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Comment by Max-q | Hacker News Reader

NRK Beta, the tech lab of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, make you take a quiz about the article before you are allowed to comment.

I really like that idea.

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Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them.

You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.

Nu.nl's comment section has been back for a while, they dumped the social network ambitions and invested in better moderation before turning it back on. It's helped somewhat.

> Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool

A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow? I feel like it's chock full of witty jokes, positive vibes, light entertainment, and the occasional weirdo just to balance things out.

It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.

> It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.

But the migration of YouTube channels and comments to G+ linked identities was reversed[0], wasn't it? Not to mention that G+ has since been shut down.

Shouldn't that make the abortive effort irrelevant for the quality of YouTube comments today?

[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/everything-in-its-ri...

Looking at Facebook I would be willing to say that has literally nothing to do with it.

Facebook insists even more on having "real people" using their real names, often forcing them to vet themselves, yet at times it easily steals the crown in terms of "really bad user interactions" from YouTube comments.

Very likely much more related to the topic under which people are commenting: Non-political feel good fluff does not allow for much friction to be inserted, thus the tone of comments will be much more civilized and friendly.

But anything that goes into controversial, and particularly political, territory is bound to quickly escalate into a complete shit show, on YouTube and Facebook alike.

Which fits neatly into common communication strategies like focusing on similarities rather than on differences.

I’ve noticed this in the comments under music more than elsewhere. Anything politics is still awful.

Music is nice and largely even positive—if repetitive (“anyone here listening to [90s band] in 2020??”)

Don’t forget countless horrific things content moderators have to read and see so that you can enjoy your experience.

We couldn't do without the epsilons.

I think Google works really hard to surface comments that they know a user will interact with.

That would work best if they'd surface all the vitriol, right? People love to interact with vitriol.

> no comments posted without approval

This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.

I had this idea as well. It only solves the low quality comment problem if that is something the site owners want. In some cases they may benefit from low quality comments.

Before the web, the HTTP POST equivalent was an envelope and stamp and maybe some moderation at the receiving side. People should look into ways to limit comments / filter noise now that it is in abundance.

Can you still comment if you get all the quiz questions wrong?

It would be funny if it still let you comment, but it showed your test results besides your comment.

It would be funny if so many didn't already wear their ignorance as a badge of pride.

Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.

At least 0% would require more knowledge than guessing. You might even accidentally educate a few anti-vaxxers, who would be forced to learn what they were disagreeing with. (Yes, I know it still wouldn't help.)

Or how about shadow banning the user on that specific article? Make it appear their comment was posted, only on their logged in account (and maybe IP address). Rest of the world wouldn't see it.

Works very well, but the massive lack of transparency will make it difficult to justify and ultimately creating paranoia and scissors in the heads of people.

I would not want to participate on such a platform forcing me to double check if my contributions were actually published or simply hidden away for some secret reason.

It's these pieces of accountability that go a long way to have users compliant with moderation.

I would assume the questions are of the simple, "What facts did we state?" kind, rather than requiring some deeper understanding or inference. So why would you allow someone who couldn't grok the facts to comment? If my assumption is true then it works as a reasonable anti-bot measure, allowing wrong answers would negate that.

Let's go further. Make it a quiz about the general topic too. If you don't have any fundamental knowledge about a topic, your opinion shouldn't get a platform for it to spread.

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