a nonprofessional programmer gets through.

Cut down on uninvested "program for free for me" threads, seo spammers (when those were a thing on forums), and spam.

INAN (I'm not a Norwegian) but the questions are something like this:

- is data surveillance a positive thing to DGF?

    - yes, they think it's good for privacy(?)
    - they haven't decided yet
    - no, they think it conflicts with human rights

- which party votes in favor of DLD?

    - (three parties mentioned)

- what does DGF stand for?

    - (three options)

IAAN. The first question is slightly off. It goes "is the Norwegian Data Protection Agency positive to the DGF?"

I hacked on something like this a few months ago as a joke: https://github.com/nealrs/readsure

I think in some instances, and they only use the quiz on some of the articles, this is a good way to filter the idiots, but on the negative side I wonder how many people forgot the intelligent thing they had to contribute because they had to spend time and mental energy completing a quiz. I hope this doesn't spread beyond serious things for serious people , it is very poor UX to ask users to jump through hoops and spend time on a quiz before they are allowed to participate.

Surely a red warning text in the textarea element where the comment will be typed out is a better idea? The quiz still doesn't eliminate the need for moderation even though it _may_ have gone some way toward reducing that need.

If they forgot the intelligent thing they had to contribute then it wasn't intelligent to begin with - it's more likely to be a knee-jerk reaction. If people read the article properly they'll already have taken more time than would trigger a knee-jerk reaction.

I can lose my train of thought between walking from one room to another. It's got nothing to do with the value of the thought itself - just that I'm easily distracted.

It's highly likely I can recapture the thought by stepping back into the environment in which it occurred (in this case skim re-reading the article I imagine), but honestly I don't tend to comment on ephemeral sites, rather post on communities about commenting. It seems more interesting/useful

>I can lose my train of thought between walking from one room to another.

That's not just you, it's a scientifically studied effect - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-throu...

Somewhat delayed response - but that's a cool link! thanks :)

Enter comment, click next, take quiz, click post. Get an answer wrong, your comment is wiped and you have to start over.

Spreading misinformation on political news through comment sections and social media has become a rampant problem. Most news sites with a discussion feature are so full of toxic and misleading comments that some form of moderation is necessary for healthy discourse. It gets especially bad after a few days when the news wanes, but the trolls keep coming. Anyone digging up an article from a month ago to see the discussion will only find the aftermath of an army of trolls, with all insightful or impartial comments drowned out.

This has been a problem since the dawn of the Internet, and along the way we have seen some interesting approaches at comment moderation (Slashdot is a classic example). Moderation has the potential for abuse, and as such, should be applied reasonably and transparently. That said, I can't blame anyone for searching for new ways to fight trolling and the promotion of blatant ignorance in this day and age.

The New York Times has even resorted to limiting discussions (or not rolling them out to every last article in the first place) and human moderation. It slows down discussion, and it may be subject to censorship, but it goes a long way towards helping both sides have a say in the discussion without it devolving to Youtube quality discourse.

I never said trolling was not a problem or that moderation should not exist, I was looking at the test from a UX pov where it fails quite badly. On the upside, it succeeds for the collective of users who don't have to filter tripe, but for the individual user it fails. Has the site measured how much traffic has dropped off since implementing this 'feature'? NRK afaik don't run ads, at least not a lot of ads, being as they are Norwegian BBC, but I can see this feature being a detriment to page hits. Would be nice to see some statistics on that and similar effects on the users.

Clever idea. Maybe HN could benefit from it?

I can see it now.

  How many microservices are needed for a CMS webapp?

  a.  17
  b.  34 
  c.  When you do service discovery properly, you don't need to count.

d. N where N is >= 1 and less than 1e9.

I think I see where you are going, but in the sample quiz the questions all relate to the article, and are very factual: Not "how many micro services are needed?", but "how many micro services does the author think is needed?"

a. "it depends" b. "it doesn't matter the author is WRONG" c. it's better to do it in <approach of the month>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com