Must answer questions before posting comments to prove you understand news
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
What news site is this? For general news sites, I've found them to be of very low quality. I can't remember the last time I gained anything from them.
Most news sources however have three primary functions: Identify, Write, and Publish news.
Commenting in HN is key to its existence; Commenting in news sources just happens to be a thing available.
Saying that comments works in HN is like saying comments work on reddit; it's trivially true, assuming the site is in any way functional/popular. But that doesn't mean comments are useful on NYT; take away comments and there really wouldn't be much lost from its primary goals.
If you're in the US, as an exercise, look up the news site of your local newspaper, and read the comments there. They're often of higher quality than the larger state/national news sites, and even then they're mostly crap.
But on good sites, absolutely! I'd consider comment sections more valuable than the news content, which is often an AP repost with a couple more sentences.
(Inside pissing out instead of outside pissing in, as the phrase goes. Until they go away or whatever, that's another day's problem.)
What is happening right now pits one fragment of the population against another aka polarization, that's a harbinger of a possible civil war, not of a revolution.
Censorship at its finest.
Now that being said, there is a reasonable point of view that says while it should not be legally mandated, private party filtering and editing of content acquired from third parties through some sort of public accommodation _seems_ dishonest. But the truth is, publications writ large exist to transmit a particular experience, whether that be cultural, ideological, or technical(in the sense of the mechanics of conversation a la HN). While this would not be ideal if taken to a no-exceptions type extreme, as long as State censorship is fought off and defended successfully, there types speech that gets muffled through one publication can and will find a light through another.
I doubt you meant it that way, but it really is a fine way to censor.
Of course they rely on a wordlist 90 % of the time but it would eliminate the trashiest comments quite well.
(i) does not apply; regardless of whether you intend to argue for or against a point made in the article, you're responsible for knowing the same things about what the publishers think they said. Furthermore, even oarsman:regatta-style test bias is of negligible relevance because (ii) also does not apply; as we can see from the 2016 election results, enough people "disenfranchised" by NYT/WP/etc. policies were able to communicate effectively in other Internet venues to produce a catastrophic outcome for the old gatekeepers.
Most of the Internet comments that produced 2016 were either written by folks who'd easily pass this sort of test, or on venues that won't add this sort of test in the future; I wouldn't worry about the impact of this on dissent. If you want to fight against anything a specific media organization does, fight against selective reporting/censorship [1]; but it's not a big deal, the Internet has demonstrated itself up to the challenge of routing around it.
1: If you have a signal with 0s and 1s, and a filter that lets only the 1s through, what is the information content of the original signal? The filtered signal? Incidentally, this is also a major problem in science today.
Many of the tests were so subjective they could simply fail anyone they wanted to. Especially certain groups who had just recently gained the power to vote.
The fee you mentioned, however, is, IMHO.
if I had to hire a scientist for a job and the only applicants that were qualified enough were white males, hiring a white male would not make me a racist sexist.
i look forward to the day when people just stop trying to correlate everything both positive and negative to race, gender, age, and any other attribute other than "are you a good person" and "can you do this job well"
completely abstracted of the rest of history maybe that'd be possible. the problem is that black people in antebellum south were prevented from learning to read. so really it went something like: let's not teach black to read and then require literacy in order to vote.
>oh well. requiring literacy for something as important as an election is not obstructionist, IMHO
i would gladly wager that an overwhelming majority of voters don't read more than 10,000 words about any given election and get most of their data from television/radio/speech. so tell me why literacy is of paramount importance?
But those "literacy" weren't anything even close to similar.
"What does this remind him of? - a literary test to vote"
vs
"This is like a ...? - literary test to vote"
So we'd need elections to choose who writes the tests and then who gets to vote for them?
The great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people. It's a way to thrash out difficult decisions where the people deciding are the same people who end up affected by them. There are gaps in this idea of course, like persecuting minorities and voters being more concerned about their tribal membership
In the US, we've had variations of that in the US under the guise of a literacy test.[1] Promoting "understanding" sounds like a great idea until the test itself is made a weapon against groups that are considered "undesirable" by the majority of the populace.
In the abstract, this is true.
In the perception, it's always the leaders that screwed up - or whomever they can blame.
In democracy, as with most politics, perception is reality
Is that a public event, too?
Who gets to enforce the public-vs-private thing?
If the article mentions that "Senator X of the pro-life camp said ..." you answer the quiz question with "X" (because it's an indisputable fact that the article calls X pro-life) and then you are free to comment how "pro-life" is a biased term, or that X is a shill for Y who supported murdering babies in the past, or whatever.
You don't have to agree with the article's stance to know how to answer the questions, you just have to know what the article's stance is.
If you didn't read the part but skimmed over it, you might be motivated to leave a comment to mention the AP stylebook's recommendation, to the benefit of other commenters.
As far as I can tell from briefly viewing them, the MSNBC and Fox News web sites don't allow comments.
From the source, it seems they're using Adobe Livefyre.
It's the fundamental difference between functional illiteracy and "plain" illiteracy.
This difference shows up all the time when analyzing data because some jurisdiction will only report the illiteracy number while some other will include the functional illiteracy as well.
Proving someone "tried* is also [nearly] impossible here: just take standard test-taking strategies for standardized tests of reading comprehension, and apply them to this context (because that's all this is, but not even done by people whose entire job is to make "good" tests)
I rarely read the articles posted on HN. The discussion is frequently much more interesting and often more enlightening. I generally only read the article if the filter of other people's comments suggests that it would be worth my time.
I think I am probably not alone in this.
I have fantastic reading comprehension from a standardized test point of view - I was always able to finish the section well before the time limit. But I also knew I didn't have to actually follow the directions - I didn't need to read the passage, I needed to find the answers: a very different, and far simpler, task.
That's what this would become.
My dream of having people answer 5 simple questions to be allowed to get a voting card would come true.
Example of questions: name three neighbour countries, who is the current president, is France in Europe or Asia, what was the last world war,...
I understand that this will unfairly remove people who are illiterate, or had a difficult childhood, or are simply dumb but they are expected to make a choice which will impact the whole country. If they do not know anything about this country and the world it is in then sorry, they are not in a poisition to choose.
Such questions are rarely useful. They tend to be either trivial to the extreme (such as the continent of France or the first letter in the alphabet), politically opinionated, or more complex than you think. (What was the last world war? You and I might think it was the Cold War but with in depth knowledge would have more nuances to their answer.)
I do not want biais, I want people who get to vote know the very basics of the world they live in.
Someone who voted X because yeah, the current president is wrong, but this "current president" happens to be a TV celebrity and not the president - such a person does not deserve to have voting rights. You would be surprised where people put France...
It is not a shame to be illiterare or dumb, or mentally unfit. This does not mean that the future of a country should be put in these people hands. I will never be a pilot because of health issues. I do not see it as discrimination but just the pragmatic reality of this world.
Your child is very sick. Do you
(A) Do what is recommended by peer-reviewed scientific literature, of which one of the central tenets is that you only believe things which are backed up by data and solid arguments.
(B) Do what is recommended by your religion, of which one of the central tenets is that faith is sufficient reason to believe in something, and neither data not solid arguments are needed.
And who gets to determine (and enforce) "rightness"?
Or... just ask science questions: "Is planet Earth flat?".
In addition to that, you end up breaking the democratic system, which is so very good at keeping our disputes and disagreements from boiling over into a civil war.