95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.
The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.
Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.
i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens.
as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.
"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.
But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."
I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.
The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.
neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and replying by asking you to look around and find anywhere on the web that has a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different conclusion...
anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example:
Holy Hell, you are right. I actually have the distinguished privilege of having one of my NYTimes comments be a "Times Pick", meaning the ed. board actually read it and recommended it for insight, I suppose.
My comment was mostly meta, calling out people for missing the point of an op-ed. The op-ed was from a privacy/civil liberties person about why a "no buy" list for guns would be a bad idea. He wasn't arguing on the merits for or against gun ownership, just that these secret lists on which LEO acts are dangerous.
Every comment was something along the lines of "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!" - I tried to point this myopic view out, and every reply to my comment was "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!".
As a smallish-government liberal (Public services are well and good but government should be kept in check by a powerful and vigilant population) I get torn up whenever I defend gun rights or spending reductions on that website.
Metafilter does moderation well. They have a team of paid moderators. It costs a token $5 to join, which means it's expensive to generate sock puppets and anyway the moderators keep your credit card on file so they can permaban you if they need to.
I think it's more than that; it's a psychological thing. You're not likely to shell out five bucks to spew an epithet at someone - you have to think about it. You have to get your payment info together. You have to think about your budget, even a bit in passing.
Automatically generating a stupid sentence is hard. Stupidity is difficult to simulate. Not lack of coherence. Not pure noise. Not word salad. Not poorly trained neural networks. But stupidity. It's hard.
Well, you can pretty much come up with a stupid paragraph on any topic if you just write a small script that searches YouTube using the appropriate search pattern, and just grabs some random comment from the top link. Chances are pretty good it's a stupid statement.
I've always appreciated the NYT's approach to flag their "Picks" as not just the ones receiving the most upvotes/recommendations, but those that represent a wide variety of opinions.
Sturgeon's law[1]: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of comments is crap. 90% of journalism is crap. The difference is that a good portion of the 90% of journalism that is crap is off on sites that you don't read.
The German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ / http://www.faz.net) also has thoughtful comments. I used to think it was something about the community but at this point it seems more related to moderation. You don't see a lot of trolls on the site.
Given that it's FAZ, I suspect all they need is a check that the comment is correctly punctuated, uses the subjunctive, and consists of 3 paragraphs written in 2 sentences :)
We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide. I believe HN is good because it serves a specific trade purpose and caters to a specific high-end niche audience. HN's participants are willing to cross a significant participation threshold to be part of the community here. I believe that kind of structure needs to be in place to get good community participation. I guess I'd summarize it with these points:
1. require significant investment from the userbase to participate successfully
2. promise to assist the userbase with something that is critically valuable to them in exchange
3. regularly deliver on 2 to keep 1 worthwhile
4. provide reputation tracking and management utilities so that the user can cultivate a profile that reflects the investments made in point 1
5. for recurring participation, provide variable rewards that trigger the brain's hooks for surprise, which translates to enjoyment.
HN hits those points, but blogs definitely don't and don't want to. They want to bring in barely-interested readers from search, from anywhere on the web. Many of these readers won't even make it into the comment section. Thus, a good community tacked on to the bottom of their articles seems unlikely.
If those principles are required to cultivate a worthwhile community, the community should always occur external to the publication of the article. The community needs to be the centerpiece, not the article. I use HN this way; the discussion is the primary thing, the articles are the subjects submitted for the community's discussion.
The other caveat is that it's difficult to provide points 3 and 5 when you're just starting out. From what I've seen, it practically always has to be artificial until the momentum becomes self-driving (if there is a physical community that uses the online forum for spillover, this may not be applicable; this is basically what happened with HN). We need better solutions there.
Since individual blog posts have certain quantities of Google juice, comment sections will be overrun with spa--err, "SEO professionals". Other participants are often low-effort drive-bys. If the community isn't the principal focus, participation will be spotty and it will be hard to develop elements fundamental to meaningful community engagement.
Facebook and Twitter are normal people making normal comments on random stuff they see. These people generally feel a compulsion to let their feelings out and Facebook/Twitter provide it. I believe this is probably what was originally intended for blog comments, but because Facebook/Twitter are real, stable communities, the participants are inclined to leave comments there instead of on the target article itself. These comments are often loose and instinctive, which is not necessarily to say they're invalid or worthless, but a community won't form around individual postings because there's no common unifying dictum (point 2 is unfulfilled, and point 1 is minimal on random FB/Twitter posts).
Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in.
It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit.
I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.
I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping.
Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.
> It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.
Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.
well some one's trash is another person's insightful comment. that isn't to say there isn't hate and trivial comments but far too many will simply dismiss any comment as ignorant that they don't agree with. This is most likely to occur with political or religious discussions.
The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.
Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.