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.
