Comments About Comments

theodp writes "This weekend's NY Times is all-about-the-comments. First, Michael Erard recounts the history of Web site comments and explains how their technical origins have shaped the actual commentary we've come to expect as usual today. On dealing with people-behaving-badly, Erard writes, 'Only a few [high-traffic sites] seem to have tried user-moderation systems like the one developed by Slashdot's creator, Rob Malda. Founded in 1997, Slashdot rapidly began to suffer from what Malda called 'signal-to-noise-ratio problems' as tens of thousands of users showed up. Rather than embracing the chaos (which was a hallmark of Usenet, another digital channel of communications) or locking things down with moderators (which e-mail lists did), Malda figured out a way for users to moderate one another. Moderation became like jury duty, something you were called to do.' Next, NY Times community manager Bassey Etim, who oversees 13 comment moderators, offers up his comments on comments, agreeing that 'the comments are where the real America is.' Finally, there's Gawker's next-generation Kinja, which aims to further blur the lines between stories, blog entries, and comments."

Comments

The most valuable part of some sites

[iampiti]

It's obvious that comments are what make some websites attractive. This is one of them.
In Slashdot I usually find very interesting what other people think about the news. Sometimes, there're some jewels: Comments about people who really know what the news is about and offer their perspective. I same those comments as bookmarks. I wonder why there's not a "favorite" option to save them.

Re:The most valuable part of some sites

[Sarten-X]

chaff(that gets modded up, no less)

That's a self-sustaining mechanism of the Slashdot hivemind.

Despite our best wishes to the contrary, Slashdotters are terribly biased humans. We just know what's right, because we are all of such high intelligence and scientific mind, so we are blind to our own biases. Of course, anyone who agrees with us is probably coming to the same conclusion only because they are smart and rational, too... so we should mod them up, of course, for being such a fine, upstanding Slashdotter like ourselves. Should we then ever need to examine our own judgement, we have the karma system and our comment history showing that we were modded up, reinforcing the consensus regardless of truth.

This is painfully obvious on any thread concerning law, privacy, Big Data, religion, or economics. The hivemind has made up its mind on most aspects of these matters, so any comment parroting the approved opinion will be modded up, while any comment that opposes will be modded down, regardless of fact. Interestingly, these are fields in which the majority of Slashdotters are not experts, or even likely to be professionally involved in.

Consider law, for instance. There are very few actual lawyers regularly on Slashdot, and also very few who have any sort of legal education at all, but any story discussing the intricacies of patents or free speech is bound to have hundreds of comments, mostly along the lines of "patents are bad" or "I can say anything, anytime, anywhere, to anyone", and the mods will happily push such comments up to +5, Insightful. Occasionally a real lawyer will stumble in and offer some actual insight, but even if their post is well-received, it is limited to being only equal to the popular drivel, so it is quickly drowned out.

A system I've seen work well elsewhere is to have admin-promoted "top comments" for each story, where the admins doing the selection are encouraged to pick comments that are relevant, accurate, and unusual. a dozen comments repeating the same sentiment won't be picked, but one that puts forth a well-reasoned argument to the contrary is more likely.

Re:The most valuable part of some sites

[i kan reed]

Then you simply replace hivemind, for Dice Holdings Approved Minds. That doesn't seem superior on the face of it.

The more moderated, the less honest

[TWiTfan]

The more you moderate a forum, or prevent users from posting anonymously, the less honest it will be. If you really must moderate, do like Slashdot and let the users do it.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[bill_mcgonigle]

The more you moderate a forum, or prevent users from posting anonymously, the less honest it will be.

And dishonest too - it clips both ends of the curve.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[dugancent]

More moderated = more groupthink.

That is not a good thing.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[SJHillman]

However, without moderation, the noise often overtakes the signal and you're left without any discussion, debate, or sharing of useful information whatsoever. Also not a good thing.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[clarkkent09]

And yet it still doesn't work very well. Take a look at any story involving, say, US politics or copyright issues and you will find that any post that strongly disagrees with the groupthink of the majority gets modded as Troll or Flamebait even when it is clearly not.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[Lithdren]

I think that says more about the general discussion around things like politics than anything else.

People dont want to discuss it, they want to yell it at one another loudly. The louder voices tend to 'win' more.

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[dkleinsc]

See, the funny thing about that is that I've had many very liberal opinions modded into oblivion solely for their conclusions. So I'm having a hard time getting convinced that there's some sort of liberal effort to mod down your posts.

I took the liberty of reviewing the recent posts of yours that had been modded down. In some cases, you indeed have a legitimate gripe: Reasonable people can differ about the correct way to handle the Syrian civil war, for example. But here's something else you wrote that got modded to -1 quickly:

Spending money on a bullshit "green" scams does not benefit mankind either. Green energy with Democrats in power is like defense with Republicans in power, a buzzword to facilitate transfer of taxpayer money to private hands.

Here are some legitimate reasons to mod that down:
1. The use of the words like "bullshit" and "scam" were unnecessarily abusive. You can argue that the programs in question are a poor use of funds without language like that.
2. You provided no evidence or logical argument for your position. Among other things, nothing in your post refuted the idea that the green energy programs were exactly what they said they were.
3. Since green energy programs cost taxpayers approximately 3.5% of the amount we spend on the military, equating them is misleading. (The 3.5% number comes from the $90 billion cited by the Romney campaign divided by approximately $2600 billion reportedly spent on the military over the same period.)

A non-troll post that would probably not get the same treatment would have been written something like this:
"Green energy programs in the past have not been very effective. After spending $90 billion on them, green sources still account for only 7.3% of energy consumption. This will be just yet another waste of money."

Re:The more moderated, the less honest

[TapeCutter]

That is not a good thing.

Nor is it a bad thing since unpopular opinions are in general unpopular for good reason.. Groupthink exists with or without moderation, in fact if moderation fails to highlight the group's main opinion(s) then it has failed to do what it was designed to do. It's simple really, if you want to know what the group thinks then browse at +4/5, if you want to know what everyone thinks browse at -1.

Now if we look at your current +5 score, we can deduce that "groupthink==BadThing(TM)" is a popular opinion on Slashdot, not one that I hold myself but never the less it does represent a significant and popular "group thought".

Re:First post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Made even more appropriate by not actually being the first post.

I never understood the desire to 'first post'. It's like saying "I've not a single useful thought in my head, and look how fast I can let everybody know it!"

God help us!

[Anonymous Coward]

'the comments are where the real America is.'

There was this article recently on Yahoo! Finance about people giving Liberty to prevent a financial melt down.

Anyway, the article and many commentors parroted the argument that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial meltdown. Many commentators and pundits have "reasoned" that the law caused the meltdown because it "forced" banks to lend to poor people who couldn't afford the loans. Did they have data to back up what they said?

Fuck no! Rush, Hannity, O'Rielly and all their clones pulled it out of their ass.

Here is what some economists found out

...the available evidence seems to run counter to the contention that the CRA contributed in any substantive way to the current mortgage crisis.

tl;dr; Most of "Real America" just mindlessly parrots what they see and hear in the media.

Re:C(C(S(C(C()))))

[ciderbrew]

Without comment's on spelling's and grammer's and the rage at wrong apostrophe usages' I think these comments's' are missing some \. fundamentals.

Re:C(C(S(C(C()))))

[CrimsonAvenger]

you didn't misspell any words

He misspelled "grammar".

Re:No More Anoymous Moderating.

[Sparton]

Moderators should be identified.

I disagree. Moderators who must be identified would just lead to harassment of moderators. There's always going to be asshats who moderate stuff down they disagree with (and I doubt every asshat who does that being exposed for doing that would change their tune), but I'd foresee that exposing the handles of moderators would be like not allowing anonymous posting; it'd try to cut down on the problem, but also cut out a lot of moderation that doesn't follow the conventional groupthink.

Much like commenting, at least the choice of moderating anonymously should still be kept (at least for Slashdot's method). Similar to non-anonymous posting, though, non-anonymous moderations being weighted differently could be a possible avenue for improvement.