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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is Slashdot. We read neither the article, nor the comments.
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.
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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
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.
So what brings you to Slashdot, then?
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.
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.
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.
Wish this had been modded up. In addition to the above, BlockTogether also automatically shares block-lists (so if anyone of your "friends" using the app blocks someone, everyone else using it will also block them). The daily-N-word victim I was talking about was raving about it the other day. Now only the first person Mr. Racist trolls with his fresh account ever has to see his crap.
Its kind of a neat idea to implement a reputation-based user moderation system entirely from outside Twitter (since Twitter hasn't been doing the job).