[Fr0ntBack]

I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

[danso]

I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0].

Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-revie...

[DashRattlesnake]

Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users.

The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.

Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.

[brennen]

> The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.

As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.

MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.

This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.

I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)

It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.

[fullshark]

That's giving too much credit to the journalists for the comment streams being terrible. Most of the terrible comments are not because people read the article and are angry about how good it was, I'd say a very very small number are.

[Chris2048]

> good journalism in general pisses people off

Not so much as bad jouirnalism

[zzalpha]

But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls.

I very much disagree with that.

Let's just take the CBC as an example. It's an excellent news organization that writes top notch journalism. And for any topic even remotely controversial (e.g., anything related to the indigenous population in Canada), they've had to disable the comment section because it's such a godawful cesspool.

[matart]

CBC comments show you how horrible some people can be. It makes me think that we leave discussion to the discussions sites. Reddit, HN, etc. and just let the news tell the news.

[stan_rogers]

I've used the "block element" feature of uBlock Origin to completely remove the comments from CBC.ca. Frankly, the possibility that I may miss the one insightful comment posted every twenty thousand or so (before it's pushed into "show more" territory) doesn't seem like much of a loss.

[jagermo]

but you could get rid of that, couldn't you? Switch to "moderate first if user does not have a high enough reputation" for a while. Idiot commenters want their posts to be seen, they thrive on the chaos. Take that away from them and they will move on.

Yes, you need a few people willing to go through the filth, but you will get a better online presence out of it.

[zzalpha]

Or don't waste your time and kill comments entirely.

Demonstrate the cost/benefit advantage of having to police these garbage piles and maybe I'll buy it. But I don't believe that most people read the Times or CBC or WaPo for the comment section. More likely they read those outlets despite them.

I agree with Vice. Leave the discussion to dedicated services like Reddit, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and focus on core competencies: producing top notch content.

[newswriter99]

Vice is nowhere remotely close to journalistic professionalism. I'd argue they bait trolls.

[sbarre]

Are you thinking of Vice from 15 years ago when it was just a magazine?

Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).

[I_HALF_CATS]

Vice has no journalism code of ethics. They have no official fact-checking process. I tried fact-checking Vice and it didn't go so well:

https://notvice.com/fact-checking-vice-a-fiction-2d482100116...

[jagermo]

Vice killed its professionalism for me when they posted the "We are with John McAfee now, suckers" piece without removing the GPS coordinates of the selfies. (https://www.wired.com/2012/12/oops-did-vice-just-give-away-j...)

In my opinion, Vice is nothing more than a clickbait machine that got somehow famous for being "edgy".

[burger_moon]

The article that appeared below the OP article was about an internet feud between Nikki minaj and Meek Mill. So you're right, I am surprised but not in a good way.

[sbarre]

Meh, Vice covers a wide spectrum of topics, all aimed at youth..

Some is heavy, some is not..

Find a mainstream (non-topic-specialized) publication that doesn't do that, and I'll be surprised.

[tormeh]

The Economist?

[weberc2]

I still see lots of partisan clickbait articles from Vice. Hopefully my sample isn't representative, but I doubt it's an anomaly.

[astrodust]

Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things.

Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.

[newswriter99]

Vice does nothing BUT write editorials and tries to pawn them off as objective journalism.

Hence, trolling.

[duaneb]

The comments on the New York Times seem to be high quality.

[danso]

They also expend significant resources in moderating it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...

(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)

[sammermpc]

FWIW, a move towards automated assistance is what motivated that article in the first place: "The New York Times is partnering with Google Jigsaw to create a new moderation system that will help us review incoming comments based on decisions our moderators have made in the past. Our moderators will continue to protect these discussions, but once this new system is launched, we will have robot helpers."

I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).

[monksy]

I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage).

You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.

[MaxfordAndSons]

> a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage

Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.

[stuart78]

I think that is in part because they are highly moderated, both by their internal team and user votes. Such moderation is costly, but I tend to think it is worth it for the good of the community.

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...

[knieveltech]

A strong indicator of intense moderator activity.

[djtriptych]

They employ people to moderate comments and select high-quality contributions. Not cheap.

[vinhboy]

The NYT is the ONLY high quality comment "left" on the internet. It's sad that we are letting extremists mute comment sections.

[toomuchtodo]

NPR also nuked their comment section. They're not what I'd consider a watering hole of ill repute.

[cydonian_monk]

And the NPR comments section wasn't generally terrible, either. At least not on the articles I usually read. Still, I'd rather the money/time/energy required to properly maintain a comments section for NPR be spent on pursuits closer to their core purpose.

[caseysoftware]

Considering how much of the media was shocked SHOCKED by Brexit, the election of Trump, Sarkozy's loss, the fall of Merkel, and the rise of Le Pen, maybe they should pay more attention to the comments..

[thinkloop]

Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions.

Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved. People simply changed their minds as the events drew near. Or we happened to hit the underdog outcomes (80% chance of Hillary is still 1 in 5 for Trump).

None gets solved by polling trolls.

[wutbrodo]

> Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.

I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.

[zigzigzag]

And the polls, markets and experts were all wrong. Apparently they aren't so scientific, liquid or expert after all.

Actually, a few journalists who spent serious time hitting the streets outside London concluded that Brexit would win or at least was quite likely, just by talking to people. They were largely ignored because they weren't "experts", just people talking to other people. John Harris being an example of that.

[forgottenpass]

>Those were shocking events. Scientific polls, liquid prediction markets and experts, all predicted different outcomes. It would have been irresponsible to take different positions.

Those were not shocking events. People wanted a prediction with more confidence than those sources of prediction were able to provide. Faced with the hard limitations of existing predictive tools, people that should damn well know better started listening when they found someone to tell them "Nate Silver has Trump at 25%" really meant "Hillary will win."

It would not have been irresponsible to account for the possibility of the less likely but still possible outcome. In fact it would be irresponsible to NOT be prepared for it.

>Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.

We're never going to be able to predict the future with total accuracy. The question is how we want to face them limitations of that accuracy. People who don't take "no" for an answer will read too much into unreliable predictions and attempt to rebuild systems for more predictable results regardless of externalities. The question should be how we adapt to that reality.

[Chris2048]

Scientific polls have participation and subjectivity flaws, 'expert' opinion begs the question.

No one addresses the obvious weaknesses, they just say "this is the best we have", but then act with confidence in the predictions, rather than admit we don't know.

[tonyedgecombe]

The media were not SHOCKED, they expressed shock in an attempt to get more attention/views.

[brennen]

I really haven't seen much evidence that media professionals expressing shock at, for example, Brexit and Trump's election are engaged in some strong form of deception. There's a reasonable set of critiques about media incentives and behavior here, but I think this is a case where cynicism of this kind can obscure observable reality: The majority of people really didn't expect these outcomes.

[reality_czech]

The point is that the media were in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.

[ilugaslifg]

That is absolutely a true thing you can say about the media and the election. They came to believe that Trump would not win the election, by being in a bubble where everyone they talked to had the same views as themselves.

But that is a totally different point than, and is actually logically incompatible with, the assertion that they privately believed that Trump _would_ win the election, but expressed otherwise to the public.

[reality_czech]

OK, that's fair. I think that most of the media believed that Clinton would win. It was actually quite creepy seeing all the glowing tributes to her life, and upcoming presidency. I still have a special commemorative edition of Newsweek from November 8, 2016, celebrating "Hillary Clinton's Historic Journey to the White House." I think I am going to keep this for a while.

[ilugaslifg]

As much as I would normally support this kind of cynicism, in the particular case of Trump's election, the media were as genuinely shocked as everyone else. Opponents and supporters, informed and not.

Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.

Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.

[kuschku]

The "fall" of Merkel? You mean, she went from approval rates of 74% to about 50%?

[rokosbasilisk]

Probably in reference to the reversal of hijabs and beginning of her reversing some immigration policies.

[djtriptych]

Trolls are attracted to attention. Every popular site has this issue.

[aphextron]

Nonsense. Literally any comment section on any news website will be filled with people spouting off their random insanity because it's simply a platform. The actual content of the article rarely even matters to these people.

[vinhboy]

We can easily discern, with statistics, which political ideology is providing all the insane comments. But in places like HN, people will scream at you for being partisan if you mention it.

I think there needs to be an honest discussion about this, because muting comment sections is not fair to those who want to have reasonable conversation.

[prawn]

You can write something completely reasonable and still attract absolute dickheads - the internet is pretty special like that. I think a more realistic position is about how your commenting system motivates better comments, not to avoid criticism but to create a better product for your audience.

e.g., focus more on your commenting system than simply your content.

My local rag is a cesspool. No persistent identities, no karma, no community moderation, no other methods of promoting the best responses. You end up with drive-by insults and little of substance.

[ebbv]

This just isn't true. Every site I've ever seen get above a certain threshold of popularity has its comments site turn to utter garbage, if it wasn't terrible already.

The problem is that once your comments section quality reaches a certain point, nobody wants to bother spending time an effort writing something thoughtful. For two reasons; one it seems like nobody there will appreciate it and two it gets drowned out by the noise that surrounds anything bombastic.

[zigzigzag]

HN, Slashdot and Reddit frequently have thousands of posts on a single story and many of the posts are excellent.

The keys are that all three sites are dedicated to discussion: that's practically all they do (plus story aggregation). So they are optimised for it. A simple example of how they differ from most newspaper comment sections: threaded replies. Posts that span the page width. Karma tracking.

[kevinburke]

I would recommend you read "The Internet of Garbage" by Sarah Jeong, which tackles this argument in a lot of depth. It's also very cheap for an e-book!

[ksk]

> But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

Can you explain your reasoning behind that?