Slashdot Mirror
Another Wave of Publications Shut Down Online Comments
AmiMoJo writes: The debate about comment sections on news sites is often as divisive as the comments themselves. Recently outlets such as The Verge and The Daily Dot have closed their comments sections because they've become too hard to manage. And they're far from alone. Moderating comments is a full-time job (or several full-time jobs) at many news organisations. Nicholas White, editor at The Daily Dot, noted that "in our experience, our community hasn't evolved in our comments. It's evolved in our social media accounts. To have comments, you have to be very active, and if you're not incredibly active, what ends up happening is a mob can shout down all the other people on your site. In an environment that isn't heavily curated it becomes about silencing voices and not about opening up voices."
Riese, co-founder and editor-in-chief of LGBT site Autostraddle, adds, "I completely understand why The Daily Dot wouldn't want to have comments — or in fact why most websites wouldn't want to have comments. I think 75% of the time they're more trouble than they're worth, and for us it's still a lot of work to keep up on. Not all of our users are necessarily on Facebook or are out as gay on Facebook, or are comfortable talking about queer stuff on Facebook. We keep comments on the site which is a safe space for people to exchange ideas — and that's a big factor for us."
Riese, co-founder and editor-in-chief of LGBT site Autostraddle, adds, "I completely understand why The Daily Dot wouldn't want to have comments — or in fact why most websites wouldn't want to have comments. I think 75% of the time they're more trouble than they're worth, and for us it's still a lot of work to keep up on. Not all of our users are necessarily on Facebook or are out as gay on Facebook, or are comfortable talking about queer stuff on Facebook. We keep comments on the site which is a safe space for people to exchange ideas — and that's a big factor for us."
Yeah, well, at least fucking Slashdot still allows fucking comments. Can you imagine Slashdot without all our fucking insightful comments?
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
I would never post comments on a web site.
I've a lot of sympathy. Some sites - like Slashdot - are all about the comments (for which the stories act as little more than a prompt). But those sites tend to have well-throught-through community structures and moderations in place. Much as we all gripe about Slashdot sometimes, its moderation system remains best-in-class.
A lot of other sites I frequent have been "going toxic" over the last couple of years, often as a result of their comments sections (I'll highlight Eurogamer and Kotaku as partial examples and Animenewsnetwork as an uber-example). The comments threads usually descend into two (or sometimes more) camps of people, yelling "SJW!" or "MRA!" at each other. Over time, the site's editors and authors get pulled into one side or the other and the site stops playing for a general audience and just becomes another factional advocacy site.
Blocking comments therefore makes a degree of sense for sites which want to preserve the quality of their writing but which don't have the resources (or a sufficiently engaged readership) to make Slashdot-style community moderation work. It's actually pretty admirable in some respects, because it is actually incurring an immediate financial penalty for the site, assuming its business model is advertising based. After all, if somebody reads a story once, you get a single page-view. If they reload the story two dozen times to participate in a flame war in the comments, that's two dozen page-views. Indeed, it's hard to read some articles on the sites I mentioned above (and many more besides) and see them as anything other than flamebait designed to encourage high page-view wars in the comments.
I am reasonably certain this is happening because people are starting to wake up to the bullshit. Propaganda is beginning to fail and when you have people pointing out the bullshit propaganda in the comments, you must obviously shut that down. This has nothing to do with negativity and everything to do with controlling the narrative.
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
That would imply there is a viewpoint to be censored instead of a troll just out to cause trouble. I think the latter happens FAR more often than the former.
The real problem is that these sites define trolling as merely having a contradictory opinion. They don't want anyone to threaten their echo chamber. They don't want people posting sincere, meaningful comments that defy the media narrative they are trying to push.
The Verge in particular suffers from this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We're going back to the old ways!
WE SAY, YOU LISTEN!
Thank you,
Old media (and now new media too)
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Except that this leads to a groupthink echo chamber. Anyone speaking outside the hivemind meme is quickly drowned out, regardless of whether the point they were trying to make is valid.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Comments are the people's voice.
Disallowing or removing contents is to censor the average person's thoughts, ideas and opinions - often in favor of biased information or propaganda.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
This is the problem. It seems like most Internet users act like morons. I'm not saying they ARE morons, but we all know how a degree of anonymity can cause people to lose control of their inhibitions about what they say. I've seen comment threads that were extremely informative, but that's rare, and mostly on the more obscure websites. Any website that attracts a broader spectrum of users is going to get a lot more moronic posts. People misunderstand the content, flame the content, flame each other, post SPAM, and just generally cause havoc. It's hard to find a signal in the noise. Even when people are well-meaning (which a lot of them are not), discussions can completely devolve.
Sites like slashdot and reddit, which are built on comments, have to have elaborate systems of moderation in order to keep the crap in check. Imagine a completely unmoderated system. It would be completely useless. Oh wait. We had usenet, and from the moment the AOLers got access, it went into decline, and now it's basically dead.
99% of everything on the Internet is crap. Statistically, that includes my comment as well.
http://xkcd.com/386/
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
We've seen flame wars and trolling since the original Usenet days. Also, spam is one of the problems in running a comments section. While you may not want to silence thoughtful dialog, sometimes it really is more trouble than it's worth due to spammers and trolls. For sites that have a local user base, like Slashdot, this is a little easier to manage. Others, not so much.
Tolerating trolls to some extent is the price you pay for freedom of speech.
Just as the threat of terrorism doesn't justify a police state, and at some point a society has to just accept the remaining risk instead of growing more draconian or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent; so too trolls and other assholes don't justify censorship, and at some point a community just has to put up with them instead of tightening the screws or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Essentially the argument against free, anonymous speech is that people will show the world exactly how they feel deep down inside. They won't filter, they won't self-censor, they won't be politically correct. And that's A Bad Thing(tm) according to the powers that be, so we have to shut it down. What a cowardly fucking attitude to have.
Grow a fucking set and learn to deal with criticism. Some people don't like me for whatever reason. A few even probably HATE me. And that's absolutely their right to do so. In fact, it's a pillar of free society to be able to have whatever opinions you like, whether or not it hurts someone's feelings, or (gasp!) makes someone uncomfortable or shatters the fragile little ego of some useless millennial* leech who can't attain respect on their own merits so they have to demand respect from society through the control of thought and language to protect themselves from the truth.
I think pure, unadulterated, uncensored, open speech is the most beautiful thing in the world. As hateful or unpopular as much of that speech is, it's how someone really feels and that person deserves to have their say just as much as any special snowflake or "safe space" dweller. In fact those snowflakes are the majority amongst the millennials of my generation due to their narcissistic addiction to social media and their tendency to be "followers". Where are the safe spaces for the minority of us who can still think critically and for ourselves, peer pressure and popular opinion be damned?
And if comment sections are so overrun with said incorrect thoughts, you have to wonder if maybe the people censoring them are the ones that are "incorrect".
So uhmmm, Wikipedia is a denier blog.
Got it.
The New York Times is a denier blog, I thought it was a left wing propaganda machine.
As for Watts up with That? I generally referenced it for the collection of references. I don't actually read the site, I did a search for something mentioning the fact that records were altered. The one incident in particular I recall involved people actually getting information directly from a weather station's archives in Antarctica that disagreed with what NASA/NOAA published as what that very station said.
Nothing creates exceptions to the rule like an emergency.
If you don't have an emergency sometimes it pays to create one.
For those who see through the cloud, call them crazy, it will keep everyone else from paying attention to them. Then you can use the propaganda to control the people.
I'm a conservationist, I do believe we're generally screwing up the planet on which we live. I like doing "green" things. I try to minimize packaging, which goes right out the window when I order off the web, but still "family size" is my choice. I prefer as fuel efficient of a vehicle as I can get, for multitudes of reasons and can't wait for a chance at an Elio. I'm a cyclist when I can be. I try to minimize my pollution and foot print for the same reason the hippies say I should. Fortunately I have a wife who's really into natural cleaning products and what have you, we're shifting towards those, we were already doing less harmful stuff, but now she's making all sorts of household products. I admit to having mixed feelings towards some of those. I go non-GMO/organic as much as possible. I think doing these things makes sense. I think green energy, like wind and solar, when done properly, is the right thing to do for the environment and for capitalistic reasons, free fuel.
I think most climate alarmism is bullshit and it's being used to implement Agenda 21, which is not completely bad, but at it's core removes freedom when implemented through trickery and manipulation. I think there's a lot of great ideas with Agenda 21, I just don't like forcing them on people. There's some really bad ideas in there too. I don't like forcing those on people either. Yes, I do think the government would lie to us. If you don't I'm not the crazy one.
So once again I ask:
Should I always trust the results a scientist who's research is funded by someone with a financial interest in a particular outcome?
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