The problem isn't bad comments - it's the publishers that don't understand the medium.
The article is a great example of how most newspapers and old publishing houses are barking up the wrong tree. It talks about using real names, court decisions and expecting people to read and comply with guidelines. That's simply not how the Internet works.
I see plenty of examples of excellent comment sections - often better than the article. HN is an example, some of the subreddits I'm subscribed to another. Interestingly I have never seen an old media outlet that has mastered comments.
The problem is that old media (or at least the people at the top) don't understand how to solve this problem because it involves a heavy dose of technology. I've never heard terms such as hell-banning, karma and vote-ring detection in a discussion by old media houses. Heck, many of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.
It's a problem that can be solved by a savvy combination of technology and psychology, but the old publishing houses seem to be clueless about both.
You assume it's a problem that needs solving. I don't know what the general feeling is, but I tend to prefer the model of going to one place for the news or information and another (like Hacker News or Reddit) for the commentary. I don't feel the need to read comments at the CS Monitor or NY Times (though the Times has a good comment section in general) or any other "long form" site. I go there for thoughtful, in depth analysis by someone who's put time into thinking about the issue.
Part of my problem with comments is that they are rarely thoughtful or in depth, even at a site like this. They are what I'm writing now: a short snippet that's more like a back and forth conversation than a thoughtful analysis. Both have their place, but I don't see the need for them to coexist on one site.
I'm surprised big brand advertisers don't have a problem with unmoderated comments. Then again, they also buy pre-roll video ads on places like Daily Mail for such inspiring footage such as a woman being mauled by a pitbull.
Part of my problem with comments is that they are rarely thoughtful or in depth, even at a site like this. They are what I'm writing now: a short snippet that's more like a back and forth conversation than a thoughtful analysis.
Alot of intelligence comes from bringint together simple--but relevant--pieces of information...or distlling simple--but essential--lines of logic from inpenetrable source material.
Like I said, there's value in conversation. I'm here at HN after all.
I just feel that conversation belongs in places that specialize in conversation (and all the spam handling, moderation and community management that entails) and not on sites that cannot get it right.
Who needs quality in comments? Certainly, not the old media. All they need are clicks, views and users' engagement.
It's quite often to see an obvious flamebait promoted to a "featured comment", etc.
At Yahoo, we tried a little to improve comment quality.
We tried to rank comments based on its text quality using machine learning (some of the features were hate words, grammar error, CAPITAL letters).
We hope that seeing well written comments at the top can trigger a better discussion than just top voted ones.
Here is the paper: http://ip.com/IPCOM/000230875
> The problem is that old media (or at least the people at the top) don't understand how to solve this problem because it involves a heavy dose of technology
There's a relatively new and successful digital-only publication in Holland called 'De Correspondent' that has been innovative in many ways. One of their goals, for example, is to allow subscribers to participate more in the news process.
And yet their comment section is the most primitive kind imaginable. It frustrates me because they do so many things right, and they have some high-profile commenters.
I toyed with the idea of trying to spice up their comment section (within the limitations of what a client-side plugin can do), but I put this off because I heard they've been 'working on it'.
I think a good commenting system or some reddit-style section would really fit in their vision, but I suspect part of the problem they face is that the site is built and maintained by a design-centric agency that isn't heavy on the technical innovation.
Another example, they touted their iPad-optimized version and yet the infinite-loading didn't (and possibly still doesn't) work on Google Chrome for iPad.
I know quite a few journalists, and one thing most of them seem to have in common is border-line illiteracy when it comes to computers. Most of them never heard of Reddit, for example, which is baffling to me for someone in a profession like journalism...
(that said, I applaud much of what De Correspondent does; they're on the right track and I hope to see similar initiatives in other countries)
Fundamentally, the problem is the community. If you don't attract people who make good comments and you don't have a high enough ratio, you won't have a good system no matter what you do. And I think newspapers have a couple problems there:
* Good communities on the Internet generally are focused on a specific topic. That encourages people who like the field to show up and gives most participants something in common. They have similar base knowledge, similar interests, and the community has a goal. Sub-reddits are usually fairly focused, HN is actually a little broad, but still has a relatively narrow field of interest. A newspaper likely won't have that.
* Good communities are the result of "trying again". When a community goes bad, the better contributers leave and join new ones. The old ones generally die, either literally or they just go down the tubes in quality of content. The good communities you see are to some extent the result of many failed communities. But newspapers are fixed, they can't just die off and try again.
* Good communities have moderators who drop the ax on allowed content. This isn't a long-term solution, but I think it's necessary to have this until the community is primed and trained to vote wisely themselves. From my experience, starting a community with a core baseline of values is like herding cats. Someone in charge has to be firm and "unfair" for a while to get things started in the right direction. Would newspapers actually heavily censor their comments?
None are strict requirements, but I think they are very helpful in creating a good community.
For example, some sub-reddits have nearly died in terms of quality only to resurrect themselves back into something semi-worthwhile. (Only examples I can pull directly from memory are /r/pics and /r/technology, neither of which is a great subreddit now, but goodness gracious you should've seen them two or three years ago.) But in those cases, they had the advantage of the things you listed, like reddit's hell-banning, karma, and ruthless moderators who made unpopular authoritarian decisions until the voters were trained to do a good job themselves.
I agree with most of this, but it's not just technology. It's the balance of power expressed in the way old media publishers publish content.
The see the content they produce as the primary value, and the comments as a sideshow. Platforms like HN are very different, because here the people are the center, and the content exists to feed the discussion, exchange and analysis of information.
As far as old media is concerned, they've already done the analysis, so the people really don't have anything to add. But the fact is that given the medium, most old media publications are extremely shallow and completely static. Only newspaper articles don't give references, background information, give no insight in how the analysis came about and absolutely do not evolve over time.
Publishers don't understand that their product is the raw material, not the end product. If they don't provide the context and services, people will take that raw material elsewhere, like HN, and the only comments on the publisher's site will be of the hit-and-run kind.
I certainly see a distinction between Comments and Conversations, and probably spent many years online struggling with online interactivity features before I realised it.
I honestly see little value in the former, which seems to be the prevailing mode on news sites, in facebook groups etc. Opinions being like assholes (ie, everyone has at least one), I suppose I must be grateful so many people choose to share theirs in a location where I will never inadvertently bump into it.
Conversations, however! Where people will read my response (and I theirs), and possibly provide feedback, support, constructive criticism, or some other form of dialogue (from the latin meaning "two assholes"[1]) - when that's underway, I don't miss pre-internet days at all.
A comment on something like a news story page, is a conversation with the author about the article pretty much.
Conversations that take place without threading are tricky to follow without additional tools.
I'd prefer ontopic comments. Interesting conversation can errupt from interactions though.
My biggest issue with online comments is that there are just too many. cap amount of posts, or cap posts by author?
Some people hang around the comment sections and just can't help but post. And some just repeat what others have already said and bring nothing new. But I'm not surprised that people haven't waded and read through every comment before they comment.
My local online newspaper has the same small collection of people regurgating their predictable opinions on pretty much every article posted, and it's very tiresome, and puts off other people commenting. They are a negative and contrary bunch.
I understand the want to hang out in a particular internet locale (I do it on two forums, my online haunts), but people could do with holding themselves back. On one forum I'm a member I've postend about 400 comments, and I could probably boil that down to about 5 themes. If I had time it would be worth me whittling them all down. Less is sometimes more.
I find it fascinating that people feel entitled to comment sections. There is genuine outrage when sites remove their comments sections.
When anybody can publish a URL commenting on another URL, the web is working exactly as it should. The missing piece is a meta-comment system (maybe some microformat) that lets you know when someone else is explicitly commenting on your URL.
Let's say I post a YouTube video (and there is no comment section), and someone else writes about it on their Tumblr using a format using an anchor tag with a rel=comment or something. Then the meta-comment service (where I have registered my YouTube channel and the Tumblr user has registered their blog) notifies me that this person has commented on my video. I could publish a reply on Tumblr to their original Tumblr post, and they would similarly be notified.
A page on the meta-comment service or a little JS widget could even show the comment reply tree across sites.
Two reasons come to mind, one historical and one practical:
First, the pingback implementation in WordPress was one of the more common vectors of WordPress' endless parade of security vulnerabilities. I remember years ago it was common practice to disable pingbacks (or even rip out the code) as a security precaution.
Second, pingbacks direct readers away from the site. This is good for readers and the online community as a whole, but bad for online publications which want to use comments as an "engagement" tool.
I think that a protocol or standard is part of the solution, but it really needs a service (or any number of them) to track the whole graph of replies.
The kind of aggressive court interference talked about in the article, will (or at least should) be the catalyst to make that happen.
Anonymous comments really ought to be hosted anonymously and in a distributed fashion, preventing them from being taken down or "used against you." The "fire in a crowded theater" supposed exception, is simply not relevant wrt internet comments.
This is going to be quite an important ruling. Libel laws are different in every country but this could be quite an influential precedent for many future rulings. It may very well have a large impact for a lot of websites with both comments and user-generated content.
If websites choose to enforce a system whereby commenters have to sign up with their verified personal details, many people may be put off and conversation rates could dwindle. This in turn may reduce traffic and said websites may suffer from it.
Some websites may choose to forgo commenting systems altogether because they may be too strapped to enforce such a system, or they may be risk-averse and wouldn't want to have their necks out anymore after this ruling.
A big problem is that a slander lawsuit may hit any time and the only things you can do to prevent it is to moderate the hell out of your UGC. That may not be feasible though. Business insurance against this kind of scenario is crazy expensive and as a business cost may be unrealistic to most. One of the people that co-run a decently sized e-commerce store in South Africa told me once that one's best bet is to have enough money on hand for a lawyer because the insurance will cripple you.
Over at http://www.mybema.com I've played around with many ways around this sort of issue. Right now, negative consumer reviews cannot be seen if you visit the site. Only the category of the review can be seen. In fact you can only see the review if you sign up and subscribe to the author. However I doubt that provides any sort of defense because legally slander is slander once another party is exposed to it. Alas, my pondering continues...
I don't know about EU or the states but in South Africa there have been rulings like the one in the article where the plaintiffs had their cases thrown out because it would be unreasonable for the media owners to moderate every comment made.
What do the other UGC platform owners on here think? How do you manage these kinds of scenarios?
My local paper (a paper in a smallish Midwestern city) did forgo commenting systems and doesn't seem to have suffered for it. In fact, I think it makes reading the online version of the paper better.
Their argument was more about quality, at least publically. The comments were a cesspool of backbiting and misinformed readers using the medium to make themselves heard and the paper basically said: "If you've got an opinion you want published and are willing to put your name to it, you can send us a letter and we will consider it for the op-ed page." I frankly think this was a mature way to approach the issue.
Like any other scheme to make commenting more expensive (resource wise), it implicitly makes the assumption that the value of what one has to say, somehow correlates with how much resources one has at ones disposal to be heard.
In the web era, the most important job a publisher has to ensure his site is a good one, is to write and edit content in such a way that he attracts an audience of interesting readers. Who will in turn, offer interesting comments. It is not, as may have been the case earlier, to hire the "best" journalists, to write their version of the truth. Sites that still use the latter approach, rarely, if ever, reach the level of truly interesting, simply because no one, or small group of, writer(s) will ever cover all bases, the way a whole community of interested and interesting commenters will.
I pointed this out in another comment, but I don't see why content and community have to coexist on the same site. Sites like Reddit and HN leverage the power of hyperlinking to merge the two models so each can do what they are best at: creating content for news sites and moderating and curating for social sites. I don't want to see what a bunch of wackos write in the comment section of my local newspaper. They added no value and the very few comments that did were not worth the overhead. HN has a community of interesting commentators, but it still relies on journalists to provide the basis for that community.
I'm curious if there's any research supporting the claim that requiring real names increases the quality of comments.
In my anecdotal experience, most sites that require real names (or Facebook logins) tend to have just a handful of comments, most of them banal. With Facebook comments in particular, there's no sense of community -- just disconnected statements.
And some of the most hideous, abusive remarks I've seen online have been under someone's real name and next to a picture of their face. At this point, the image of a nice-looking older person cuddling their grandkid next to a racist all-caps rant has become so commonplace that it no longer shocks me.
"The borderless nature of the web means it can be hard to avoid the ranting bigots and creeps we would ordinarily shun in the real world."
While I understand his point, I believe this is one of the great things about online communities. I think many people are too quick to shun those who we disagree with (I know I'm guilty of this). I think there can be a lot to learn from those we vehemently disagree with.
I can't help but notice a market opportunity evolving out of the need to moderate comments. I imagine a service where sites could hire cheap, proven moderators - and pay based on the number of comments needing review.
Two-sided marketplaces are undeniably extremely hard to build, but seeing as this is a huge problem and something tons of websites need, maybe it could be successful in this case.
Anyone know of anything out there like this/think this could work? I guess there's MTurk.
The only problem I can see with this is any site popular enough to need regular moderators could probably get away with offering moderation for free to their members, just for the cachet of being mods. Most of the rest of the possible cases (small personal blogs and forums, which may cost nothing or almost nothing for their owners) probably wouldn't be willing or able to afford the fees, or want to give privileges to some random person on the internet. Professional sites like online newspapers and businesses will want to farm it off on an intern or someone in house.
It seems to me that it would certainly be a difficult thing to make money at but if you can establish a reputation then it could potentially work. Although then in a few years everyone will be complaining about how this service is crushing free speech across the internet.
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The problem is that a ruling like that does nothing to address the actual issues and instead punishes only the one party who did nothing wrong.
(A) is incompetent at managing their own reputation, (B) chooses not to communicate in a civil manner, (C) is incapable of forming their own opinion, so reacts negatively to (A) based on (B)s comment, and the one that gets punished for it all is (D).
It's a bit of a worrying precedent. The test case was fairly trivial with a £270 fine for users calling a company that was about to plow their road “fucking shitheads.” But establish the law and you risk having folks like the Koch brothers sue you for $1m because someone on your site has called them or one of their organisations dishonest or some such.
An interesting solution to troll comments would be auto-detection via Machine Learning. For a class final some friends and I wrote an algorithm (neural networks and SVM's) to detect intentionally deceptive comments on hotel-review sites. It worked with about 82% accuracy. I'd imagine something very similar could be done with troll comments.
Coincidentally, me and my friend are working on making online comments smarter and overall simpler by providing a feedback structure. See more here: http://www.orat.io
Bloggers can embed orat.io Comments on their blog by simply adding two lines of code or using the WordPress plugin.
It seems that quality dialogue amongst users happens in communities where the people have a decent amount in common. (The more civilized reedit forums are smaller, niche places, and places like hn or gaming forums are similar). Are news sites simply too broad in audience to ever get past this, perhaps?
I read the front pages of a bunch of different newspaper websites (thedailymail, guardian, mirror etc) as it's interesting to see what they are all focussing on.
I use adblock to block the comments sections on each as I find them just completely useless (I also do the same on youtube and a few other sites).
Along those lines, I recommend a Chrome extension called "Shut Up" [0] which hides most sites' comments by default. I have it allow comments for a few sites like HN but most of the time I know I'm not missing much.
Is it just using some sort of heuristic to determine the comments? I was thinking that that might have 'rules' for each site individually, which would make no sense for HN (because why bother for a site where the comments are the whole point).
It's not difficult to use machine learning to do a good job of moderating comments automatically. A general method has been patented since 2001: http://www.google.com/patents/US7200606
Maybe an answer would be to allow anonymity on the web but only as a legally registered pseudonym. The only way this legally registered pseudonym can be revealed is in legal action against a comment on conviction. That way people can have the right to anonymity so long as they stay within the law.
>The only way this legally registered pseudonym can be revealed is in legal action against a comment on conviction.
So they would convict you before they knew who you actually were? Awesome. No need to defend myself, I guess!
How about instead, we respect the concept of free speech, and allow people to say whatever ridiculous shit they want without threatening to imprison them if they say something that makes us uncomfortable.
> That way people can have the right to anonymity so long as they stay within the law.
What does that even mean? If the system is designed with the express purpose of allowing the law to punish you for something you said, it's not anonymous.
Last year, for example, Popular Science, a 141-year-old American magazine, took the radical decision to banish comments from its website. Its editors argued that internet comments at the bottom of an article, particularly anonymous ones, were undermining the integrity of science and led to a culture of aggression and mockery."
Sometimes ill-conceived pretension warrants "agression and mockery"--and sometimes scientists can be among the worst offenders.
While working on WORDS for Chrome (http://www.words4chrome.com, soft-launch 6+8=14), I've done a lot of thinking about the problems with web comments.
In short, it's two things:
1. The Clean Slate Effect - the ability to go from site to site being horrible everywhere, no centralized consequence mechanisms
2. The Too Much Trouble Effect - Creating a new account and giving up your email address yet again sucks. How long will the comment last? Will it be searchable? Does it use your real name? Whenever comments are Too Much Trouble, only crazies leave them.
WORDS doesn't have any comments in it yet and I'm still tinkering and testing getting ready for launch, but I'd appreciate your opinions on it.
"Bad behaviour online is so common that it has generated its own typology of abuse. “Flaming” is to engage in a deeply personal and angry war of words across an online discussion."
So common? Does this journalist have no knowledge of Usenet? It's not common, it's older than most websites these days. To suggest Flaming and Trolling are unique to comments is false. They predate comments by years.
I think it's safe to say that modern Web commenting utterly dwarfs the entire history of Usenet posting, making the latter pretty much irrelevant except as a historical note.
Look at the article's definition of trolling. They use "troll" as a codeword for "asshole". Real trolling is an art. You put some bait on a hook and see who bites.
The article is a great example of how most newspapers and old publishing houses are barking up the wrong tree. It talks about using real names, court decisions and expecting people to read and comply with guidelines. That's simply not how the Internet works.
I see plenty of examples of excellent comment sections - often better than the article. HN is an example, some of the subreddits I'm subscribed to another. Interestingly I have never seen an old media outlet that has mastered comments.
The problem is that old media (or at least the people at the top) don't understand how to solve this problem because it involves a heavy dose of technology. I've never heard terms such as hell-banning, karma and vote-ring detection in a discussion by old media houses. Heck, many of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.
It's a problem that can be solved by a savvy combination of technology and psychology, but the old publishing houses seem to be clueless about both.