Comment sections are poison: handle with care or remove them (2014)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
While this could be true, with certain sites (like news sites) comments are bound to be politically charged and tend towards the negative. Doubly so if comments allow threading or reflinks, making tangential discussions (and arguments) between posters easy. I think many sites assume comments would somehow lead to a revenue stream because something something facebook.
Also, it's probably likely that any site built on Wordpress is going to keep comments by default in their templates.
I don't comment too much[1] because I've found that, in general, there's always someone smarter than me who has said what I want to say already. The fact that I always seem to find that smarter person in the comments is why I'd prefer comments sections not to go, even if they are loaded with trolls.
[1] This thread's an exception, I suppose. I don't want to see comment sections go, though!
The day Obama released his birth certificate for instance. If you go back and look at some of the more fringy sites, the comments on that day are pretty amusing. A lot of people mystified by pdf layers.
It's one of those awkward arguments where I want to vigorously deny the premiss but affirm the conclusion.
There are great places for civil discussion online. If people who make content can't figure out how to build one, they should stop trying and just stick to what they know.
Where? I'd like to see examples, especially any that are new to me.
We're working on a set of moderation tools for the community that we hope will help with this.
I'd argue that incivility itself isn't even necessarily a bad thing, and that the real goal shouldn't be eliminating incivility, but rather making people put their money where their mouths are. (So to speak.)
I've always thought we out to be putting people with reputations' comments by people with similar reputations' eyes, and noobs' comments to noobs' eyes. Once the new people have established them as reasonable people, they start showing up more to people who have built a reputation.
Not just gross, net, or average karma, but i think to do it right, you'd need some sort of handicapping system like golf. On a good day, to you provide good content, great. If so, we'll rank you higher in the feeds of others with good handicap. Not every comment will hurt you if it's not helpful (we all have bad days, and everyone is occasionally grumpy), but if more often than not, your comments are terrible you're aren't going to be placed high in the feeds of those who are more socially adjusted.
One downside is that if some lurker who is an expert in the subject comes alone, he or she may no be able to participate in with all, but in communities like reddit or these, if you cannot pass some threshold, then you're not really a part of the community anyhow.
Another downside i see is that lurkers are a major portion of theses websites revenues, and the sites don't really want to remove content from their eyes. I'm not sure how to fix that issue, but for well establish sites, i think filtering via similar karma-type levels would surely bring up the discourse for those who want to have it, while keeping the trolls trolling other trolls (which is rather interesting to watch anyway).
http://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2ff814/reminder_randal...
The idea that content should willfully, and secretly, be withheld from users is a bit frightening and I reject it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikk...
It drastically improves the entire internet just by blocking every comment section everywhere on every website, except those you explicitly whitelist.
I wonder what Disqus YC 07 thinks of that?
I think we should treat the comment cesspools of the Internet like say, Youtube or Politico like a honeypot. If you comment there, frankly I never want to see anything you ever write on the Internet ever again.
I mean sure, you can implement more clever ways for comment moderation, like HN, but there's always going to be the issue where some parts of the community complain about how things are going for the worse.
This will always happen I believe, regardless of the community or the tech used to moderate its comments. And so at some point someone will inevitably consider community X's comments to be poison.
I can almost bet that there are people out there that believe HN comments are poison because the comments all show groupthink or whatever (not saying I believe this is the case, but that there's probably someone who thinks this way). And technology won't ever solve this.
To date I have not seen a method of comment moderation on any site that hasn't been used to stifle dissent or unpopular opinions. It's unacceptable to give the illusion of open, free discussion when you have the ability to downvote or delete a post.
This is, plain and simple, an article espousing censorship. I'm not qualified intellectually to argue with censorship proponents, especially here.
What are your thoughts on the downvote system? on Reddit, a comment that is badly downvoted sinks to the bottom and becomes collapsed... but if you want, you can still choose to read it.
People consciously or unconsciously associate comments with the site where they read them. This can hurt the brand of the site and be a distraction from the useful conversations that its trying to foster. Turning comments off isn't censorship, it's a matter of self-defense. It also isn't censorship by definition, as you can't censor someone without knowing what they are going to say or whether or not they are going to agree with you.
It would be nice if there was a technical solution that could separate politically divisive trolling from the informative presentation of opposing views, but that doesn't exist yet. We're left with expensive human moderation that doesn't scale well. So, for now, turning off comments is the best solution for some. Hopefully we can solve the problem by raising the overall level of public discourse, but I'd bet on a getting a technical solution to work long before that happens.
Unfortunately, some people want open discussion, while other people want bubbles. I would rather people censor themselves than censor other people, and create their own bubbles.
The Hacker News community's comments are actually more intellectual than the writer's click-bait propaganda, and leaves room for debate on the author's one-sided views.
Edit: grammar
Think about it, if you see a slightly greyed-out comment, that becomes a data-point in interpreting the comment.
Though compared to other places with such strong voting mechanisms, the echo chamber seems to be less in effect. Only topic I can think about where it really comes out is articles on Uber, bizarrely.
Moderation plays a small role in the HN community. Any "community bubble" is due to shared interests and a core set of guidelines. This seems like an excuse for making a libertarian rant and nothing more.
It's also worth keeping in mind that /r/ainbow was created as an alternative after the mess that /r/lgbt became. /r/games from /r/gaming is a similar example. As much as a change in moderation was a focus, it was also a different audience that moved over to the new subs.
I think in those places aggression simply serves to push people who would think differently out.
If the truth hurts... downvote it so it can be hidden! Yeah, that'll show you!
Sure, you can write complaints about Slashdot, Reddit, and HN (see siblings of this post competing to see who can slag on them the hardest), but at least there's a chance of some semblance of discussion. That is not a chance that big sites have.
I have little doubt as to the particular types of views that the author would want moderators to enforce.
This is another argument for removing comments: implementing any form of moderation opens you to criticism that you're not doing it fairly, favoring certain viewpoints or users over others.