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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Is it that hard to simply delete comments that don't meet the forum guidelines?

This is really the key point:

> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them.

So it’s a tiny fraction writing the comments, which is disproportionately represented by racist trolls. Removing the comments manually is a lot of work, an automated system is problematic, but The Inquirer very understandably doesn’t want to leave up hundreds of hateful comments.

Besides, have you read the comments on local news websites? Even the very best are almost always useless. It is not like Hacker News or Reddit or another news aggregator, where the value is in the discussion. I don’t think any meaningful discourse is being lost.

I find it comforting to hear I appear to be at the right corner, as opposed to be in wrong corner. Thanks.

In addition to being expensive to hire moderators, they would also be likely to get one or more consumer groups that support boycotting the inquirer due to censorship (perceived or actual, I will let you decide).

It’s not worth the headache, imho.

Comments in periodicals have attracted a lot of people who seem to enjoy being part of the rage cycle. It has sadly ceased to be constructive “community” dialogue in most cases, if indeed it ever was.

This is answered under the subheading "Why not just invest in more moderation?".

Or all comments can only be posted once approved by the moderator. This obviates the need for 24 hour vigilance.

No it doesn't, you'll still need someone moderating to approve posts 24 hours a day or else the site stops working. No one wants to have a conversation through hours-long gaps in a moderation queue.

I've participated in such forums before, such as comp.lang.c++.moderated, and it works.

A counterpoint to that was given in Philadelphia Magazine back in 2013. The Philadelphia Inquirer also tried a system of moderation by volunteers in 2015. The headlined article tells us that they did not work.

I didn't see anything in the headlined article that says anything about a moderation system where posts are not posted until they are approved. It only talks about removal of posts after they are posted.

comp.lang.c++.moderated used a system where submissions needed approval by the moderator(s) before posting. It worked well for many years. The delay could be up to a day, but people accepted that.

After all, it's like the pre-internet "Letters to the Editor" section of the newspaper.

I did say that a counterpoint was in that 2013 Philadelphia Magazine piece. The headlined article says that nothing tried worked. One has to actually look up what was tried, and beyond that what was not even attempted, over at least a decade.

It can work, but you need enough moderators to keep the pace of posting moving and users willing to put up with the delays.

On a tiny blog, sure. On a news aggregation site, engagement will collapse.

comp.lang.c++.moderated is not a good example, that's a niche topic with relatively high barriers to entry. On mainstream news websites a big story can attract hundreds of comments a minute.

The fact that you've already changed between two supposedly simple approaches in under an hour might suggest that there's more to it than you initially thought.

I do work as a moderator myself, and understand that different forums need different styles of moderation.

Why go to all this trouble for a worthless addition to your site? It’s obviously not profitable or productive - any startup would kill such a feature so why are you demanding low-margin businesses have to keep such features around forever and actively invest in moderating them?

> demanding

I don't see any words like that in what I posted.

Removing comments is "censorship" which is liable to get your site boycotted or troll bombed. Removing the commenting system is just good sense.

The volume of such comments can be enormous and unless you are watching 24/7 it does not work as the trolls will happily do it at 3AM.

The article addresses this. It requires 24/7 moderation. Newspapers have been cutting staff to the bone for years now.

Nu.nl ( NL :-) closes the comment section around 23h IIRC.

Much easier said than done I'm sure. With most newspapers struggling to get hiring full time moderators is probably a luxury they can't afford.

This sounds like a good application for GPT-3 and the likes.

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