I’m happy with the trend of removing comments from online publications. Too many are outright spam (“I make $500 per day on Facebook and so can you!”) or they’re the opinions of ill-informed people who try to spread one agenda or another.
I think having comments everywhere possible was an idea from the web 2.0 era that’s proven to be not all that worth it in most cases. Moderation is hard and it doesn’t make sense for newspapers and magazines to be spending resources on it. There are other forums (reddit, hn) for this sort of thing.
Never quite understood why comment section wasn't one of the premium subscription features for direct monetization. It could cover the moderation costs directly, provides an incentive for some to buy a subscription and sock puppet accounts are less likely if they cost money. Then, I would assume that if your comment is tied to your billing account, you may be more inclined to not write the worst comments (insulting, etc.).
So I happen to actually have such an account and there seems to be no difference to the normal subscriber account. However, commenting with this account means commenting with your corporate account. I would expect that people are more careful then, but it seems like this might not be the case.
Is this a separate subscription for commenting only? Perhaps this would work: an additional small fee for the possibility to add a comment? I don't know, probably this would also drive away people who comment sensibly.
[edit: rewrote a badly written subclause to be clearer than before]
The worst commenters have an agenda, so they will put down that fee as a "cost of doing business", like printing leaflets.
Your suggestion would address spam, but as major newspapers end up paywalled that's largely a non-issue. The others are moving to compulsory social login (e.g. FB) which also mitigates that (and basically makes you "pay" with your personal details).
Newspapers should totally have an easy feedback form, possibly even a dedicated forum, but not comments.
> and basically makes you "pay" with your personal details
I believe the parent means that you pay/it hurts your wallet (even if it is $5 per year). When you "pay" via your facebook details being shared, then this cost doesn't affect you. If you cared you woulnd't be using FB in the first place :)
See also public groups/comments on Facebook itself: the realname convention makes most reasonable people self-censor to silence, leaving only the wildest nutcases posting (with rare exceptions in between). Even if you don't use your real name there, as long as you aren't on a dedicated spam account you'll still be connected to your real life network and that is enough for massive self-censoring to happen. Would your hn posts happen if they'd show up in the feeds of distant family? Mine surely would not, and that's while I try keeping hn posts to the highest quality tier of all my online interactions.
Pay to post is harsh on the consumer. Pay to prove you're not a spammer is better, because you get your money back.
I'm experimenting with a fix for this at repowcha. There's probably a cost threshold past which it becomes unprofitable to post bad comments with an agenda.
Because you reach roughly the same audience as the original article with your comment when it's published directly below it, whereas your social media post is read by your contacts only unless it's exceedingly successful.
Why would anyone pay $5 a month subscription to a YouTube channel that is already free?
The idea of selling things online was never about how to sell them to people who don't want them. You're clearly not the target market. It would be for people who are so fiercely loyal they don't think twice about how nice of a bonus it is to be able to be in the select audience that CAN comment. I don't know if people are this loyal to publications, but I've certainly felt it towards YouTube personalities that align with my thinking so strongly that I feel supporting them is promoting my values.
It is, increasingly, at least in the Sports content world.
The Athletic, for example, has its own comment section (duplicated on a much larger scale by Reddit discussion of quotes from the paywalled articles). Even niche outlets like the Dunc'd On Podcast come with their own Discord.
The lure, I think, is basically what's being discussed here.
Sports discussion ... suffers perhaps more than average from an absence of moderation, so a paywalled community is seen as a benefit.
I agree. I remember years ago a friend of mine was found dead (took his own life) and a local news site reported it and had a comment section.
It was beyond horrible. People were commenting about how glad they were that this person they *didn’t even know* was gone. “One fewer idiot” type of comments. It was one of those things where it was so bad you didn’t want to look away.
The moderation was non-existent.
I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.
Who wants to scroll through 1k comments in a narrow, awkwardly-paginated column? They also allow posts from anyone with an email account (mitigated somewhat by the paywall on most articles) which results in a lot of high-emotion, low-information spam. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal limits comments only to people with a subscription. Perhaps as a result, the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Maybe (I've never tried to look at WaPo comments). I did find that the WSJ comments are much, much worse than the FT comments (angrier, less interesting).
I wonder if this is driven by the different susbscription prices, or just the different audience.
yeah I'm actually quite happy with the comments on the Guardian. They don't have them on a lot of articles but when they do they always have their Guardian Picks, meaning high quality comments that are highlighted. I don't know why the general comment section there is good but one point is definitely moderation. They even delete postings (spam or flame wars).
> I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.
In my mind, the answer is quite easy: increasing the amount of page loads increases the amount of ads people see. If you deliver emails along the lines of "someone replied to your comment", people are gonna click on them and you're going to serve another set of ads.
Moderation requires effort and reduces the amount of page loads, therefore most websites that use comments don't want to do that.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
I don't think removing comments will affect page views by much.
I think that sometimes a comment section can add value (like high voted comments on HN), but for a newspaper which has a very broad and undiscriminate audience, they need a better system.
I think I saw one system where you couldn't comment directly, but you could post a reaction. It would need to be approved before being visible to others first. I think such a system, while pretty labor intensive, would be preferable.
A similar thing happened a few years ago after my friend died in a car crash: when I saw the unbelievable comments, I wrote to the editors begging them to delete all comments and disable any more. I feared my friend’s husband would stumble upon them. Why is a comment section even necessary on such an article?
Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.
If you build a public scribbling board, people will indeed come and scribble on it. (-:
It's a lesson that definitely pre-dates computer-mediated communication. I've seen freely accessibly physical noticeboards quickly fill up with advertisements and suchlike, posted over the notices for which the noticeboards were actually for, for one.
I agree, but there’s this screaming cage match, euphemistically called “engagement,” that is the vein of gold for Web site owners.
As has become clear, “engagement” means public brawling. It generates clicks, and clicks are gold. It also encourages people to sign up for accounts, just so they can jump into the cesspool. Those accounts are quite valuable, as they are fodder for data miners, correlators, and aggregators. Making those accounts free, and easy to create (but not so easy to delete), is a natural.
That’s why so many of these sites wait until their comment fighting pits reach brand-destroying levels of rancor, before they do anything about it; sometimes, too late (remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).
> I remember when Reddit was caught paying trolls.
I've been there for like 10 years and I don't remember this. Was it even before? Do you have a link or something? I tried some searches but didn't find any relevant result. Thanks in advance.
I'll remove the reference (I can't be bothered to spend the time to hunt down the sources), but it was a huge (but brief) stink. It wasn't that long ago.
The guy was a paid subreddit mod, and an engineer in Arizona or New Mexico, or somewhere.
The story destroyed his career. I know he was immediately fired by his day job. Maybe it's a good thing that the story is hard to find. We all deserve a second chance. I actually felt a bit sorry for him.
I don't know if he was a mod, per se. The scandal was that he received renumeration from Reddit, and had a direct reporting relationship with them. It probably wasn't much, and was probably loose enough to allow a speedy under-bus transition of the person, when found out.
I am not much of a Reddit user, so I don't know the landscape well enough to be cognizant of the terminology.
You're getting it mixed up. He was running a bunch of shock porn and near-porn subreddits skirting really close to the line of illegality(most notoriously a number devoted to clothed but suggestive pictures of minors). Nobody was paying him. This was the piece you're thinking of: https://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-th...
Yes, that's probably it, and it does look like I was mistaken. The problem was that Reddit wasn't doing anything about it. People got quite upset over that.
Thanks for the correction. I [honestly] appreciate it.
I suspect this was what had me confused:
> Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.
And this might be why I didn't remember the case. So it's either a different one the GP is talking about -of which I couldn't find any relevant result, maybe my fault- or the GP is referring, like you suggest, to Violentacrez, a very different case that I still remember.
>(remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).
I think it's always been like that. The GNAA (when it was new back in early 2000s) was copying the template of existing trolls by challenging those on probationary on their IRC to get racist first posts, something like that. It was already just one of those things you ran across on Slashdot, like bizarre Natalie Portman copy pasta.
>(remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).
I do, and I had an old account there, back in the before times. But now it just looks like a less popular reddit comment section. What do you mean with the swastikas?
There's a certain...subculture...of /. troll that go into many of the comment threads, and post these giant ASCI art swastikas. They are usually accompanied by all kinds of racist pejoratives. I'm sure they get reported, but I have seem them stay up for weeks.
They probably aren't real Nazis; just bored teenagers, trying to get a rise.
You usually need to max out the comment filters to see them (rightly so).
But there's also plenty of good old-fashioned abuse trolls, there.
One of the reasons that I like this place, is because it highly discourages that kind of behavior.
If it starts happening here, I'm heading for the hills. I used to be a troll, but as I have gotten older, the shine has worn off that brand of behavior.
That actually makes me sad: good automoderation tools are decades (plural, yes) old and yet most website haven't caught on the fact that you need some sort of ranking to filter out spam or bots.
Thing is, newspapers as their business model currently is, have zero incentives in having quality comments. Negative incentives actually. Journalism is 20% facts reporting, 80% comments and that's generous: comments are the cheapest to write, some news website/papers are closer to 99% comments. If you have quality comments by your readers, what are you selling then?
We need to move to a business model where facts reporting and facts checking (careful: talking about facts checking, not analysis checking) are the primary services that journalists would get paid for. Comments, even quality comments can be done through a good enough moderation system and a big enough community.
The problem is not spam or bots, the problem is that most commenters just post worthless shit.
I mean, even on HN, which I consider above average, you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts. 99% of comments are from highly opiniated people with little subject matter experience and no concern for subtlety. It's just not a very good value proposition.
I have a newspaper subscription and like reading editorials, because they often have interesting people talk about relevant topics. Usually the "professional" comments are a lot less divisive, and a lot more fact based than the simplistic bullshit that tends to be upvoted in comment sections.
I still like reading user comments, but I don't think they are a replacement for good journalism or professional writers.
I believe a huge problem of sites like reddit or HN is that from my, a comment writers PoV, it is just not worth it to spend much time on a comment. Even when I feel like writing one, I still only spend a fraction of effort.
The big problem: All comments have a half-life of half a day at most, and even during that short time they are buried in a mountain of other comments. If a story is popular (many potential readers that I could reach) there will also be hundreds of comments, mostly low quality, that make finding good ones hard. If there only a few comments so a good one will stand out more there won't be many readers.
Writing a blog post has a much higher chance to be found over a larger period of time. Probably, depending on the blog. A choice between getting attention (by borrowing the fame of reddit or HN to draw in readers) for a very short period of time, or be easier to find over longer periods but then it depends on the fame of your own blog.
So it is not worth spending a lot of time and effort trying my best because I only reach a handful of people in the first place, but even if it's hundreds, they are all just story- and comment browsing randomly for their daily does of entertainment. That means whatever I write will be forgotten pretty quickly because in the end it's not all that important. Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there.
What I mean by that is that only when you actually end up using what you read in a practical way does it really matter and you remember. Everything else, even if it's really great wisdom, if you have no practical application for it in our own life your brain does not put any priority on retaining the content. Even apart from comments, I for example took loads of courses (edX, Coursera) outside my own field, at the time I spent a lot of effort and even became a community TA in some of those courses (chemistry, statistics, biology). However, I forgot soooo much by now, because in the end none of it has any practical implications for me. With some completely random (all kinds of topics!) comments, even when they are good, it's much worse.
Therefore I don't expect such comment sites to ever rise above what we have now. It just does not really matter for either readers or writers. The quality will always just be "good enough" (on the low side).
PS: Oh and by the way, in my long reddit and HN experience, what gives the most "Likes" rarely is the quality technical stuff - but rare personal anecdotes.
> Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there.
Disagree. Reading these comments, especially when they relate to specific technologies, I have come across numerous systems, resources and techniques that I have gone on to use in practice. I'll just take this opportunity to say a quiet 'thank-you' to their respective authors.
My point is that that is exceedingly rare - it is a statistics game. For the commenters too. You read and write all your life. You don't spend 100% on every comment, even the most committed commenter soon settles into an equilibrium of effort vs. perceived/expected rewards (how many people are you likely to reach that would truly benefit).
For example, you see somebody posting what you know is a big misconception. You spend time and effort educating and clearing it up. Even if you succeed, you soon run out of patience - you reached a hundred people, 5 of whom cared and will remember. However, there are a few hundred million left in the world who still have that misconception, and there still are way more daily conversations and blog posts where the misconception is spread. You on the other hand spent half an hour education a handful of people. How long until you ignore comments you know are wrong and just shrug and go on with your life?
Answering a specific one-time question by pointing to some resource or project is easy enough in comparison. I did not mean to imply that all comments are always useless. I did not think it would be necessary to point that out. See, that's another problem, somebody always comes up with an interpretation of what you write that will make you spend even more time to clarify because you never thought that interpretation would happen.
Could comments be assigned some big weight that has the effect of the comment staying around high enough to clear the misconception?
Could each thread be allowed only a finite number of comments or words, to not disperse attention, with lower quality comments forced to disappear?
Could there be a fool-proof mechanism to force comments you know are wrong to disappear?
If a new site like HN or Reddit showed up, how would would like it work? I ask because I'm toying with the idea of one. Thoughtful beta users get in touch.
> even on HN [...] you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts
Not trying to be rude or a smartass, but umm... your comment didn't pass its own bar. Because you've set the bar incredibly high.
Even on HN, people come for some chatter/community, not only to have their worldview challenged every minute of the hour. Also, chatter is not the same as "no concern for subtlety".
There is crap in every comments feed everywhere. There is crap on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube.
If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.
In this case, "hard" doesn't mean it's an unsolved problem with a lot of complicated variables, it means "expensive". If you charged your commenters $1 for 10 posts you'd be able to throw batches of comments into MTurk and clean out most of the garbage.
If people have to pay you'd have much less bad content to begin with - only the very dedicated trolls would actually put real money on the line to get their shit posted.
The problem is that we are both approaching this as a problem that needs to be solved, while in reality it only needs to appear like one.
Social media companies make their revenue out of "engagement", and posts breaking the rules often generate the most of it, so properly moderating them would actually hurt their bottom line by more than just the cost of said moderation.
These companies are incentivized to leave as much "bad" content up as they can (as it generates engagement) while making it look like they are taking action as to not risk bad PR or legal consequences. Same goes for deterring or punishing offenders - long-term bans are trivial to implement and would significantly deter breaking the rules, but would also decrease "engagement".
If these companies set the wrong metric of success (in other words, if there can be better incentives) and these companies don't follow the better incentives, then better companies will arise.
I was referring to the cost of pruning free comments. If people had to pay, comments sections would be almost completely empty.
Any fee attached to commenting is little different from just banning comments. Few will pay to put their $0.02 on a story they disagree with even fewer will pay if they agree with it. They'll go bitch about it on FB, then bitch about the commenting system too.
As you say, fighting comment trolling and spam is expensive, news media isn't making money hand over fist. I've rarely seen comments add value to a site so why pay to keep them?
This isn't limited to journalism. Advertising-based business models are inherently toxic and completely reverse the incentives between the website and their users.
In a typical paid product, the provider provides a service to the users who are paying the provider for said service. In this case, the provider is incentivized to deliver the best version of that service so that users keep paying, whether it's great journalism with added value (a high-quality comments section would be a plus here) or software.
With advertising, this changes completely. Broadly speaking, the profits negatively correlate with how much value is delivered to the user. There is no incentive great journalism and moderate the comments section while you can churn out inflammatory clickbait and leave comments unmoderated - the latter will actually net you more profit because outraged people barking at each other in the comments is a great source of "engagement" which is what advertising-based business models profit from.
This makes me wonder: how can forum sites (like HN or Reddit) can actually make a money. I guess that HN isn't trying to, but I don't know its balance sheet. Likewise, I believe that Reddit is selling ads and app subscriptions. How do they even stay in business? And what are the fundamental difference from their business model and that of news sites?
Hacker News sells inline advertising. Job posting adverts crop up pretty much daily on here which are adverts. It's a recruiting tool.
As for expenses, HN seems like a lean site and likely doesn't require a ton of resources. I think there is only 1 full time moderator, dang. I have no idea whether YC makes money on HN or not, but I'd be surprised if it didn't at least break even.
Also the free advertising for the brand of Y-combinator. With the reach HN has these days having your name out there right in the domain means that the on balance positive reputation of HN rubs off on your enterprise. It's basically a huge 'sponsored by' byline. This doesn't necessarily translate into a net positive for a company, but in this case I am willing to bet it does.
It's honestly a fairly transparent transaction, and much preferable to the opaque world of on-line targetted advertising. I like how my ad-blocker just sits here twiddling its thumbs.
Forums don't require much resources from a technical point of view - most of it would be for moderation, but even then, there are usually enough passionate community members out there to do it voluntarily for free.
You can make enough money to sustain the thing with a one-time joining fee or unobtrusive, directly-negotiated advertising. You just can't make unsustainable VC-level money.
Reddit also sells super-upvotes (called "awards") that you can buy individually or as a component of a premium (ad-free) subscription. Not sure how much revenue that produces compared to ads, but it's definitely a component.
That seems completely reasonable, as local newspapers were never two-direction mass-communication before, but it's somehow harder to justify removing a comments section once you've decided to have it.
Sure, but that is a moderated communication channel. They pick and choose what to publish and, unlike most comment sections, unmoderated content is not visible to your audience. The opaqueness of the moderation process in a world without instant mass communication (i.e. the internet) would also likely have made it unlikely for your readers (users) did not have an expectation for their messages to be quickly reviewed or published.
The other big advantage is that the only participants in channel are the newspaper and the submitter; no interaction between third parties on your platform means no flame wars or the like.
If you haven't seen it, this article [1] on the London Review of Books about Glenn Gould is a good start. It's a really long essay on why Glenn Gould is amazing while Alfred Brendel doesn't get it, only for Brendel to show up in the "comments". These comments are actually letters to the editor, so it's the world's most educated and polite internet fight.
And if you can tolerate the meme format, [2] is my favorite academic fight of all times.
That curation is also a problem. In an era where every news outlet is biased, and most of the major ones are lurching ideological leftward, and journalists bring their personal politics to work, the lack of equal and uninhibited reach for opposing viewpoints is a problem.
Yes, but letters to the editor were picked by the editors for their ideas and for their writing. It was a high bar, often higher than the newspaper itself. So I used to enjoy reading them because of this.
Not really; it's ideal. Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire. Individual message boards, small, and well regulated can be a wonderful gift. Commenting away from the primary publication, but about the primary publication seems ideal.
>Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire
Except for substack. In an interesting twist the comment sections on substack are thoughtful and polite with the authors chiming in -- at least in my experience. Don't know how to explain that compared to most sites. Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
Just give it some time. Once the user base swells up I'm sure the site will witness a general decline in quality, unless the moderation tools catch up.
This is something I've seen with countless forums and message boards over the years, i.e. Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.
So true. I was thinking about Clubhouse recently and realized there are two basic forces that conspire against successful new platforms:
1) Going mainstream / mass appeal means the lowest common denominator drops, whether that's content or quality of conversation
2) Commercialization incentivizes the wrong things - see Twitter and how its been optimised for "engagement" above all else (not quality of content, or user happiness etc).
Interesting things are happening at Clubhouse but surely they know how this will go. I think successful new platforms that want to maintain their integrity should be looking at paid membership. Substack might be OK because of that.
Add The Athletic, a subscription service, to the pile. Early adopters were enthusiastic and polite in the comments section. Even just one year in, the tenor had changed significantly.
> Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
That's certainly not true for all substacks. Authors choose whether each post is paid-subscriber-only or not, and publicly visible posts can be commented on by unpaid accounts.
Maybe Substack comments are better because they represent a narrow audience (people interested in the output of a particular writer). Generally it is up to the author of the substack to moderate its comments.
There's no reason these are mutually exclusive. We can be happy that we have our own little forum for discussion while still feeling others should have the right to discuss content where it is. Alternative isn't better than mainstream, it's just different.
>Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire.
Only because they are not moderated properly. Newspapers should simply have a staff member read and approve every post. It really doesn't take that long to read something and hit yes or no.
With comments, they could have become facebook. They still can become facebook by offering comments, letting their readers create profiles and expand from there.
Newspapers aren't swimming in money because they don't go all in on online content. Moderating comments, choosing information for their readers, that's their core competence. Writing articles or printing is secondary.
They’re not swimming in money because a thousand small independent newsrooms across the country, working independently, were no match for the massive VC-backed attention-stealing ad-revenue-sucking social networks coming out of Silicon Valley.
Yeah, it works at NYT scale. They have a massive paying subscriber base, and they can afford to operate both automatic and manual moderation systems. But it’s not scalable downwards.
I think part of it is the commenters belonging to a community that has some sort of shared understanding. Whether that be a political leaning, or a desire for respectful comments (HN to some degree), or a view that flame wars and insults aren't a problem (4chan).
I don't want 50 different accounts and comment sections. I want to take articles I'm interested in and bring them to the town square or pub to talk about. This is that.
Hacker News specializes in being an online message board, so they actually have the moderation staff to manage the platform they're running.
A news site running a comments section is sort of like a restaurant deciding they should also sell groceries. Can it work? Maybe - but more likely most people didn't want to pick up groceries at your restaurant, while people looking to steal food know that it's unattended most of the time, so you have a massive shrink rate problem. That doesn't mean groceries are a bad idea, it means it's something people need to specialize into.
The HN moderation is (AFAIK still) a 1-2 man show, with @dang doing fantastic work as a moderator, but also much helped with the upvote/downvote, flag and a whole bunch of algorithms.
Very few news orgs devote the resources needed to curate messages for relevance and filter trolls and flames.
Furthermore, places want to make money on subscribers so potentially have an incentive not to remove postsade by subscribers (no substance behind that theory).
Nytimes is the only news site I see that doesn't have absolute trash for dialogue quality.
Credit to the mods here. They have a vision for a culture, and they've done a good job at it. It doesn't mean it's the only way to have a conversation. I recognize this sentiment is going to be unpopular here. There are probably other places that would feel the opposite, that HN is a groupthink SV bubble with any diversity just a riff on that theme. I like it here, but I swear some people here think they have a monopoly on truth.
Agreed, and most of there comment sections are badly moderated in the first place. I find more insightful comments on Reddit and other platforms anyway.
I’m amazed you’re not getting more comments of agreement. There was a period of two years where every single 538 article had a “I’ll make you $500” comment and 538 couldn’t/wouldn’t take them down.
Newspapers struggle to exist as is without devoting more resources to an obsolete forum system. Better to retreat to a BBS system for overall discussion of the newspaper and let HN/Reddit/4chan provide platforms of discussion for your articles.
There is a middle ground of outsourcing the comments handling to companies like Disqus. But the Philadelphia Inquirer does say that (a) it has tried everything, presumably including considering this option, and (b) the comments have proven to be not actually useful to the publication nor widely used (outwith a small group) by readers outwith two specific areas.
> But the Philadelphia Inquirer does say that (a) it has tried everything, presumably including considering this option
They claim they tried "everything", but did they actually try everything? For example, did they try limiting commenting to paying subscribers only? They don't mention in this post whether they actually tried that or not.
I couldn’t disagree more. Many people don’t have accounts with these other websites like Reddit, or don’t want to make them, or don’t want to deal with the biases of those various echo chambers. Having a community of news readers has a lot of utility. And from the news sites that I read (both local and national), I see very few outright spammy comments. I see a lot of legitimate push back and diverse opinions that provide different shades of perspectives on issues.
What I do see as an increasing and disturbing trend is newspapers selectively turning off comment sections on stories that are controversial. The Seattle Times does this, and in 2020 the readers were robbed of the opportunity to discuss controversial situations freely (like CHAZ or a violent BLM riot). This was presumably done to avoid the trouble of moderation of PR, but a less charitable and very believable take is that this amounts to controlled manufacturing of public opinion by disallowing a dissenting viewpoint.
In the absence of comment sections, all that’s left is one journalist’s biased take and characterization. With news houses across the country experiencing left-leaning employee activism and newsroom revolts, the opinions of readers is extremely important to not just platform, but feature prominently as a balancing force. And yes, anonymous comments in particular must be permitted, so the voice of those who aren’t in power is heard.
And if you need to be informed to comment online should also require the same levels for voting. It seems it would be just as if not more so for the latter.
Also, who's deciding the truth so that we know what informed is?
I think the point is that there are enough outlets, and the barriers creating them are so low, that you, Guthur, could create one with the threshold you wish. If others agreed it would become popular.
And that seems to be the position of the Inquirer (and nj.com that they reference): they are outsourcing comments to Twitter, FB etc)
Thanks for explaining what spam was--I think a lot of the people here probably were unaware. It's always good to learn things.
Anyway, more to the point: First, the comments are almost always the most interesting part of a mainstream article, to the point where I will scroll down to see if they are there (if not--don't bother). Are there idiots posting? Yep--just scroll past, no problem. Second, Mainstream media dislikes comments because they don't like people pointing out their errors. (No one does, of course.)
I used to handle comment moderation for a metro newspaper, and I was floored by the amount of time and effort people put into posting racist diatribes. We had some who must've been script kiddies, because they started automating their comments, just like spammers. But they were selling hate, rather than ED pills.
I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.
> I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.
That's an excellent idea, too bad management said no. a friend of mine works on an outlet where only paid subscribers can comment. Not only it reduces spam by 100% but it actually allows for a more thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
There were multiple reasons why it was not considered an acceptable option, but one of it had to do with the fact that if we limited comments only to paid subscribers, then what happens when a paid subscriber breaks the rules and gets banned?
Is it an all-time ban? Or just a temporary ban, until their subscription renews? What if they deserve an all-time ban? Will that lead to them cancelling their subscription altogether? I think management was (overly) concerned about tying a person's conduct in the comments to their subscription, for fear of lost revenue.
That's where making commenting a perk (among others) of being a __paying subscriber__ would be a change in business model that might be beneficial. Though that alone wouldn't get me to pay. Weight towards focus of research I find valuable might.
Back in the day the revenue from charging someone to comment paled in comparison to the reason everyone added comment sections: user generated content attracted traffic from search engines.
In the early 2000s I used to run a small travel related website and added commenting. Ads just on comment deep link pages paid the rent on my apartment.
Even if it doesn't make the comments better, it's at least the paper's paying audience, so at the very least it's "authentic." If their subscriber base is all racists, well, I guess that's enlightening.
Just the requirement that one have valid payment mechanism deanonymizes most people, at least to the newspaper. That should tamper most of the worst behavior. The holdout jerks can then be banned in a way that sticks.
Slight tangent. There was a program on Dutch TV yesterday (we have elections now) and it appeared that just about 500 twitter accounts are doing much to influence public opinion. There were some script kiddy bots (one posting every 14 seconds from a wide range of pre-cooked responses), but a significant amount of the influencing came from pensionados. People around 75 years old (mostly male) having nothing else to do, and not anonymous but really very proud of their work.
If trolls, or any one user, can make dozens of accounts per day, that's on you. You can very easily stop account creation from VPN and TOR IPs, and of course limit it from real IPs. Or make it so new accounts can't post for 2 weeks or need a certain "karma" to post, etc etc.
>I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.
The project comes up on HN quite frequently, and there are many, many issues built into the project.
For a start they redefine a lot of words and concepts to their own meanings, rather than commonly accepted ones, in a way that's reminiscent of cult-y organisations. These then feed into their own obscure programming language. This serves as a barrier to entry and an in-group language.
Secondly, well it was started by Curtis Yarvin, whose (unpalatable) ideas about neo-feudalism are baked in.
But yeah, look up prior HN discussions if you want more info. Urbit is an oddity, and not necessarily a good one.
It seems to me one of the few real projects using blockchain technologies in a sensible way. Honestly not sure why it wouldn't use blockchain technologies. Urbit has been using blockchain tech since before bitcoin or Ethereum existed.
Here is from the original article quoted on the Wikipedia page: "Since 2002, Yarvin had been working on an algorithm — the backbone of Urbit, a product that would restructure how people use the internet. In 2013, he launched the San Francisco-based company Tlon, which oversees Urbit."
Can't really find any info about when they officially "created" this thing, but color me skeptical when someone says they "worked on blockchain" before blockchain was even invented.
I think I was probably just wrong to describe it as a blockchain (sorry about that). It was a different kind of consensus ledger. Here's an article about it:
Glad that Urbit agrees that they don't need a blockchain. Disappointed that they chose to use one. There are real downsides to using one (currently one of those is speed and another is wasted electricity) and no unique benefits.
>By ensuring that nobody will bother using your service? Sure, I guess.
You're begging the question (i.e. whether or not Urbit ID would succeed). Besides, Urbit ID needn't be forced on users, it could be offered side-by-side other options.
>Besides, what you're proposing is essentially the same as "charging for account creation", but with extra steps.
There are several major differences, the most obvious of which is that an Urbit ID user would not have to pay to create an account. This is because the Urbit ID could be tied to many different accounts across the internets. In other words, a person could pay for one Urbit ID, and then be able to comment on many on-line internet journals using that single Urbit ID.
Well, I was a big evangelist for the idea back int he 1990s, as well as for anonymous posting. With hindsight, this was a big mistake, predicated on an overly rosy view of democracy-as-civic-participation. I thought that people who really wanted to comment (such as myself) were doing so in good faith and wanted ideas to succeed or fail on their merits.
On the one hand, I formed these overly rosy views prior to Eternal September, but on the other it should have occurred to me that the reason trash tabloids sold in large quantities was not that people were tricked into buying them but because a lot of people are in fact awful.
> predicated on an overly rosy view of democracy-as-civic-participation
Ah, the 90s... when people would deliberately leave mail relays open as a service to the community, and people just made stuff for others to use, without worrying too much about hacks or security because the internet is a community and that sort of thing would be bad netiquette...
A simpler time.
There was a time and a place for flamewars, and it was called usenet.
I'd guess the rationale for comments would be implicit before then. e.g. it's not strange to see that there's a chat alongside livestreams on Twitch, or a comment section beneath YouTube videos. There's a natural community of people interested in the content enough to comment. - I'd guess the difference here is that newspapers get significantly more traffic from social media.
I'd also think it comes from a positive vision of technology. The internet as a means of "making the world more connected". Empower people to communicate in ways which weren't possible before. - Turns out this wasn't as positive as expected.
From memory, published arguments have only been against right from the start, because it was so popular that the pro side needed no support.
Comments and social sections were the big in-thing in the latter part of the noughties, if you were trying to make your site modern and hip, it was assumed you'd have comments and share links on everything. I recall a degree of belief that social media was the future and if you didn't integrate with it you'd get left behind, but I think as much it was just a design fad.
Doc Searls, Kevin Kelley, probably Clay Shirkey, various O'Reilly heads, Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Declan McCullough, I recall or suspect, were among the boosters.
I'm reading some late-1990s sources (Lawrence Lessig's Code, Andrew Shapiro's Control Revolution) which cover some of this ground. I was there for it myself, though memory is a faulty guide..
Online search is difficult as later writings cloud the results.
Get your readers arguing with each other - makes pageviews go up, which makes ad revenue go up, all without spending more money on those pesky journalists.
Purely a matter of scarcity. Back then people had a real need to know what other people think about things. Then they found out, then they found out more than they should, then they no longer needed to know, then they realized they couldn't stop the torrent so they jumped in to purely vent.
If you're not willing to go all in on community, this is the right decision.
But you are giving up something. Rather than focus on the small commenting audience as a detraction, look at it as an opportunity to grow. 2% seems small, but I bet a huge portion of that is paying subscribers. There are publications that have a healthy commenting section, so we know it's possible.
At one point in time Digg (which has gone to the dogs now) had a thing where they'd have a sort of AMA with the author of an article featured on their front page. I thought that was fantastic. I wonder if the Inquirer considered allowing subscribers to ask questions of journalists, which (if answered) would appear as a comment below the article. You take the money you're paying your moderators, and you pay your journalist more for the time they're spending on that.
NU.nl used to be famous (in a bad way) for the comment section. After closing the comment section for a while they reopened it again using software 'Talk' from the Coral Project. This software was made by a few and for news organizations.
The difference is quite drastic. They still need to moderate a bit, but the effect is quite good. It also learns from the moderation, thereby lowering the amount of moderation required.
The site does close the ability to comment during the night, comments are closed after a certain period, plus commenting is sometimes not possible (if they don't expect the article to be visible during the day).
People still often complain about the comment section of NU.nl, but for me there's been a drastic change. There's almost no trolling going on. They allow different opinions, even if those comments are badly researched. People tend to focus on the poorly thought out comments. Though I appreciate them (not everyone knows everything or can easily find the answer).
The decision to disable comments is not one that requires an explanation to anyone who has used the internet in the last decade. I’m still amazed that this site hasn’t yet turned into a garbage fire.
It's burning at the edges. The mods here do a great job, but the fire is there. For proof - turn on dead comments and take a read through of that mess.
I hate this trend of shutting down comment sections.
Only very establishment public opinions will now be allowed to be shared on mass media. What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you?
Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS.
Whatever you do on the internet, you're always at the mercy of private companies. You're always subject to your hosting company or domain registrar or ISP or whatever.
On some level, private companies have to allow everyone neutral access. Like phone companies and the USPS, the internet should be accessible.
On the other hand, comment sections under news articles are really not the way I'd make this argument. Let's talk about net neutrality first.
Yep, I think net neutrality should solve the ISP and hosting problems (you can self host out of your basement). Domain registrars are harder; can we get net neutrality to apply to them?
> Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech.
Actually, it does, that's the liberal ideal of free speech, that it 's a public protected good. Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
> Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
It absolutely is. You are still free to propagate your ideas. You have no claim to use other people's tools or access other people's property to do so.
You are not entitled to an audience. If that means you're literally screaming into the void because nobody else wants anything to do with you, then that's still free speech.
I m actually talking about the case where you are not. Private actors cancelling people is exactly that, taking away their freedom to propagate them. They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs like, nobody says "build your own electric grid". We live in era of digital communication, and just like in the past the state built roads to connnect people, it needs to build basic infrastructure for communication and social networking. Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association (esp. in a time of pandemic and lockdowns)
> I m actually talking about the case where you are not.
No, you aren't. You're talking about using other people's services, infrastructure and registered users.
Twitter is not the world. It's a small subset of the world shouting at each other. It's not the way to reach everyone, nor is it the only way to reach people. And it's certainly not the commons or public property.
> They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs
But you can build your own twitter-alike, and people have done, rendering this entire point moot.
Further "fundamental need"? Maybe take a step back and look at your life if you don't think you could get by without twitter. I've never joined, I know very few people that bother with it.
> Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association
Clearly it's not a right, as people can be and are frequently denied access to the internet entirely by judges in many countries including the US. And even if it were, using a particular platform is not.
Your right to free speech doesn't extend to other people's property, and you do not have a right to access any audience. And you never have had.
> It's always someone else's services, whether that was a printing press or a telegraph.
You can easily make your own printing press or telegraph system, though the work is in laying lines. Further, you never had the right to compel someone to print your book, nor send your telegrams. You are inventing these rights.
> Governments are in it in official capacity, and not in some other system.
Are there really governments who put information on twitter that is not published by other means? That's a massive dereliction of duty if so, given twitter serves a small subset of any given population.
> Yes communication which includes social networking is a fundamental need
Twitter kicking you off is not denying you the ability to communicate. Social networking is not a fundamental need, as evidenced by the fact that not everyone uses it, in fact the majority do not. The vast, vast majority if we're talking about twitter, which has an audience of around 100-150 million worldwide. You are exaggerating this massively.
> Freedom of association is a fundamental human right
Your idea of digital freedom to associate is clearly not something that exists at present, nor ever has.
> had the right to compel someone to print your book
You had the protected right to distribute the thing you printed, it's called freedom of press. There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter, i m not claiming that twitter should be forced to accept everyne, but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative and b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
> You had the protected right to distribute the thing you printed, it's called freedom of press
But you couldn't, for instance, gain access to private premises or gatherings to do so, or force them into people's hands. You could (and still can) hand them out on the streets. Marconi was never obliged to broadcast it on his radio systems.
> There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And they aren't under threat.
> And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter
You mentioned it first, if you go upthread - "build your own twitteR", so I presumed that platform was primarily your concern. It certainly seems to be one that's copping a lot of heat for deplatforming lately, mostly around election denial, Q etc.
> a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
I mean, nobody is completely deplatformed at the moment. There are choices up to and including building your own pages. What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap? No problem is solved, people relegated to that public platform would still be shouting into the void.
> b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
If they do so on a commercial platform, which they joined because it already had a critical mass of people, I don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves.
You seem to be arguing there for a federated system - might be worth your while looking into Mastodon.
I m not american and i don't care at all about those
> nobody is completely deplatformed
I m pretty sure there are quite a few who have been chased out of the internet completely , without being illegal
> What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap?
So what, public TV usually doesnt get high rankings but is still valuable. It's still better than having no platform at all
> don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves
They should at least have a real way to get a copy of their audience, through some well defined protocol. The friend identifiers they get should be actually usable, enough so that they could find their audience in another platform.
Mastodon is actually a good platform to use for a public platform,
and i look forward to seeing publicly-funded servers.
>You had the protected right to distribute the thing you printed, it's called freedom of press.
That has nothing to do with what the original post was about. Yes, you can print whatever you want. But you cannot compel someone else to do it. You moved the target for some reason.
>but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
So your argument against censorship is to hand the reigns to the actual government? What happens when your free platform for individuals to ensure they cannot be deplatformed becomes a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
>b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
They didn't acquire the audience themselves. They used a 3rd party platform to do that. I don't understand this statement.
i dont think i moved a target because i found the analogy disingenuous. You can also write your tweets in notepad, but what twitter provides is the distribution, not the storage of 140 bytes.
> a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
Then it becomes a subject or what is allowed by the legal system, which is a situation vastly superior than being at the whim of a few high ranking employees with no transparency.
> They used a 3rd party platform to do that.
That's like saying dostoyevsky didnt write his novels, he used someone's pen to write them. Sorry i find that absolutely weak
>You're talking about using other people's services, infrastructure and registered users.
You sound a lot like someone who is against net neutrality with this statement. Does ATT or Comcast have to allow all content through their network or not? Why can't they regulate what goes through their infrastructure? Twitter has a near monopoly on their type of service, similar to ATT or Comcast. What makes it ok for Twitter to regulate but not more root services? What about DNS? Can the registrars regulate who can register a name? Why?
> Twitter has a near monopoly on their type of service
Twitter has a user base of approximately 1.5% of the world's population. It's not an essential communications tool by any stretch of the imagination. There are multiple other services, most of which gain little to no traction because it appears that to most humans, twitter-style communication is entirely uninteresting. I count myself in that (large) number.
> similar to ATT or Comcast
Except those companies appear to have literal monopolies on internet access in places in the US, which is not the same situation at all. Not being in the US I find that situation bizarre.
> Can the registrars regulate who can register a name?
Probably. Certainly the various authorities are empowered to do so.
> Why?
That's a far more interesting question, and certainly up for debate. Should some level of communications access be a right? If it is, who pays for it? Who runs it? Does anyone or any government get to decide what's acceptable behaviour on such a system? Why? But equally, why not? I'm entirely open to that discussion, it's probably a discussion that needs to be publicly had in western societies, at some point.
But "It's my right to exercise my speech on twitter!" reeks of entitlement and is not supported by any existing concept of speech rights. It also reeks of conflating twitter, a large but still niche service, with communication in general. Twitter just isn't as important as people like to make out.
Part and parcel with free speech (in America it's also right there in the first amendment) is free association.
You don't and can never have, a right to an audience, because people have a separate right to choose whom they associate with, and everyone can choose not to be in your audience if you're terrible/boring/stupid enough.
exactly you have the right to associate, and in the digital association era this right is being curtailed by private actors. This is a problem, and as an ultimate solution, states should provide social networking/communication services to their citizens.
I don't understand the "right to an audience" argument. Maybe CNN can claim they have own their audience because they literally earned it, but in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership. Even though one's social network is not yet protected legally, it should, and people's audience grown in a platform still belongs to people, the same way that private information put on a platform is still owned by people
> this right is being curtailed by private actors.
It really isn't. They can keep you off their platform, nothing more.
> states should provide social networking/communication services to their citizens.
And you think this would be less censored?
> in social media individuals earn their own audience
So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter? Twitter itself has nothing to do with it? You really think that? Platforms just pop out of the air fully formed?
>They can keep you off their platform, nothing more.
Why? Because you believe corporations are people?
>And you think this would be less censored?
By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
>> in social media individuals earn their own audience
>So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter?
Is this honestly how you interpreted the OP comment? Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter. They are nothing without the content creators since they don't create any content.
> Why? Because you believe corporations are people?
No, but I believe that in general they have a legal right to control the services they make available, within the limits of the laws on hate, discrimination etc.
> By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
Twitter is not just in the USA, FYI. People engaging in unpopular speech on "Gov Twitter" could still be sidelined effectively, by other groups. I imagine an adblock-style distributed blacklist might spring up pretty fast. Then what? I have a right to be heard by anyone I choose to spew my opinions at?
> Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter.
Without the platform on which to create and disseminate said content there would be no audience. I'm not trying to say that it's all one party responsible. Quite the opposite.
I'm trying to point out that this - "in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership" - is wrong. The company have provided a platform and fostered its use, which gives people a place to go and gather an audience. It's symbiotic. You can't at the same time claim that twitter is a fundamental, irreplaceable human need (that 98% of humans apparently don't need) while claiming it's contributed nothing to creating a community and an audience.
All of them, signed up to twitter specifically to follow those other people they already knew about? None signed up because of the service itself, and the generic offering?
It's nothing at all to do with twitter building the platform, advertising the platform, creating a user base? Nobody followed someone else because the platform promoted something, or made it easy to discover people, anything like that?
In that case twitter itself is completely unimportant. If you can build an audience without relying on twitter's existing user base, then why do you care if twitter bans you? Go build that somewhere else.
So twitter is both a fundamental right that cannot be easily replicated, and a complete irrelevance that has done nothing at all that would give them any claim to their own user-base?
Your question is poorly worded. Twitter created the platform and fostered the community. The content creators and the platform have grown together. I'm challenging your idea that the platform has contributed nothing, not asserting that it contributes everything. Without their creative ideas to build the platform in the first place, make content discoverable etc etc, it wouldn't exist either.
> that world view is by no means uncommon
I'm not convinced that wikipedia article describes the worldview above - "twitter is both a fundamental right that cannot be easily replicated, and a complete irrelevance that has done nothing at all"
I understand why there might be interest in developing ideas around digital communication rights. It's definitely an interesting topic and one that's going to become more relevant over time.
I am specifically challenging you on the idea that they already exist, and are encompassed by rights such as freedom of speech, which has never encompassed free access to the means to disseminate that speech, or freedom of assembly, which has never included the right to assemble on someone else's property.
Go ahead and argue these are useful ideas we need to talk about, that existing rights need to be mapped and interpreted more expansively in the digital world, that we should start building platforms as a society which encompass these ideas, I might even be on your side.
But being banned on twitter is no violation of any existing right. Especially as twitter is a niche communication tool.
> Twitter created the platform and fostered the community.
Look, i see this as shorthand for "twitter gathered the attention".But that doesn't mean that they own the attention or the people whose attention they have. Good of them to be pioneers, but, like everything, social media is 15 year old tech now and is commodity. The undeniable thing is, users funded 99% of the effort with their work and often with their own ad money, and twitter did 1%. Same (or worse) would go for other social networks. They created a viral vortex, but the intrinsic value of that is not as high as is perceived to be -- in fact most of the value is in lock-in and monopoly rather than in technical facilitation. I find the fact that neither twitter nor FB pay their users quite egregious, and attribute it to 2 things: 1) they have no competitor in their niche and 2) user collectives dont exist and users are not uninionized while those companies are uber-powerful in terms of money and lobbying.
> they already exist,
They don't exist but are coming, in fact i'd say they are late already. I think we 'll soon see major shifts to that direction . Practically, yes they will be just an extension of freedom of speech laws, that's the category where they belong (like how e.g. sexual orientation was added to anti-discrimination laws).
I m not arguing that free speech/free assembly rights will trample on property rights, but that the state should make sure public spaces exist for people to exercise those rights. However platforms should be required by law to make user data (including their friends identifiers) exportable.
I m no legal expert but I wouldn't rule out that some companies may be held into account if a judge judges that they acted in coordination and maliciously to obstruct someones free speech rights.
So again, if social media is a commodity, why does it matter if someone gets kicked off a particular network?
You can't have this both ways.
There are no free speech right implications at all for this, a judge would throw the case out.
FB and Twitter don't pay their users because they're providing a service that their users value for free. Frankly if that's not a good enough deal for you, don't use it. I try not to, they're a waste of bandwidth IMHO.
This is a popular idea around here but is actually fairly radical and a pretty significant departure from what free speech has been understood to mean in the past.
That doesn't make it wrong and we do seem to be headed in that general direction. Just understand that what you're proposing doesn't necessarily follow from pre-internet free speech protections and is a different ideal.
> free speech has been understood to mean in the past.
I actually think the opposite , that in the past free speech was a well guarded liberalist ideal, and we 've regressed to confusing the freedom of internal monologue as free speech.
The people banned from Twitter or otherwise 'censored' by private business are still free to use a literal soapbox in the literal town square to communicate with fellow citizens.
It does require more effort though; there is that.
To be fair - news is not a social media platform. I don't know why every webpage on the internet needs a comments section anyways. News articles can be posted elsewhere for public comment and discussion. Like here or reddit, twitter, etc.
Exactly, the OP comment is pretty ridiculous. It's equivalent to demanding the local news TV station put your phone call on air so you can share your uneducated and often off topic opinion on what was just displayed.
There’s value in a discussion being tied to the community of news readers as its own social environment. Twitter and Reddit have heavy, biased moderation that don’t even allow many legitimate viewpoints. Plus you have to deal with their user bases, who are strongly opinionated and would drown out the voices of dedicated followers of a newspaper. Just like any community subset has some value in its separation and identity, there is value in the news comment sections.
First, the comments that cause this are so from "establishment opinions" that you can be well outside them and still not come close to what they're talking about. Second, what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify? Seems like some have started to understand freedom of speech as "you're free to publish exactly what I tell you to publish!" Freedom of speech also means that I'm free not to repeat what you say. This understanding of freedom of speech is the one that has been at the very core of media companies and educational institutions for ages; they're free to shape their reputation by choosing which speech they publish.
> what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify
What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? Above a certain size, these platforms are public utilities and public town squares. For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
> For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
So newspapers will be required to publish any story, no matter how true? Universities will be required to teach any theory, no matter how crackpot? Twitter will be required to promote porn just as it does other content?
> What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society?
But they don't. You have huge, successful websites devoted to porn. A publication like Quillette builds its reputation around pseudoscience and is free to do so. You have entire cable news networks devoted to conspiracy theories. But yes, more mainstream venues try to shape their reputation by not amplifying more fringe speech. Not only has this always been the case, but that's what everyone understood "free speech" means. You have more mainstream publications and fringe ones.
I’m not proposing that newspapers publish any story submitted by the general public as a news article, if that’s what you’re taking away. For newspapers I am proposing that their comment section should be free of censorship. For social media I am proposing the same. That also means their algorithms would need to “promote” things in a content neutral way. I’m also proposing that society is served better when ideas from powerful publishers (like journalists at big newspapers) are easily challenged by the public via features like comments sections.
I think we’re getting a bit off topic but since you mentioned it - universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories. As institutions with tremendous power, they influence society greatly but their commitment to a one-sided biased environment serves to only amplify one ideology, and this unbalanced outcome is effectively propagandizing all of society. Giant social media platforms are similarly problematic, because their degree of reach and network effects give them power other new social networks cannot mirror or challenge. Their policies restricting content that they don’t like ends up amplifying one worldview disproportionately while shutting down others, which also is effectively propagandist. In both cases these institutions are as powerful and influential as nations’ governments, and their choices to promote certain speech or censor certain speech are as damaging as the government taking such action. We have outsourced the ability to exercise fundamental rights like free speech and free thought to spaces that are legally non public but really should be held to the public standard.
Your claim is that there are “huge, successful sites” or other media that fall outside the control of these institutions I am complaining about. However, that’s not really the whole truth because the scale of those alternatives is simply completely different. Facebook has more users than any country and Twitter is probably close to that as well. Universities have no diversity of thought and there isn’t much of an alternative to the university system at all. It doesn’t matter if some other alternative site could have millions of users carrying speech blocked on Facebook or Twitter, because the amplification of ideas allowed on the biggest platforms will drown out all others. These are really public squares that should be held to public regulation, including upholding the right to free speech.
As an aside, your inaccurate and uncharitable characterization of Quillette as building a reputation around “pseudoscience”, when it is actually built around high quality critical thought, makes me think you’re on one side of this ideological war and happy with the status quo because your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views. But what you’re labeling as fringe wouldn’t be fringe if it was given a fair chance to be heard and amplified in various institutions or platforms. Because ideologues have tried to suppress and diminish challenging views in aggressive and unfair ways, these ideas are in lesser prominence than they deserve.
> your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views.
Can you be more specific about which views precisely are being censored/deplatformed en mass, which, in your opinion, gained more mainstream dissemination and/or respect in the past?
When people attack the freedom of speech in the name of the freedom of speech, what they want is their fringe speech to be treated with the same respect as more mainstream kinds of speech. That is not freedom of speech, nor has it ever been the norm. Freedom of speech includes the freedom of various institutions to relegate some speech to the fringe.
> universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories.
That those theories are crackpot is the opinion of a group of people who are not researchers in any relevant field, based on a "study" that, itself, meets no criteria for scientific research, but you are free to believe what you like and even say it -- see, no one is censoring you. The point is that universities are free to choose what to teach and what to "censor" as that is freedom of speech. It is not freedom of speech to demand the same level of academic/publishing respect to be afforded to all views.
BTW, my characterisation of Quillette as a platform for pseudoscience is accurate and based purely on scientific rigour. It is perfectly reasonable for respectable publications to avoid that content, and yet those who seek it or disseminate it are not censored.
It feels very strange to me that you are viewing a (privately moderated) comment section as the forum for public speech. These comment sections have existed for little more than a decade and have never been a useful forum, neither have they been the place where civic organizing happens.
> Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS.
They would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, on down the line for this to be true. There are dozens of places where you can call out the media for their nonsense.
As recent politics have proved, calling someone out for their bullshit is pointless when you have millions of people willing to buy into their bullshit regardless.
It's a sad state of affairs when online comment sections have become an integral part of the social cohesion (such as it is) of a society.
In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes.
The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section.
Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.
No public ability? Not sure if that’s said with a straight face, but there are a multitude of platforms to bind your comments to a particular article/post/entry/etc. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News come readily to mind. There are many, many, many other ways of getting your opinion out there online.
Content producers of any ilk are in no way obliged (and imo expected) to provide and administer a public forum alongside their work.
Did you read the article? Better yet, did you read the comments at the bottom of The Inquirer's articles? You know things are bad when a media organization realizes that online discussions about sports _in Philadelphia_ are the least toxic ones on their site.
This was a good decision. Nothing of value was lost. The 2% of productive commenters can go back to writing letters to the editor. The 98% can go back to the chans.
>> What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you?
From the article:
The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It
does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to
provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The
Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish.
Freedom of speech is necessary in a democratic society in order for citizens to be able to criticise their government freely. It is not meant to protect any (non-existent) right to verbally attack one's fellow citizens with impunity. Indeed, most modern nations that have legislation that protects freedom of speech also have legislation that protects their citizens from defamatory, or libellous speech, and many also protect individuals from hateful speech that targets personal characteristics like sexuality or religion.
tl;dr, freedom of speech sets you free to punch up, not to punch down.
I like the substack model, in order to comment you must be subscribed to the newsletter (say $5 per month), while others can read the article and comments.
I don't know if that's the best method though. If some PAC decided it was going to pay for the subscriptions of its members as a campaign, then that subscription model isn't really a big barrier.
I’d imagine that’s substantially less common than your everyday racist spambots in news comment sections. I doubt the amount of influence you can gain from astroturfing a news comments section is worth the cost of dozens of newspaper subscriptions.
And most news papers already have a login for paid subscribers. Seems like a nobrainer. Certainly will attract less bot spam if you need to be a paid subscriber.
Vice also doesn't have comments [0] on their articles. What other big venues do this (NPR, Atlantic, NJ.com are listed in the Inquirer article)? Or I guess many just embed Facebook comments or some other outside network and consider it someone else's problem?
That said, this doesn't seem to be the norm yet. A number of news sites I frequent try to solve this by hiding the comments section by default. NYT sometimes hides comments on articles posted on weekends when they have fewer content moderators available, they say. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/reader-center/comments-mo...
Let me also suggest that sites have found that comments don't provide any useful input or data for measuring "engagement" or anything else that contributes meaningfully to ad revenue.
For people who need to comment where the publisher has blocked, you can use Anywyse which is a chrome extension that lets users ask or answer questions on any webpage.
It would be neat if there was a forum that provided a comment section for every website url. Users could use a browser add-on to display the comment section when they browse to a page. The key point here is that there is only one comment section per url. I think this is different enough from reddit. HN, etc that it could be interesting in a unique way.
Back in the early, heigh-days of the web, there was a service started up that allowed anyone to add any annotations to a web site that they desired - I thought this was pretty neat, until it wasn't, due to abuse.
But I still think we need this kind of service, allowing anonymous annotations that could be turned on/off as a visible layer for any visitor to a website. Seems to me, it might be time for this idea to be re-tried ..
You might be interested in Memex. Right now its mostly for personal annotations but they are currently also adding social features.
https://getmemex.com/
This actually already existed and it was (is) called Dissenter (https://dissenter.com/). It is built by Gab, a pro free speech social network that has been maligned by the political left and anti free speech crowd.
In an absolutely shocking affront to the neutrality of web browsers, Firefox banned Dissenter from their extension stores (https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-rejects-free-speech-bans-f...) because they disagree with an exceedingly small number of offensive comments made on there. Chrome later did the same and Dissenter has its own browser now (https://reclaimthenet.org/dissenter-free-speech-browser/). But obviously being removed from those browsers’ extension stores seriously limits its reach.
There are many HN comments saying “you can just discuss these articles elsewhere”, but when tech companies are censoring/deplatforming any views they disagree with in unison, there aren’t ways to have honest and open discussions unless you align with a certain worldview (progressive views) or have incredibly limited reach. You simply can’t speak freely on controversial topics like gender identity or critical race theory or illegal immigration on Reddit, Twitter, on your own apps in App stores (see bans of Gab or Parler), or even our web browsers. I will be not at all surprised when it comes down to browsers or phones blocking which websites you can visit.
Calling Gab pro free speech is pretty rich. They ban people for being Democrats or being critical of gab itself. They just don't ban people for anti semitism.
Dissenter also got banned from the Mozilla and Google Chrome web stores[0]. I can't help wondering, though, if banning software for allowing people to access offensive web content might be a policy that browser makers wouldn't want selectively applied to their products in OS app stores.
It's fine to propose technical solutions like browser add-ons.
But how does this address the problem of comment sections easily devolving into a dumpster fire? There's a reason why newspapers, like the Inquirer, are turning off their comment sections. That reason is sound.
It's like hosting a block party and having it overrun by neighborhood maniacs, weirdos, libertarians and homeless people. What you're proposing is a means for inviting, organizing and publicizing commentary for all content on the web whether the content creator wants it or not.
The crucial difference is that HN doesn’t spend any resources creating the articles so it can focus its actual resources on cultivating a healthy discussion.
The “toxic a-holes in the comment section” problem is difficult for small blogs where commenters sustain the bulk of the public discussion surrounding each post. But, even for small local newspapers, the conversation about the articles happens outside of the newspaper, and very rarely is there anything useful or substantively original in the comments section on a newspaper website. So while there are arguments for keeping a moderated comments section, it is a lot of cost for probably little benefit (and, as the Inquirer says, they would rather focus on reporting).
But HN has active moderators, and also is a much different subset of people than the people who are reading the article. Also you don't see HN comments by default on articles, so even if the comments are bad they won't detract from the article itself.
I removed comments from my websites and I don't miss them. Now I invite people to email me. I only receive questions and praise, no spam at all. It makes my websites smaller, faster and more focused. It also lets me address reader mail like any other mail.
More cancel culture and censorship is exactly what we need, because that's been proven to be so immensely effective in humanity's past.
Let us also not forget that we are not allowed to be politically incorrect, we all have to be namby-pamby because nobody's feelings are allowed to get hurt for any reason: we cannot have gentle sensitivities having to deal with how other people really feel or view things. Truth about how people feel deep down is ugly and dangerous, therefore sweeping the ugly side of humanity "under the carpet" is far preferable to dealing with it, especially since that has also been proven to work extremely well in the past.
This is simply grand, just imagine the possibilities: anyone can now label anything one does not like as toxic and use that as an extremely effective method of censorship and oppression in a special propaganda war, while people sit in a bubble hoping all of it will go away! What could possibly go wrong?
Would allowing only paid subscribers to comment help keep comments open?
The NYT seems like one of the last remaining organizations that offer moderated comments on its articles. The Guardian UK dumped comments a long time ago (except for sports).
Comment spam and hate speech is a huge issue that I'm surprised anti-spam tech has not been able to address. The cost of human moderation is why websites, blogs and community groups ceded their audience to Facebook a decade ago. We've been paying the price ever since.
How about requiring a $5 deposit to post, refundable at the end of your posting tenure, and confiscated on falling foul of the guidelines? An additional benefit would be fewer low content posts
Making people pay to comment removes certain types of low quality and spam comments, but I believe it can actually worsen polarization. Most people with moderate points of view aren't going to be nearly as motivated to comment as those who have extreme views, and therefore will be even less likely to do so with more barriers in place.
Sure, GPT2 could do it, but again - it won't stop the trolls and wouldn't be actual discourse. I think the other comment about fishing for an xkcd link sounds more likely.
Instead of disabling comments, why wouldn't they use one of the techniques that successful discussion forums employ to filter out spam, extremism, and other noise?
HN being an obvious example, but there are plenty of others, each with its own approach.
Many successful online discussion forums rely on user moderation, which makes it feasible without Inquirer hiring a huge dedicated staff.
> why wouldn't they use one of the techniques that successful discussion forums employ to filter out spam, extremism, and other noise?
They have done.
Removing comments will reduce some engagement, but as pointed out they've come to the conclusion that the sort of engagement lost is of low value to the majority of their target audience and comes with a cost (in terms of moderation effort) that isn't worth, to them, any residual "good" value the comments sections have.
>HN being an obvious example
I think a key difference between HN and news pages like those in the enquirer in this matter is that their comments area is more of an afterthought to start with where much of the purpose of many visiting HN, good sub-reddits, and do forth is for the comments. This means removing them would be much more sufficient a loss. It also means that for a greater part community moderation works, reducing more costly (for the need site) central effort (it is still needed, of course but the cost/benefit balance is very different).
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
But maybe not. And cleaning it up (for existing comments if they didn't just junk everything prior to now, and in terms of ongoing moderation) would be more effort than they are currently spending on the matter.
Also, a large part of it may be that the comments are at the bottom and a large part of their readership don't get that far on many articles. Some will read the headline & byline, some complete the opening paragraphs, and only then if it seems interesting enough (or they are otherwise lacking anything to do) will people read on further (never mind all the way to the end of a long article). Getting around that by putting the comments higher up probably isn't a good answer. I've seen some places have a "<number> comments below" link near the top but I can't imagine that drawing people through unless they would read that far anyway or the <number> is high enough to suggest some interesting controversy.
The comment section often has the actual news story hidden in it if you look hard enough. Most of the news stories I read are 30-40% accurate, if you scroll though the comments it’s often you will find the corrected story at 70-80% accuracy. So at least in that regard they have value
This is great. I don't know why every site thinks it needs comments or ratings/reviews. Allowing user-generated content on your site is a big responsibility and attracts a lot of bad behavior. Adding comments should be a careful last step, not part of every Wordpress template.
I don't know about this - it seems to me that all you need to do to shut down a community that threatens you is harass it systematically. I think we should be looking at more intelligent solutions.
Interesting how the word "toxic" is mainstream nowadays. Considering the term originated as a way of describing aggressive/angry kids on the videogame League of Legends.
It’s been in use as in “toxic relationship” or “toxic behaviour” for maybe fifty years. If you’re thinking of “salty”... that goes even further back. And both were definitely popular in Counter-Strike a decade before any other game!
A popular newspaper in Malaysia was fined recently because of their readers comments [1]. It is wise for the Inquirer to do this. Newspapers are regulated entities and it is more sustainable for comments to migrate to 3rd party sites like Reddit / Facebook / HN.
In the US, it is protected by the section 230 ("no provider [...] of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"). In other words, you can sue the commenter, but not the platform hosting the comment.
In the EU, there's an opposite precedent (Delfi AS v. Estonia), in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed that fining Delfi (Finnish web portal) for comments doesn't go against the platform's freedom of speech. Of course, that's not a law, but it might impact future EU-wide laws that aim to regulate that sort of thing.
Sanitary is a good way to describe it to be frank. It’s relatively cordial but also not someplace you come for unconventional opinions or out of the box thinking.
The old Slashdot comment system before the original creator left worked very well. It was proud to say that the only comment they were forced to delete was one that criticised Scientology. That was because they took Slashdot to court. Users moderated comments with a set amount of mod points, usually only having 5 points to moderate up or down at a time (every few days I think for people with excellent score), there was metamoderation there as well, user metamoderation mind you. Not sure if metamoderation was there at the start, but the comments I generally saw were generally quite good. It was great to get various viewpoints without all these people trying to stop people saying their piece like we find all the time today. Not that no comments were removed, comments were hidden if they were below a specific score that you set. You could set the score to -1 if you wanted and see all the comments, and it was nice to do so sometimes. Note that it really did work like a democracy to show what comments people really thought were worth upvoting. It worked. Now with the new owners there is a link to flag a comment on the bottom right of each comment. Sad.
I suspect that the relatively narrow targeting helps as well. General news sites have a much broader audience with (generally) less subject-matter familiarity than HN.
And most stories here are far less controversial than most news stories these days.
The ability to quickly flag posts that attract partisan back-and-forth helps a lot. That doesn’t work out quite as well for a newspaper, where virtually every story can relate in some fashion to politics.
> Our review found that the commenting climate in Sports is better than elsewhere on the site. The conversations are more relevant to the stories, and there are fewer personal attacks. We’ll now be focusing all of our moderating resources on Sports, and our Community Guidelines will be strictly enforced.
I wonder if this is a common pattern. Perhaps sports stories naturally encourage healthier discussion.
Intuitively it makes sense. Talking sports with someone can be a great icebreaker if they come from a totally different background.
As if the Inquirer didn't cultivate a toxic, racist audience intentionally. They published the thoroughly mediocre Christine Flowers basically weekly for 17 years.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think that newspapers are dying due to a lack of good leadership and direction.
It's a hard job to do right and theres no incentive for it. Instead we have a bunch of idealists who's dream is to influence people. (But they don't have the experience to understand why their position is misfounded and harmful) [This is where you get vice and other extreme positioned based papers]
Anyways, journalism never really caught up on the idea about online news and tried to go the ad revenue route. They didn't innovate and they degraded their product. (Clickbait). Then they tried to put the genie back by doing paywalls. (Expensive and they've been using dark patterns to try to prevent you from cancelling)
They've had their chance to understand what the context of their work is and to innovate. But all we're seeing is a profit driven approach with no clear acknowledgement about how people want to interact with them.
Iirc, Matt Taibbi said that newspapers are dying because the news never made money. Some of it was subscriptions, but most of it was the classifieds, ads, and other non-news items that were obliterated by the internet. This means that subscription models (like NYT) and media consolidation are the only viable path forward.
Subscriptions mean that papers will cater to a wealthy audiance and lock out the poors. Advertising makes news available to the poor, but makes their opinions unrepresented because newspapers can't say anything that would upset their advertisers.
Given the news doesn't really make money and is necessary for a functioning society, we might need to look towards public funding and ways to include the public.
EDIT: As a side benefit, a publicly funded news agency doesn't need to maximize eyeballs on it and so can afford to be less sensationalist. That is, it can be, but it has no life-or-death obligation to do it.
There's a huge load of hypocrisy, when you write articles critical of other people. But will not let your self be criticized on what you just wrote.
Given how skewed and inaccurate the articles are becoming. At least the comments can point outright lies and biases.
It somewhat levels the playing field. So I'm of the opposite opinion. I think comments should be possible on all news articles.
If you're given section 230 protection, you must allow all public comments.
However, I would allow moderation in the style slashdot does. Where you slide a bar, to determine how much moderation you want.
I know that in theory you're defending the right of people to speak truth to power, but in practice you're just defending the right of people to scribble cartoon tits and dicks on a toilet stall. Almost no comments on the internet advance humanity in any way.
That can't be true. Even if you just look at this site, ycombinator. There are comments on here that save people time and inform them all the time. Some of these people are advancing humanity, if by no other way, than by building technology.
I see no hypocrisy here -- a lot of information is, and was, only one-way.
Town criers in the ancient times, teachers, theaters, art galleries, books, newspapers, radio/TV.
The idea that one "must allow all public comments" if you talk about other people is a pretty weird one. Things generally do not work this way in real world, and I see no obvious reason why it should be different online.
Your examples are all based in times of local news sources not large global news sources. In the times before the internet all communication was local, and all pushback was local too. It may have looked one way, but counterpoints were made locally. Almost all cities had multiple newspapers that had slightly different takes on events.
Now in the age of global news and the internet, counterpoints need to be made in the same medium.
Well, I think you are unnecessarily advocating for a form of Authoritarianism. The powerful get a microphone. But the public will not get a voice. I personally think it enhances democracy to allow public comments on articles.
Anyone can run a blog or so for free. I lose very little sleep over awful people promoting their awful views on blogs, but I get quite annoyed when I read a news article and want to hear opinions on it (even ones I may disagree strongly with), but the legitimate opinions are downed out by abusive assholes spamming hate speech or endlessly trolling. A lot of those people are just bullies trying to drive others away so they can 'own' the comment section.
Imagine you are an artist and you have your own space, maybe a small table at the fairgrounds where you are selling your pictures from.
Would you allow random people to attach notes to your pictures -- the notes that everyone who wants to look your pictures would see? Or will you say, "this is my table and I decide what goes here"? If the later, does this make you undemocratic authoritarian?
It is not just "the powerful" who "get a microphone". Anyone can speak out. There are tons of places where we one comment on articles -- we are on one of those. And getting your own site is pretty easy, too.
>There's a huge load of hypocrisy, when you write articles critical of other people. But will not let your self be criticized on what you just wrote.
I'm fairly certain virtually every newspaper on this planet will gladly give someone who is subject of criticism a page to respond, however nobody who is serious thinks that means you need to give anonymous trolls a place on your website to argue on that person's behalf.
Secondly, that is not how 230 works. 230 grants platforms the right to moderate their sites and be shielded from liability. (or else Hackernews, which you are commenting on right now, would cease to exist).
> I'm fairly certain virtually every newspaper on this planet will gladly give someone who is subject of criticism a page to respond
Are you familiar with the James Bennet / Tom Cotton incident at the New York Times? The self-proclaimed Paper of Record forced their editorial page editor, James Bennet, to resign for publishing an op-ed by sitting US Senator Tom Cotton advocating for a position supported by a majority of the US population - that we allow US Military to assist local police in dealing with out-of-control riots.
We are way, way past the era of giving people who are the subjects of criticism space to respond.
Yes I'm aware and I personally disagree with how that case was handled. However, the context of the thread here is reader comments. My point was, a person of public interest and subject of an article ought to have a right to respond,that's good journalistic practise and generally happens today still. Joe Schmoe from the comment section doesn't, and never had, and it's not a reasonable thing to demand.
Just a few years ago readers got to write letters to newspapers, and when the newspapers thought the comments had something particularly thoughtful to say they'd publish them at their discretion. But the quality of user comments in general is so low, there's no reasonable case to be made that they all ought to stay up.
One of the things I miss from Slashdot moderation is the tag that would accompany the score — Informative, Funny, etc. I’ve never really seen it take off anywhere, and hashtags or emoticons don’t convey the same.
I think what makes Slashdot tags work is that they are not assigned by the comment's author -- the community decides on what is funny/insightful instead.
When the ratings are assigned by users (like github comment "reactions") they are sometimes pretty helpful.
If you said "Section 230 was designed to encourage websites to be neutral common carriers"
You are exactly 100% wrong. We've already covered why it does not require neutrality above, but it was also intended as the opposite of requiring websites to be "common carriers."
I think if the news organization is willing to go all in on moderation your comment makes a lot of sense, but if you can't/aren't willing to put the resources in, the idealism is rapidly lost today.
NYTimes has quite a good comment system with decent moderation. If you present dissenting views, that's fantastic if it's well presented.
Contrast Fox News comment area and you get a mix of lies, mud slinging, and lots of left vs right blame game. Well presented/thought out comments on Fox almost never surface.
With News orgs, the further left or further right you go, it seems to only get worse.
So while I agree with you in idealism, practically speaking, it's never was as simple as throwing up a Disqus comment section.
The best solution to the toxicity issue of anonymous internet comments I've seen relates to identifying the users. In Sweden there is a country-wide ID system called BankID. You can authenticate towards any website using a mobile app which validates your identity (through your bank).
One of the regional comment platforms has adopted this and requires you to sign in using BankID, thereby confirming your identity.
I don't know if this is solving the problem or if it's just masking it a bit better by introducing a "shame" aspect, but it's working on the sites that I've seen using it.
The theory that anonymity is the cause of bad comments has been resoundly disproven by the existence of Facebook (and Google+, and Twitter) where people post whatever they like using their own real names.
I believe that China also requires that people's comments online be connected with their physical identity, and I'm sure that's quite effective at stopping people from spreading any unacceptable ideas.
It means anyone who risks social or professional consequences will self censor. It means a number of legitimate ideas will never enter public discourse because the prevailing ruling ideology will ensure negative consequences (“cancel culture”) for anyone who dares speak up. For those with nothing to lose, this isn’t an issue. For everyone else, the lack of anonymity is tantamount to losing their practical freedom to express themselves.
In practice, though, this just ends in ideological witch hunts. If you look at, say, the Twitter comments that got Gina Carano fired from The Mandalorian (and evidently blacklisted from Hollywood), they were actually pretty tame overall, just not in line with the nouveau moral minority.
With the constant ramping of propaganda and lies, it becomes too problematic to have hundreds of people disagreeing at the end of each article. The public sentiment must be known, and as such I am reversing this decision.
News article comments are usually low quality, but I think this decision is partially rooted in setting up a system where any discussion on a topic is dissuaded because the news organizations feel like they're the end-all be-all for defining public narratives.
If you don't like racism, sexism, and so on, you can always just let your eyes slide past those comments and focus on other ones instead.
This is absurd, how are you supposed to slide past them without at least speed-reading the very content you're offended by? I fail to see why priority has to be given to the people who go out of their way to make others miserable.
A lot of supposed "racism, sexism, etc..." is not actually bigotry, it's just people saying true things that happen to be taboo to say. As for real bigotry, as long as it stays just words, personally I don't mind it much or at all even when it's directed against groups that I belong to, at least as long as I'm free to fire back. Sometimes I find it amusing. As long as it doesn't cross over into people actually hurting others, I'd rather it be open to say. Words don't bother me.
Because believing things and taking a position are different things, maybe? It's actually one of the hallmarks of a cult (like wokeness) that to become a member, you must openly declare belief in obviously false things. Religions are another good example.
The first is a factual statement (is versus ought);
The second semi-factual ("not justified" is a maybe subjective distinction);
The last is purely subjective, both in the "shouldn't" and the somewhat vague definition of "mental disorder".
That said, the furore around TS seems to be as much about enforcing terminology that appears to muddy-the-waters wrt biology i.e. what "woman" means, or should mean.
> you are, in effect, asking for people to step in the bear trap in order to prove to you that it’s dangerous
As a counterpoint, by invoking the "bear trap" argument you are dismissing the only possible way to prove your point. Both sides sound like logical fallacies to me.
Something can be true even if there is no way to prove it. But even if the proof can not be offered volontarily, you might see other people accidentally “step in the bear trap”, so to speak, and thereby infer its existence.
I think if I answered your question the HN moderation would see it as leading the discussion into ideological flamewar and crack down. This is based on my past experience.
It's bad for branding; the Inquirer is hand-wringing about having their name and logo next to things that they don't want to defend. This kind of organization really shouldn't be in the comment business at all, but got convinced it was necessary in order to keep up with the future.
If not for "platforming = endorsing", cancel-culture wouldn't exist and we'd all live happier lives. It's all corporations acting like really shallow teenagers.
I think having comments everywhere possible was an idea from the web 2.0 era that’s proven to be not all that worth it in most cases. Moderation is hard and it doesn’t make sense for newspapers and magazines to be spending resources on it. There are other forums (reddit, hn) for this sort of thing.