Slashdot Mirror
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.
Well they've got to go down this path bu choice, they're only 5 years out from complete bankruptcy that includes the money from the trust. They need to try showing people that they know how to remain solvant and can get their head on and fix the problems...and see...those problems? We want your opinion!
Personally, I think them having Jessica Vallenti was a great idea, it was a really good comedy section. I mean look at these examples: One week she gets to tell the idiots that wolf whistling is sexist, a few weeks later, she says it's sexist not to wolf whistle at someone. Then she starts going off about how air conditioning is sexist, but it's really not sexist all in the span of 3 weeks.
Om, nomnomnom...
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,
People who hold views that are contrary to the majority are targets for abuse. Moderation promotes groupthink. Take Slashdot for example.
You don't understand Slashdot's moderation method? And no one is blocked - ever. browse at a lower mod level, and accept that not everyone will agree with you.
You might even be exhibiting a little bit of Guardianesque ideas, in that you don't seem to want anyone to disagree with you.
We've had a number of posters here lately that are pissed that someone replies, and disagrees with them. Life just doesn't work that way, and Slashdot has come up with the best way to exist with the tragedy of the commons ever.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
What I've found from the news sites that have gone to Facebook is not only a much smaller set of comments, but a great increase in spam. By putting their faith in Facebook to weed out the malcontents, many sites literally destroy their comment sections.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
[...] but there is a fair amount of groupthink here, [...]
It's less of a problem than many people who are part of the groupthink clusters seem to think. My observation is that with a few exceptions, any comment which falls into groupthink territory tends to have its "+1, Agree" upvotes and "-1, Disagree" downvotes balanced out. Such comments never get to either -1 or +5.
It's rare that all groupthink clusters align on Slashdot to the point where a non-troll comment gets moderated to -1. I think the only time it's ever happened to me was when I advocated Deep Space 9.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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
...and it's annoying that, if you be banned your comments' history will be gone also, they are vapored without any warning. I were one of the 'victims'.
And, after that I found out many readers have the same problems with this 'moderation system', no matter they are left or right, and they joke that 'CiF (Comment is Free, is what The Guardian call their comment section), but some comments are freer.
And, their 'community standard' is very obscure, while some personal attacks are still there, some normal debates were deleted. When I demanded they show how I violated the rules (yes, with "please"), they deleted my comment also.
It's not that I'm whining, I'll be fine that I must respect the 'rules', I will be OK if, 'you violated 'Section 1, clause 3', so your comment was deleted', but in The Guardian there is no rule. It's likely the moderators delete comments they don't like.
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.
Here in Brazil, usually when a site has a comment section based on Facebook is guaranteed that you will find the dumbest people you can imagine posting the most absurd/hatefull/shitty things. To avoid getting sick I usually block Facebook in its entirety using adblock and noscript.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time