As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.
I think that's the problem with comments on any website. The questions are 1) how to bring out the best from people, and 2) whether that is sufficient.
The same person will behave very differently in different contexts. They may be professional but constrained in a business meeting or around superiors; intellectual, curious, and challenging in a classroom; and obnoxious and loud in a bar. How do you make your comment section, and website in general, bring out the qualities you want in your comments? I'd guess that many websites are not so altruistic as to want intelligent comments more than provocative ones, to generate traffic. I recently read an interesting history of the NY Times Op-Ed section, which said that provocation, rather than wisdom, was the intent.
And even if you bring out the best in people, is that sufficient? I find almost all columnists and op-ed writers to be a waste of time; how much time do I have for uninformed, random people? (And I appreciate the irony of saying that in my comment!)
Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.
The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I'm sceptical that removing the trolls is going to be sufficient to fix that.
It's not a culture change that happens overnight, but the potential long term benefits make it worthwhile.
I am quite convinced that the nature of US political discourse is largely determined by the predominant media, and not by the individuals participating in the discourse.
–– Cable news is incentivized to sensationalize any minor event, and to frame stories centered around conflict
–– Social media rewards the most emotionally potent messages, consistently pushing aside calm discourse in favor of messages that hit emotional hot-buttons
–– Newspapers, magazines, etc have adapted their style of writing in order to gain more traction on social media, furthering the cycle of increasingly strong emotional engagement. Sure, newspapers are also often quite dispassionate, but those stories rarely gain much attention in the political realm.
–– Social media also increasingly creates identity bubbles, where like minded individuals can support one another's beliefs. This grouping of people has lead to identity being the primary consideration; facts are secondary.
I would go one step further though, the news tries to make everything emotional (it obvious by the loaded words they use). Any emotional discussion can't be rational, almost by nature.
There are plenty of historical examples of partisan clashes like the USA’s "conservative versus liberal/progressive" one without a modern media. Just look at some of the appalling rhetoric between the two parties of the time in 19th-century America, or the clashes between the Blues and Greens in Constantinople.
Choosing a tribe to belong to and then adapting a harsh “us versus them” stance seems to be a human universal. Modern media has only capitalized on something that was already there.
It's hard for me to imagine what a comment on a Washington Post article could add to the article or to anyone's knowledge. It's user involvement for the sake of user involvement. "Healthy debate" is maybe unobtainable at that scale.
HN can get pretty ignorant and off in the weeds (hey we're all guilty) fairly often, and that is despite being topical, relatively small, having relatively informed users and active moderators.
> So how did the like button come about? What problem were you trying to solve? I was trying to solve what we called the redundant problem. So for example, if you write "We're getting married!" all the comments used to say "Congratulations" over and over again. I found that really aesthetically ugly, plus, every time someone did say something heartfelt, the post was hard to find among all the other redundant ones. [0]
I find a similar situation on YouTube, where commenters don't add any insight or discussion to the video, they just say something like, "Great job!" or "Beautiful music!". Not a problem in itself, but when you have hundreds or thousands of these comments it leaves out real room for critique, questions, etc.
GitHub has a similar feature with reactions to issues.
However, one small concern I have is that such reactions might "dumb down" user/viewer participation and give the impression that using a reaction is all you need to do to have an opinion. Real discourse requires thought and reason, and not just slapping an emotional sticker on something.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbag3a/the-inventor-of-th...
It wouldn't allow for great conversations, but I like the idea that I could write a blog post, go to this site, pick a couple of thesis statements that basically sum up my article, and plug them into the bottom of my post. When people reply, they'd need to reply to those arguments and use the conventions that the site establishes.
People are running pell mell into this arms race and are stopping to imagine how their tools could be put to ill use.
The best option for moderation is trained man power.