The Guardian Publishes Comment Abuse Stats, Invites Debate On Moderation (theguardian.com)
AmiMoJo writes: British newspaper The Guardian has published some stats on its popular comment sections attached to each story. So far the Guardian's site has received 70 million comments, of which around 2% were removed for violation of community standards. Articles written by women tended to get the most blocked comments, especially if they were in male-writer dominated sections like sports and technology, while fashion was one of the few areas where men got more abuse. Further down the article the reader is invited to moderate some sample comments and see how their actions compared to those of the paper's staff. You can leave suggestions for improvement here.
What they failed to do was publish articles written by one gender/race under the alias of the opposing gender/race, serving it to part of the internet and seeing if there is a difference in the number of negative responses. They also didn't track the geographic region of the originating blocked posts. No conclusions can be taken from these numbers besides, "some people on the internet are assholes" which we already knew for a certainty thanks to the youtube comment sections.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What's with the "community"? There are no "community" standards — the removed messages were deemed offensive by a handful of moderators. Moderators prone to keeping some posts more equal than others and susceptible to manipulation by evil regimes.
Calling them "community" is redefining terms...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or at least... a Slashcode-like commenting, moderation, and meta-moderation system.
For all we complain about it here, and for all the trolling that occurs, the Slashdot moderation system seems to have passed the test of time reasonably enough.
Perhaps it's a little like that infamous definition of Democracy: It's the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Since you can turn off all moderation filtering (which I do, the site is quite boring if you read at higher mod levels), it's up to you as the reader. That seems to me to be the best approach. In other words, short of a few rather abusive posters (like APK when he goes off his meds), moderation only exists if you, the reader, decides it does.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So, for example, they cite that 8 or their 10 most "abused" contributors were women (4 white, 4 not). But since the newspaper has a great deal of coverage of "women's" issues including a lot of highly opinionated articles about feminism -- but no corresponding articles, or sections, concerning men's issues their coverage is neither balanced, nor able to show how much abuse their "men's" writers would get, since they don't have any.
They also counted all "moderated" comments (ones that do not meet their community standards) as being abusive and they assume that the abuse is directed against the author. However, they remove comments that are off-topic and ones that make personal comments about other commentators. So a comment that was removed because it insulted a commentator who was attacking the article (i.e. the insulter was supporting the author), would be counted as abuse against that author. They do not give reasons for removing comments and only have the single classification.
Finally, The Guardian admits that it does not moderate either consistently: applying different levels of rigor depending on the topic, nor does it moderate all articles to the same extent. It also does not open all it's articles up to comments.
In all, while their analysis does point to there being online abuse - they reckon they delete 2% of articles, from the 70 million submitted so far, the results are patchy, inconsistent and cherry-picked. It would never pass a peer review and seems to have been published more to push the newspaper's own agenda, rather than as an authoritative work to highlight a problem (they don't say if the level of "abuse" is rising or falling since they started in 1999).
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Maybe if you didn't put labels on people to such a staggering degree, and thinking that all wearers of a label you've given them think entirely the same, you'd have fewer problems with people calling out your lazy thought processes. In a single post your argument hinges on all "SJWs" thinking exactly the same, and all "leftists" too. You appear to be terrible at critical thinking. No wonder you are so confused and angry.
People who spout "SJW" all over the show rarely demonstrate nuanced thought.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
(I'm in Belgium)
When governments and societies take foreigners and group them together geographically, you end up with small enclaves where there's ca no reason or need to learn the national language.
I can show you places in here in Belgium, where Arabic will help you more than French or Flemish, there are sections in Frankfurt where you might as well speak Turkish, large area in northern Mexico where half the population only speaks german and sections of Spain where no-one speaks anything but UK English.
Yes, some people have no interest in integrating, but when there's no way to even use the national language, at lot of foreigners end up giving up trying to learn it.