He's not referring to debates as being the problem. Quite the contrary: "In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments."
Civility does not mean blindly agreeing. It means just that: acting civil.
However, what he does argue against is rudeness and insults. Essentially, not debating, but slinging mud.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought."
Simply put, you can act civil even if you disagree. This does provide value. However, when that civility is removed, the results are polarizing.
If you can't see the benefits of civil debate, you are an idiot.
Actually, I want to thank you. For making my point, better than I can. Whether you are being serious, or you understood what I was trying to say, that you said what you said proves my point.
Just to be clear, I did not really mean this:
"If you can't see the benefits of civil debate, you are an idiot."
It was intended to have a tone completely different from the rest of the comment. And so, despite the rest of the comment being sound, this one sentence caused a rift.
So, I did not add it to insult. I added it to make a point, and you highlighted that point so much better than you realized.
Whoah, what's with the hostility here? Not everything is a big corporate media conspiracy for control of information, power, and taking over the world.
Forget about what you think of the Times or any other major media outlet for a moment and just focus on the point of the article and you'll see the author makes some great points.
Supposing for a moment that the NYT and other outlets are trustworthy, doing a good journalistic job, etc. This research shows that people who write ignorant comments, especially if they're written in a tone not much different than your own right now to be honest, can distort what others think of the information presented. This is not a good thing. The people who comment based on emotion rather than reason are able to sway people into not only believing something potentially wrong but such comments also take otherwise thoughtful people and get them acting and thinking based on emotion rather than reason.
If you yourself were to make some very good point about topic X that was well-researched and could potentially help to inform and make many peoples' lives better but then some asshole contrarian comes along and makes some emotional appeal that sways people in the opposite direction. How incredibly frustrated would you feel knowing that a potentially enlightening conversation could have ensued but now it's just a rat's nest of ignorance like YouTube?
I don't know how you turned this into a statement against media outlets but this is actually something that applies broadly and is not just harmful for the Times or the other "evil" media outlets.
Hacker news is a great haven for this. I don't know of any other place on the internet where such a large portion of the comments are constructive, civil, and enlightening. It really adds a ton of value to the content itself. Such a shame that most of the internet is better off just turning the comments off.
The key is the limited community. Comments are great when the community is oriented towards something. Generic type comments, just like generic type social media are useless. In extreme cases, like youtube, the comments severely degrade the quality of the site (try using a youtube comment blocker).
When I made this comment, it should be noted that most of the comments were pretty negative toward the NYT in particular.
Not paying attention to the publisher, I've gotta say that I find myself agreeing more often than not. Sometimes, comments do great- but anything above a readership in a couple hundred thousand, and suddenly it all goes to hell.
You'll get a mix of misunderstanding, people inserting their own bias, memetic derailing bullshit, and a whole lot of people who think they're experts, for whatever poor reason they found. This isn't because they're trolls, or horrible people; We all have done it. We all do it. It's being human.
But the problem is, finding the signal in all that noise is just impossible given our current means of filtering. Different outlets have tried different ways of getting people to put more thoughts behind their posts- requiring real names, Facebook accounts, hell, entire companies like Disqus have sprung up for the exact purpose of trying to foster better conversations. And while they all make a decent change, none of them even solve a quarter of the problem.
About the only solution I've ever seen, is heavy-handed moderation. But that opens you up to 'censorship' comments, as we've seen here. Personally, I can't help but feel like maybe it'd be better if real, substantive stories and opinion pieces just didn't have comments; If a person wants to respond, let them go through the effort of making their own blog post, and addressing the author with it on Twitter or in e-mail. It'd certainly lead to more productive conversation. It's partly why I wish there were more intellectually-minded Tumblr accounts, as their format for this is perfect, with reblogging.
This isn't to say comments are all bad, or that they don't serve a purpose. Just that sometimes, all this social doesn't actually produce better content.
When reading NYT comment sections, I always sort, but never by the editor's picks. I rely solely on reader's most recommended. This is the best bullshit filter I've found, and I can see why lazy, dishonest, poorly informed, or otherwise sub-par journalists resent it.
I do something similar when reading HN. Scrolling through the headlines, I (almost) never click on the link itself. Instead, I open the discussion tabs, make a snap judgement about the quality of the piece from there, and click through only when it's clearly worthwhile. The ease with which this filter can be applied is the most amazing thing. At this point, it feels so fluid and natural that I do it reflexively.
A few years ago news outlets were coming to terms with the idea that there was no front page online. Yes, some readers did go to the outlets home page and decide what to read from there. But more often than not, they were coming directly to a piece that would have been buried in a print edition. The social layer further diminishes editorial control, in that people can further economize their quotient of attention by finding and trusting informal social groups that reduce the megaphone effect enjoyed by the analog press even further.
The Reddit voting system works fine. On both Reddit and HN I usually learn more from the comments than the actual article, but I still wouldn't want comments in the New York Times.
Heavy handed censorship turns rude commenters who should be simply ignored into internet terrorists, Facebook comments dilutes the conversation by making people self consciously edit themselves and Twitter or Tumblr replies are like shouting into the wind.
Good old semi-anonymous Reddit comments still perform though, even with a user base of millions of bratty kids the best stuff usually floats to the top.
This article could be retitled to "Why Fox News and Right Wing Talk Radio is so Effective". Injecting constant insults and rage into commentary is the secret ingredient.
"Why MSNBC and Left Wing TV Shows are so Effective"
This is not new (go look at some of the early Presidential elections - 1800 is a good start). The only real difference is that science and technology have advanced and people's understanding hasn't kept up. We now have a lot more people commenting on things with whole services built for it.
Its kissing cousin is the "Link Bait Headline". Its basically an aggressive comment used as a title naming some items or concepts people hold dear.
Comments on the same site as the article are a terrible idea. It basically allows every green-ink shouty idiot to undermine what's being said, in a way that gives them huge undeserved prominence. Just because you said something to the NY Times, does not mean you deserve to be published in the NY Times.
The internet permits you to reply to anything - get a tumblr. If your opinions are valued, you will attract a following.
I usually do, not all of them, mind you, but at least the highest ranking comments. For example that's how I found out that former Italian PM Mario Monti wasn't that much of a "success" in his home country two months ago, by reading the top online comments in an Italian newspaper. My only tangent with the Italian political life was through newspapers and magazines like The Economist, FT or NYT, and they all were painting a pretty rosy picture of his job. Sure enough, come election time he got handily defeated.
Fascinating results indeed. Suppose you are a competitor or have some vested interest in a specific product failing/not being well received. You could poison the comments section in the articles that report on said product, using an army of sock puppets...thereby potentially turning any article into propaganda that works for you.
But that's not what the evildoer can learn from this article. He probably has those sockpuppets already. What is new, is that he now needs to tell them to curse, use ad hominem and generally be unfriendly.
Another interesting thing, if you include a somewhat negative remark about something the readers care deeply about at the beginning of your article, something like "paradise was lost because of reader comments", most people will ignore the content of the article and just argue about that part. As evidenced right now here on HN.
Pretty sure this has nothing do with with trusting newspapers and everything to do with human nature. It's easier to call someone an idiot than simply disagree with them and explain why. Couple that with the immediacy and anonymous nature of the internet, and you give a lot more lazy people the ability to offer their opinion, even if it's nothing more than mindless drivel.
People have always disagreed with newspapers. It's just that prior to the internet, the overhead to respond was much higher.
My thinking was just that the efficacy of nasty comments is probably higher when you have readers who don't trust a publication, the writers, or editors. I think a lot of people assume newspapers are politically biased, but in reality I think they are biased by their desire to appear non-biased, their goal to go easy on people to get further interviews/access with them, and also their role as the mouthpiece for corporations and entrenched government power.
> My thinking was just that the efficacy of nasty comments is probably higher when you have readers who don't trust a publication, the writers, or editors.
I disagree. Oh, I'm sure if you dislike the source, you are more apt to dismiss them. What I disagree with is the nature of these comments and who they are coming from.
Nasty comments are most likely coming from people who disagree with the premise presented in the article, not who is writing the article. There is also the study that shows that other comments will induce you into taking one side or another. Any comment you make can easily be just as volatile.
Point is, the epidemic has nothing to do with the source, but rather, the message. I do not have enough faith that all those nasty comments are from people who've done proper research into what reporters and newspapers strive to do.
In the end, it's easier to blame someone else for your failings at civility.
"Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought."
That would mean that, the best way to influence people is to use expletives. If it's true then there's no wonder so many people are rude on the internet - it's the best way to get your message across!
The tea party uses this to great effect. At one point they had training sessions where they would encourage people to go online and post canned comments in an attempt to discredit and delegitimize their political opponents.
From September of 2001 to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the New York Times treated the world with fabricated story after story about WMDs in Iraq, by way of Judith Miller, by way of dedicated liar Ahmed Chalabi, whose fairy tales the New York Times saw fit to print on its front page time and time again. I kind of like the idea that the vox populi can call them for their BS under their articles. Of course comments are still invisible until approved by a moderator.
Incidentally, Chalabi went to MIT and studied under Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman key exchange fame.
Of course the paradise was lost for the oppressing media. Long live the internet.
"Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place"
Research would show that your lies significantly distort what readers think in the first place.
"But as they say, the genie is out of the bottle."
You would happily undo this whole internet thingie, wouldn't you?