Slashdot Mirror
Writer: Internet Comments Belong On Personal Blogs, Not News Sites
sixoh1 writes: Nicholas Jackson at Pacific Standard suggests that internet comments are permanently broken (in response to an issue Jezebel is having with violent misogynist GIFs and other inappropriate commentary). He argues that blogs are a good-enough solution to commentary and dialog across the internet. "They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly."
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience. It seems unlikely that using only blogs for responsive dialog with authors and peers could come close to matching the feedback and community feel of comments such as we see here. Is there a technical solution, or is this a biological problem imposed on the internet?
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience. It seems unlikely that using only blogs for responsive dialog with authors and peers could come close to matching the feedback and community feel of comments such as we see here. Is there a technical solution, or is this a biological problem imposed on the internet?
I think the example given in TFA is an absolutely terrible one. Jezebel, as a site, has been known to pander to fairly extreme, militantly feminist views, while trashtalking and flaming any counterpoints or opposition. While commenting on legitimate news outlets may be a problem, Jezebel is certainly no more credible than a blog, and honestly should be treated as nothing more serious than such.
When I have interest in an article of news, it's certainly not for the gratuitously added comments section below it. I never had the desire to.
It's just webmaster feature creep at that point.
A lot of noise here gets buried by the moderation/karma system.
Does Dice offer the Slashcode for sale?
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
A good troll is better than a bad human.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
How is this any different from regular vandalism? We see this stuff throughout history. Everything from gang signs, to burning crosses, to vulgar language spray painted on a street sign.
to monetize the comments. There have long been multiple types of comment systems that handled comments from spammers very well. Ones that require authentication, ones that allow people to downvote a comment into oblivion, ones that get hidden because no one reads them. The Kinja system they used was horrible, and their moderators were too slow to deal with complaints of the types of comments they were having.
If your web business relies upon comments for page views and for actual income, then you should actually have multiple full-time people whose job it is to delete unwanted comments. It's that simple. If you can't afford to do it, then don't have the comments.
It appears that Nicholas Jackson does not understand how modern media works. The trolls are necessary in order to develop that inclusiveness...that "us vs. them" mentality. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of random people saying "I agree." on every article. That doesn't drive revenue. No, my friends, those trolls are necessary, in fact, I'd go so far as to say they are vital.
agree with "Jezebel?" above. please mod up.
I also find that the slashdot comments are often more useful than the actual article.
I enjoy comments on mainstream news sites. To me, at least, random public sentiment is at least as important as the sanitized news version, if not more so. Public opinion is a lot more likely to affect me, and provides a better indication of what I'm more likely to face in "reality" than what the news writers provide. Does people's anonymous behavior suck sometimes? Yes. But is it more honest? Absolutely. On any given topic, maybe one in four people secretly agrees with the worst of the worst trolls, and it pays to be away that other people around you actually do think/feel that way, even if it seems foreign and alien.
I read the news to prepare for life. Other people (even terrible trolls) exist in real life. I value learning their opinions, even if only to prepare myself for dealing with them.
It sucks that people can be offensive, but... hiding it doesn't help anyone.
Yes, by all means, lets hide away all the comments because some people are mysoginistic or bigotted assholes. Heaven forbid those who stay on topic should be heard near the topic of discussion.
Censorship, much?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Whether you agree with the politics of a particular site or not, the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics.
If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?
Imagine /. with goatse images.
""They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly.""
he misunderstands what comments are for. They are for a discussion. People like to have a discussion after they read a news article on some relevant topic. And just like in real life, some people try to hijack that discussion.
And as in real life, the only way to deal with those people is to physically remove them from the conversation. That is, have a moderator whose job it is to delete the posts and evict the poster, even if it is a throwaway account.
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience. It seems unlikely that using only blogs for responsive dialog with authors and peers could come close to matching the feedback and community feel of comments such as we see here. Is there a technical solution, or is this a biological problem imposed on the internet?
Ummmm, I would not classify Slashdot among the non-broken sites with broadly thoughtful, intelligent comments. And the hokey voting system here works just as much to hide thoughtful, but unpopular, opinion as it does to make trolls invisible. I believe Jackson is holding up sites where depth of though reigns and which don't depend on technological thumbscrews to maintain a veneer of quality.
that the traditional news-media is doomed to slide further and further from relevance.
Free speech is that protected or regulated by government...not that of an individual company to moderate what sort of speech goes on its website.
Surely you realize this?
And it's not about what people are saying...these are gif meant to evoke a visceral reaction in people. Looking a rape gif is not "reading" a comment. These are people who are actively trying to shut down the comments section of a website. They ought to be sued for harassment.
I don't know if the author realizes this, but Jezebel (along with pretty much every other Gawker-owned site) is essentially a blog and not at all a news site. In fact, this ENTIRE THING sounds like a typical Gawker tactic known as "clickbaiting" or "nerd-baiting" - essentially, blog authors on Gawker get paid by how many times people read their stories, so they have been known to make headlines that are overly controversial and inflammatory in order to get people to click on them.
'
As an example, there is one author on Gawker's "Kotaku" gaming blog named Jason Schrier. About a year ago, Jason Schrier wrote a series of articles decrying the game Dragon's Crown (which features stylized characters with exaggerated body proportions) as sexist and an insult to females and the LGBT crowd. 90% of what he posted were pure opinion pieces that were geared toward baiting as many people into clicking and commenting as possible, because this is how Gawker Media makes money. One of his most-clicked "articles" was a photo of his E3 badge (which featured art from Dragon's Crown) and a blurb about him potentially "boycotting" E3 because they used Dragon's Crown in their promotional material. The whole affair was ridiculous, childish, and geared toward baiting as many people into reading as possible.
There's also Patricia Hernandez, who writes long-winded articles about how various video games are sexist. Her articles are pure tripe, and even she knows it - but she wants to bait as many people into reading as possible so that she makes money.
Jezebel is exactly the same thing, but with feminism instead of videogames. They advocate a position that is so extremist as to be unrealistic, and attract a crowd of feminists who have.. less-than-mainstream views. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if these "rape .gifs" are a false-flag to drum up more attention (and thus more money) for Jezebel - it would certainly explain why Gawker Media would refuse to do anything about it.
Global warming is faaaaake!
dickbutt.jpg
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Never gonna happen. Most people just read the headline then jump right to the comments section to roll around like pigs in slop flaming each other. News sites rely on traffic for revenue/value. I don't know about you but I certainly perceive a story as being of less value when there is no comments section.
"Nicholas Jackson at Pacific Standard say's that far too many news subjects are getting their feelings hurt"
Yes, who needs a middle-man? Or, who needs "a portal to the web?"
... other individuals (early web). Didn't work.
.... currently it's Google+ and FaceBook.
AOL tried for years to situate themselves between individuals and
I forget who tried it next. Didn't work.
OK, just a list is enough: MySpace, Time-Warner via a reboot of the AOL idea,
I can use email (etc.) myself, thanks. No need to run every message and page-view through a third party. More hassle, they read them, and could disappear at a moment's notice.
In future, someone else will think they force their way in to being an uninvited middle-man. It hasn't worked yet..."
Unfortunately the definition of speech is broad enough to allow that horrible picture to apply. Hell, at this point if simply spending money equals free speech, than just about anything else can too.
The important thing is that no one is required to offer a forum, excepting some of the rules regarding fair distribution of political advertising in advance of an election. Since even nasty traffic is still traffic though, it's not in the forum's interest to curtail such behavior unless it actively drives away use.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Free speech is that protected or regulated by government...not that of an individual company to moderate what sort of speech goes on its website.
Wrong. Free speech is the concept that you can speak freely. Things like the first amendment limit the government's power. I do think that government censorship is worse, and is forbidden, though.
They ought to be sued for harassment.
I can see you love free speech so much. So much that you'd be willing to get the government involved by suing people for posting gifs. "harassment" is subjective and we shouldn't allow any such nonsensical restrictions upon speech.
One would have to catch them first. If you read the actual article, you would have realized that chances to do so are slim.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly
This bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.
The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse, but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.
The internet is the ultimate gladiator arena for thoughts. If an idea cannot stand up to the harsh scrutiny of a bunch of anonymous trolls, it probably does not deserve to thrive permanently in the public realm. The reality of internet trolling is that people are free to say what they actually think, without the tethers of society keeping their ego in check. It does get ugly and unproductive at times, but let's face it, ideas are stronger for running the gauntlet.
I especially think that news sites need to support comments. The primary reason for that is so that that informed members of the public can provide counter points and make persuasive arguments to influence people who might be on the fence about the subject. Every site, from a mainstream site like CNN to the darkest fringes of the internet, is biased. As a society, we need to be able to counter the bias and the best way to do that is with discourse.
Jez is part of gawker. gawker loves to gin up controversy. This is how the outfit sells ad space, in which case some ads pose as stories, etc. The more feathers get ruffled, the more eyeballs gather to watch. It's about a busine$$ model, not about bad actors in public or self-restraint or hiding anything. gawker painted themselves into this corner and now they have to live with the monsters they've created.
They're loving how these conversations are helping their bottom line, so be sure you get your cut for helping to promote the train wrecks over there.
With the sole exception of Slashdot, and The Register, I hate reading comments on articles. They're, at best, a minute fraction better than the comments you see on youtube videos....
And I think this article explains very well why comments, or modern day public discussions in general, are crap:
http://theconversation.com/no-...
Users vote and the higher votes get visibility. Slashdot. Reddit. StackExchange. Usable sites, it's a solved problem.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Granted most comments are useless but usually there are few gems mixed in. Comments next to an article are a a convenient method to pick apart journalistic claims. Its no big secret the editorial boards of large news organizations massage stories to push larger political agendas rather than stick to objective reporting of relevant facts . Comments will give the side of the story that the editors didn't want to push. It's not that the journalists are always wrong but its important to understand... a. News sources are made up of people b. People can have biases Given most news site now have a comment section arguing they should be moved to blogs is absurd. Won't happen. The real issue censorship of comments. Go to the "the Guardian" or "New York Times" and start slamming leftists. Go to Foxnews and start slamming the right. Watch is yoru comments either get removed or your account does. What's amazing is both organizations claim to be for freedom and against censorship but both constantly do it on when its in their power to do so. Unless someone has broken some law, (e.g. violent personal threat) , spam, or some sort of niche market news outlet (e.g. posting oft topic items harms the quality of service) --- comments should be allowed to stay. Period. By protecting the free speech rights of bigots, sadists, and general all-round -ssholes, we are also protecting our own rights.
much of the internet is openly hostile to women.
You (and they) are making this out to be something related to women when in fact it's far more simple.
ANY subject brings in trolls, and the more easily trolled the subject is the worse the trolls will be. Jezebel is not seeing anything different than any other place on the internet does that has people who issue strong opinions. They just have much suckier automated blocking techniques, algorithms for first time users and moderation tools period.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You guys realize that slashdot is just as clickbait-y and unreasonable and targeted as Jezebel, right? The headlines here are designed to drive comments and pageviews equally as hard by leaning on the same sorts of buttons, you just don't realize it as often because the buttons they push reenforce your own viewpoints and biases.
Human beings are social primates. Being aware that the nature of said beasts include the occasional handful of flung feces, it should be possible to identify what people use this environment to achieve. Typical drive include the sharing of ideas. The garnering of social capital for intelligence and wit. And yes, some people use the internet as a toilet the same way some Cretans enjoy passing gas in a crowded room.
So How do you get the benefits of an exchange of ideas and our combined intelligence, while at the same time keeping the ass-hats on a short leash? Sounds like a job for game theory? Yes? Set up a comment ranking system (Hmmmm where have I seen that before?) and make the Troglodytes live in the lowest subterranean depths, findable only by folks who are in want of the kind of entertainment that only serial brain-farts can provide. Elevate the best and brightest commentators to the height and revel in the brilliant things they have to say.
In fact as we begin to build better and better natural language engines and software capable of accurately parsing human conversation, it could be a lucrative service to build a system that accurately ranks comments for intelligence, humor, style, and all around quality. Of course, context will be important. Someone commenting on the waste that is religion might, get a plus point on an athiest's blog, and negative 10 points on a religious blog. Perhaps until the advent of AI, we'll need automated ranking with possible human follow up in disputed cases.
I think it's on SourceForge.
Don't kill commenting just because Jezebel has a terrible commenting system. I've long known that Jezebel's system was bad from the perspective of a commenter, now I know that it's awful from the other side of the fence as well.
The one time I'm happy /. doesn't support inline img tags.
with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience
I think that's what allot of this boils down to.
You're doing it wrong.
Signed,
Some loser.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
I value comments on news sites and blogs. They provide reporters and writers are often wrong or one-sided. Comments provide corrections, additions and other viewpoints. Yes, sometimes they provide shit. Press page down.
(p.s. and no, the /. mod system doesn't improve it - unless by 'improve' you mean 'hide away by the lowest common denominator of consensus groupthink, nope, nothing to see here at all, move along, move along ...")
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience.
If you read Slashdot at -1, you'll see plenty of horrid comments. Heck, people can be quite rude in +5 posts, although usually not both rude and stupid. Slashdot isn't helped by being self-selected or homogenous; it's helped by heavy moderation, both by users and by admins. Newspapers and magazines seem to leave their commenters to their own devices more. Rather than modding down the trolls, people reply to try to debunk them.
I normally read slashdot (well, skim) at -1, and the comments here are relatively decent. It really helps that I can browse as a single webpage. Compare slashdot to "news" sites, where the "noise" overwhelms the signal. And since slashdot has (had?) a reputation for tech articles, many of the commenters know how to type.
227-3517
disclaimer : I was an admin for fark.com.
The problem as I see it is that news sites started adding the ability for user comments to try to make their websites more 'sticky'. They wanted people to keep coming back ... but the ones that do are the trolls.
Unless you've modeled your whole site around people commenting, and build up a community, you don't tend to get useful comments -- you either get trolls, people advertising 'work at home', or someone with a follow question about the article that no one every responds to. Once in a while you might get some actually useful information from the general public, the 'I was there' accounts and such ... but it's few and far between.
(note, I'm not commenting on how Fark handles things ... most of their measures were implemented after I left, and I only know some of it; my experience comes with managing other websites)
Allowing anonymous posting that immediately gets shown to the public is just plain stupid. It's begging for trolls. At least with accounts you can monitor the new users, as in most cases you either have the throw-away account (which might have been registered months ago, specifically for use later), or the person who's just constantly obnoxious.
If I ever set up another website, I'm going to the model of 'invitations' where you have to know someone already in the community to get an invite -- because then if we get someone being an ass, we can suspend their friends' accounts, too (giving them some external pressure to not be a dick), or prune the whole tree of accounts if that doesn't help.
So, anyway, my basic categories:
There are some successful hybrids out there ... but if you're going to allow comments, you have to know how to handle them ... and I don't want to say too much, because I don't want to give the trolls info on how to bypass some of the more interesting systems I've seen.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Such sites are the only places people get exposed to widely divergent views anymore. "Homogeneous" (read: "insulated") protected communities are not it. Sure, often such divergent communities meltdown into flamefests, but that doesn't mean we should all be cocooned into safe little worlds where everyone mostly agrees with us. If you can't take the heat, stay inside and remain ignorant.
Considering the content Jezebel posts they deserve every internet troll they get.
The problem with Slashdot is that the moderation system actually works. You mention AGW, but I've found that while there is a strong denier community here, on AGW articles they mostly end up at +5 in equal proportions to the people posting scientifically more accurate responses.[1]
Why is this a problem then? Well, it takes several hours and rounds of moderation to bring a comment section to that state. By that time, although the discussion has become readable and interesting, it hardly pays to add your viewpoint, as most people will now be paying attention to newer threads.
[1] Note to the peanut gallery: read very carefully. Nowhere in that statement do I equate 'scientifically more accurate' with being pro- or anti-AGW.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
dickbutt.jpg
This link isn't working >:-(
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
He is 100% correct.
When I go on a news site, I don't look for and I don't care for and I don't want random strangers commentary. I'm looking for journalistic articles, which at least in some newspapers is still a level above bloggers.
Frankly speaking, allowing the unwashed masses to add their zero-knowledge opinions to a carefully researched and fact-checked article makes it cheaper.
That said, many news sites are little more than organized multi-writer blogs these days, but I'm not talking about them. When you do real journalism, you should be ashamed to have your work displayed on the same page as Joe Doe from Montana writing "this is all nonsense, my cows love Mozart!".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Umm. I'm pretty sure it's open source.
Best Slashdot Co
Well Mr. Jackson should practice what he preaches, then. We won't be hearing from him on purpose.
People say awful things about the news, because the news is awful, the newsclowns writing it are awful, the news agencies spreading it are awful and all they promote is the awful news. It's lurid, it's emotional,it's meant to stir emotion and keep you coming back for more.
If comments disappear, the readership will disappear, save for a few with extreme interest.
Mr.Jackson is just spouting off garbage to draw attention to himself.....fuckin' troll.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
There is apparently a new app (meaning only mobile?) called Blocktogether that auto-blocks any Twitter accounts that have been created within the last seven days. I'm sure it won't last, but it's a start.
There are no news sites. There's just blogs that people like you happen to get paid to crap out. Everything is op ed you doucebag. So fuck off.
Comments are called "Editorials", and represents a point of view, opinion.
A Journalist is someone that can take facts of an event and make it readable, while not curing your Insomnia.
Fox News is an Oxymoron, and listening to it makes you worse off; which is public record.
/. tends to be a cesspit of sexist commentary, or dude-bro whining, or sweeping sexism under the rug because these insular men and women don't believe it exists because they can't see how it affects _them_. Evidence: Almost every comment above this one.
Here is a great example: http://www.newser.com/
I would actually like it if all commenting interfaces gave up, and we fixed netnews,
I agree with this, I would very much like to be able to use a preferred, threaded client with offline capabilities.
--
Jimfive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
On News sites with good comment systems, the comments add the real value.
Examples:
- reddit: Comments are dull, because everyone wants to be funny
- Slashdot: Comments are often better than the article, some are just funny, others insightful and interesting.
- Heise: Best* comment system, good threaded discussions, which add value even to the often very good articles.
* look at the news forums. Some other Forums, like telepolisblogs, techreview, mac&i, ... are migrated to new forums, which are worse. If they really migrate all forums, their comments will decline, too.
This is the fault of Social Media, itself
I think this is a monster created by Social Media priorities and the lack of structure adopted by the choice of the blog as the main model for communication on web pages and social media sites. The abuse comes from the equal voice every respondent gets, and it reflects that fact that human beings need far more nuance than the blog is able to give then. The blog begins to fail in its human function after about 10 replies or so. It is fine for short one-off threads; maybe about 95% of what is in Facebook or Twitter, but really quickly falls apart if there is any lengthy discussion or contention.
Threading by Topic Change
The threading and sub-threading that is allowed in discussion fourms is an important filtering tool that users can employ to choose what they want to read. It was relatively easy to select threads in USENET newsgroups that were likely to meed your needs by avoiding subjects that were tagged as people responded to the,. A user could tag a particular thread as coming from respsonding to a troll, for example. Or a reader could decide that a thread containing 100 replies was low hanging fruit or too facile to read. The skill at setting new topics is that self-selection can direct readers to what they are interested in, That might include straying from their preconceptions as well.
Discussion needs more structure than a blog
There is a technical solution and it existed long before the web and blogs existed. It is the structure that existed in e-mail and discussion forums, notably USENET beginning in about 1985. Mark Zuckerberg is noted for having decided that unstructured Javascript Textareas was the perfered medium for communication, i.e. the blog, in social media. My guess is that the Big Data application for his CMS was the reason. He placed the priorities of software that likes to grep through text blocks as the data mining tool of choice for his business partners. This makes features like quoting from other postings and threading of posts unfavored. But this is the reason for the abuse of blogs. And the "abuse" of the blog may be no more than changing the subject or hijacking the thread, something that is natural for human discourse, such as in a speaking conversation or a debate. Such tactics and including offensive remarks and trolling were handled in the past by technical features such as changing the topic line and responding by context quote and replying in kind. It is because such tools had been stripped from the blog in most current social media sites that the tactics people use to try to manipulate each other in a conversation are a problem. They were not a problem in the past, So, I argue that the problem is due to business decisions and lack of imagination in the owners of web sites and that tools such as Reddit and Slashdot contain some of the solution.
Topics need to be Neutral, not Promoted
There is another piece. It is to remove the social media promotion of topics by making the subject hierarchy neutral to the content. The social media promotion of topics, whether done by an editorial board as on Slashdot or as a user promotion as on Reddit, still creates a problem in undue bias in the stories that get attention. Slashdot had a topic hierarchy, but it is a second key to the editorial promotion. The USENET newsgroup hierarchy is still better for its neutrality of subjects than any promotion scheme proposed by social media sites. I know USENET has a bad reputation for abuse of binary media, but that could easily be fixed by not allowing for binary postings and an alternative hierarchy, yet again, could be proposed to separate its web-based resurection from the old one. I really think that the USENET approach is ultimately the right answer to the failings of social media blogging.
See my blog