
Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com - artek
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/were-getting-rid-of-comments-on-vice?utm_source=vicetwitterus
======
spott
I think there actually might be a market here for Reddit...

Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site
automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Embed the relevant post on the
news site.

Since "karma" is transitive across Reddit and across news sites, users are
slightly less likely to troll. You could also do this with some sort of
reputation system across websites (Disqus could add in something like that).

The big problem with news sites is that the communities aren't big enough that
there are any negative correlations associated with being a dick. Even
facebook runs into this problem because there isn't any way to "punish"
someone for a rude comment. Transitive, persistent reputation is key to
solving this issue (at least in my very non-expert opinion). Reddit helps,
with comment karma and post karma... but it obviously isn't perfect.

~~~
rabidrat
> Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue

Reddit/HN/etc make the username behind each comment as small and discreet as
possible. As much as I dislike the low content/cruft ratio of BBForum, its
design emphasizes each commenter's login, and registration date. This helps at
least a bit, as even visitors can readily notice the correlation between
certain avatars and the quality of their posts.

Whereas on Reddit and here, I even sometimes miss that the same account is
just replying to a reply--i.e. just continuing the conversation. I think the
aim is to judge comments by their content rather than the character who posts
them, but context is always extremely relevant. It matters whether the poster
is a Senator, a thought leader, or a habitual troll. And I often get too
wrapped up in the content to dig for the source.

~~~
wav-part
This has much simpler solution: user tagging. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite
has it. I am working on a C Reddit/HN client (basically RES on steroids) that
would implement these user remebering features such as usertags, usersets,
bad/good users, total_upvote/downvotes_given_to_a_user etc.

------
AbrahamParangi
I think many people have realized that the costs (filtering & moderation) vs.
benefits (community engagement) of comment sections just don't make sense for
most websites.

I suspect that for comment sections to be _good_ the users need to actually be
invested in the 'forum' they're posting in. Without any skin in the game
(reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to
add value and the system becomes dominated by 'low value' posts (like trolls,
flamewars, spambots, etc.).

~~~
seanalltogether
This actually a good argument toward shifting commenting into a paid
subscription offering. Give access to the site free of ads and allow you to
comment on articles.

~~~
rezashirazian
I disagree, if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel
entitled and less likely to self-moderate.

It would make more sense to grant commenting privileges to individuals who
have engaged with the site previously and are in good standing. Much like the
Product Hunt.

~~~
throwanem
> if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and
> less likely to self-moderate

Not if getting banned means they have to buy a new account to post again.

~~~
saboot
Yeah, this is the something awful forums model. It's not perfect but better
than most places.

------
swalsh
Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high
standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course,
they are of much lower quality).

A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the
tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new
commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality
comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I've
always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to
reach Reddit's size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.

~~~
dba7dba
Would Ycombinator be willing to start a separate product with its
ranking/reputation system to allow other sites to host comments section?

Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is
built on.

~~~
kevinwang
I'd guess that a big part of the quality control here comes from efforts of
the moderators, so I don't think that replicating the ranking system would
replicate the quality of discourse.

------
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...](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-reviews)

~~~
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.

------
colordrops
Many sites have been closing their comments section. It seems to me that the
purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. Rather than
finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation, these sites just
shut the community out and become a broadcast medium once again.

A notable removal of a comments section was NPR's shutdown right around the
time of the Democratic National Convention. The comments were overwhelmingly
anti-Hillary, but they were for the most part civil. It looked really bad
because these were progressives and liberals going after her rather than rabid
right-wingers. Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments
section had to go.

~~~
kevinburke
> It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control
> the message.

Insofar as "control the message" means "we are tired of anonymous people in
our comments section doxxing our authors and other people, and vile, racist
attacks on our authors and groups of people", then yes, this is an attempt to
"control the message."

> Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.

There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.

~~~
colordrops
> anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other
> people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then
> yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."

That is a cop-out and not true for all comment sections.

> There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.

That's a huge cop-out statement to shutdown conversation, and this is about as
on-topic as possible. Who are you to decide what is on-topic?

~~~
kevinburke
Sorry - did you read the article? It was true for Vice:

> Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the
> loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and
> the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise... we had to ban
> countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and
> subjects, doxxing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against
> pretty much every group imaginable.

> We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving
> forward.

~~~
kristofferR
They deliberately neglected to mention how often the top comment pointed out
factual inaccuracies in their stories though.

------
slang800
I don't buy the "troll" argument. Every site has low-value comments and people
either ignore them or down-vote them. They're not an issue. Take YouTube for
example - they are known to have a cancerous comment section with little-to-no
moderation, yet people don't avoid YouTube, they just avoid reading the
comments on most channels.

The real problem for VICE is when comments aren't from trolls - when they're
debunking the article and pointing out flaws in real-time.

That being said, I'm happy to see them disable comments. This will open up an
opportunity for someone else to take over managing comments on their
content... Hopefully someone who cares more about open discussion.

~~~
throwaw12ay
> they just avoid reading the comments

This. But usually when the content is good and thoughtful ,(AKA void of
controversy or outrage), the comment can be useful. But otherwise frankly
Youtube comment is a worst place than reddit itself.

------
Bedon292
It has been a long time since I actually dove into a comments section on any
news site and found anything other than inflammatory arguments. It seems like
people target out these news sites intentionally to start these arguments with
no intent of listening to the other side. I would much rather come somewhere
like here, and actually seem to have mostly civil discussions even when people
disagree.

Does anyone find the comment section of any news site informative and useful?
If so, where?

~~~
clydethefrog
De Correspondent, a Dutch publication, their comments section is only
accessible to paying members. They treat their subscribers as a community and
usually an article ends with a question to the reader to discuss.

Their publisher has a typical Medium post about their strategy. As a
subscriber I would say it works, unless the topic is already really
controversial.

[https://medium.com/@ejpfauth/lets-give-reader-comments-
anoth...](https://medium.com/@ejpfauth/lets-give-reader-comments-another-
chance-and-for-real-this-time-77506d29856b#.o3beuoqbe)

~~~
type0
I think it's great giving their subscribers a voice, however I don't agree
that it's good to only be open to paying members. It's better to have
something like subscriber accounts with unlimited comments and regular user
accounts with limited number of comments.

------
charlesism
Hopefully the biker bar analogy* is correct. Every year it feels more and more
like the bikers are actually _the majority_.

*[https://chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/](https://chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/)

~~~
lmm
Interesting to look back on this. Reddit seems to be doing fine now - it's put
the line in a clear and simple place, and while there are occasional paranoid
grumblings that certain subreddits are getting away with brigading it's mostly
working out. Whereas Twitter - which seemed to follow a line closer to the one
being advocated there - is a disaster area.

~~~
brennen
> Reddit seems to be doing fine now

Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016
reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which
incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity.

Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of
reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by
far outstripped its prosocial functions.

~~~
mundo
The problem with generalizing about Reddit is not its size, it's that Reddit
is made up of a bunch of separate forums with separate mods and rules and
users and so forth. It's just a place where discussion boards live. Reddit :
forums :: Blogspot : blogs.

~~~
brennen
I used to make more or less this same argument, by analogy to Usenet, phpBB
forums, etc.

My take now is that this falls apart in that the pathologies of reddit are
down to a shared platform (the voting system, moderation tools, etc.),
userbase, and site culture. While it's true that userbase and culture are
differentiated between subreddits, they aren't really isolated enough, and
maybe more importantly, things like GamerGate and /r/The_Donald keep
happening.

It doesn't work to assume that every space or interaction on reddit is
terrible, but at this point in history it works pretty well for me to treat
reddit itself as a terrible meta-space: It routinely and actively produces
systems that damage society, out of all proportion to its positive effects.

(Edit: I should add that I was on reddit pretty early in its lifecycle,
probably owe my career to proggit in some very important sense, and sincerely
feel for the people who have to _run_ the damn thing. It's been a pretty
amazing platform in many ways, and it still feels kind of bad to write it
off.)

~~~
mundo
> the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system,
> moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture.

I don't buy this, not a whit. I think /r/the_donald and /r/woodworking are as
different as any two phpbb messageboards on the pre-reddit internet ever were.
What is the same between them (the voting, mod tools, etc) are not opinionated
enough to affect the culture, they are the bare minimum necessary to make the
site work.

I don't think Reddit has changed as much as you think it has. It had its share
of racists and trolls back in the halcyon days you remember, and it dealt with
them (or didn't) pretty much the same way back then as it does now. If
anything it is doing better on that score. But I do agree that something has
changed, and I have a theory on what that is, which I will now share with you
(and the one or two people who ever read HN comment threads more than a day
old):

I think that what's changed is the, shall we say, meta-conversation _about_
Reddit in the larger media. For the past 2-3 years or so, the question, "Is
Reddit racist/sexist/etc?" has been a newsworthy one. Like any newsworthy
topic, it has generated commentary: pro- and con- essays, nuanced opinions and
dumb ones, insightful well-researched articles and misleading clickbait
journalism, blog posts, FB comments, etc, etc. It spawned numerous sub-
controversies (Did Ellen Pao make things better or worse? Was banning
/r/whatever censorship or not?), each of which was a new opportunity for all
of the bloggers and journalists and randos to weigh in again and argue some
more.

Point is, if you follow this meta-conversation, by reading articles about
Gamergate and Ellen Pao and so forth, you are exposed to _much more_ of the
worst Reddit has to offer than you would've been simply by using Reddit as a
discussion forum to talk about fly-fishing or programming or whatever it is
you went there to chat about. From the sounds of it, you did follow this
stuff, at least casually. And it seems plausible to me that that changed your
opinion more than any real change in the underlying "character" of Reddit (to
the extent that such a thing even exists).

~~~
brennen
Eh. I see your point. I'll grant that it's more or less true, from a certain
angle: My thoughts on reddit are influenced as much, these days, by its effect
on the wider world as by experience on the site itself. My direct
participation trailed off some 3 or 4 years ago, judging by my comment history
there. On the other hand, my participation tailed off in part because being on
the site was becoming actively unpleasant, and I think that the direct
experience of phenomena like GG is a reasonable basis for judging a community
that fosters them.

(To be clear, I think a lot of the delta here is a question of scale as much
as anything. I'm well aware that there were always virulent racists and
ideological misogynists present in the userbase.)

Anyway, we disagree and that is that. Thanks for a reasonable interaction.

~~~
mundo
Likewise!

------
leavingreddit
In my humble opinion perhaps websites might benefit simply from more sorting
filters on comments.

Reddit allows sorting by most upvoted and most controversial which is cool.
However I wonder if sorting by the reading age of the comment for example
might work. Perhaps creating a set of words which are inflammatory and sorting
by most negative comments to most positive comments. Perhaps combining filters
could be constructive.

Of course there are performance concerns here but nevertheless I'm sure there
are better alternatives to banning comments in general.

~~~
newswriter99
The problem with the internet is it allows people to wall themselves off from
information and people who contradict their view. Even if they're in need of
said contradiction.

What you're describing is part of the problem, not the solution.

~~~
leavingreddit
I think that's a fair point. I've seen reddit change over the years into a
place where people no longer debate in the comments section, they just find
the thread they agree with and comment on that. It's part of why I'm looking
for somewhere else.

~~~
newswriter99
Can you find it though? Or, like a string of trees in a rainstorm, will it too
become saturated?

I'm no longer looking for an alternative. Wishing for the good old days of
dial-up BBS like Totse is useless as well. However, there's still hope this
will all turn out to be a narcissism fad which will eventually give way.

------
creaghpatr
Part of the problem is that Vice promotes their posts all over facebook to (I
presume) a bipartisan demographic based on target age range.

Because these are 'sponsored posts' not ads, people who do not agree with
Vice's often highly partisan slant are constantly served their relatively
provocative headlines with a really easy opportunity to leave a comment (both
on fb and by clicking the link and heading to the comments section).

edit: changed 'broad demographic' to 'bipartisan demographic'

------
soyiuz
A healthy comment section needs active moderation. Consider getting your
readership involved. You could, for example, follow the Stack Exchange model
by giving frequent contributors more editorial powers in the comments section.

------
frozenport
Comments are one of the only time effective ways to challenge news stories.
Indeed editorials in newspapers used to be a mode of public discourse. If we
consider VICE a legitimate news outlet, then this a sad day.

~~~
djtriptych
Write a letter and sign your name.

~~~
kristofferR
Nobody except Vice gets to see that, and since nobody sees them Vice won't
feel pressured into correcting their article.

~~~
djtriptych
Oh so trolls are helpful correctors lol.

------
weewooweewoo
There's something to the idea that comments are "letters to the editor", as I
believe that the biggest incentive for people to comment is when they feel
that they have something to contribute. The problem, of course, is that
hateful reasoning is usually something to 'novel' to contribute. It is
especially easy to contribute something novel when you skim an article and you
don't see any indication that the article is going to where your thinking.

I've been playing with this on a small side project (a literary journal, so
the worst medium to try it out with), but it would be my dream to see a major
publication try this out: Making commenting only available after correctly
answering a quiz question that demonstrates that the reader has read the
article. Initial questions have the ability to frame discussions, clarify
controversial details, and discourage lines of thought - and on the other
side, it requires little effort for an editor to implement.

~~~
aphextron
>There's something to the idea that comments are "letters to the editor", as I
believe that the biggest incentive for people to comment is when they feel
that they have something to contribute.

I don't think that analogy holds up, though. People are free to sit down and
write a well thought out email to the author of an article if they have a
specific point of disagreement. The problem with comment sections is that
people often times aren't even reading the story or providing constructive
commentary on it. The page just becomes a platform for them to go off on
whatever nonsensical theories they have and troll people.

------
egwynn
I’ve wished that there was some kind of HTTP header I could have my UA send
that told the server not to bother sending me the comments section, as I
consider them to generally be a waste of resources. I even thought a little
about how I’d go about formalizing it. After realizing that such a system
would require an RFC, my brain broke from the irony.

------
rokosbasilisk
Considering all the events that occurred in 2016 from the brexit to trump that
came as huge surprises to the media, maybe media elites should be paying MORE
attention to the comments.

~~~
gee_totes
This is a good point. The sentiment of "deplorables" is largely being removed
and modeled-out from the mainstream internet/media and helps create a filter
bubble. However, I don't think those comments give any value to the users of
the site.

------
vic-traill
I can't comment on what might be the best technique(s) for retaining a high
level commentary on news sites - I don't have the expertise.

But I do know where I stand on my own digital interactions; if there appears
to be the possibility of having a critical, constructive dialogue, I'll try it
out.

Everything else just encourages the mob. Walk away, don't let my ego or
emotion convince me to reply to non-constructive comments.

Non-constructive comments are, as the old chestnut goes, like love. Tough to
define but you know them when you see them.

------
Buetol
Looks like a good opportunity for a startup to provide efficient comment
moderation.

I've seen big youtube channels switch to human moderation and that made the
comment section a real place for discussion.

------
brilliantcode
anonymity without oversight that actively kills toxic individuals is going to
revert to the lowest possible quality.

there should be some rule: The lower the friction for anonymous commentators
the greater the affinity towards resembling a low quality and toxic
communities.

------
SerLava
>Besides, there are plenty of other ways for you to publicly discuss our work
and the personal worth of our staff. We'll still be reading your thoughts on
Twitter and Facebook,

This may be the real reason. Or at least a big reason.

I have seen some other sites push comments to social media in order to bolster
themselves on those platforms.

------
norea-armozel
I don't get the infatuation people have with comment sections. Most of the
time they're full of spam or really bad trolls. If you want to share your
ideas maybe you should host a blog or a vlog (on YouTube) where people are
willing to engage you. I know people like to socialize but not every site
needs a comment section. Go on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Slack, or whatever.
That site you think needs a comment section doesn't owe anyone a space to
share ideas.

------
cf
Since the comments section of a news website is a major source of engagement,
why not charge to make comments? Wouldn't this discourage the worst of the
them?

------
wyck
Translation: Like ever other MSM outlet we want to control the narrative, even
on our sub-par and typically worthless articles.

There is a reason why Gavin McInnes left.

------
Fr0ntBack
One possible solution to this problem is to use a crowdworking platform like
Mechanical Turk to delete low quality comments. This is a lot cheaper than
employing dedicated moderation teams, but there is a trade-off in that more
low quality comments will slip through the net.

------
aibottle
When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me
really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their
opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really
nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it
again, just forget about it. However when a youtube video on 10 ways to keep
me from being productive" has its comments disabled I can live with that. In
the case of Vice it is a whole new dimension. Guys, you are journalists. The
comment section often is a direct indicator on the quality of your stuff.
These days there are so many BS-articles written even by you guys that I can't
keep up and I really like how someone in the comment section can just point
out wrong statements for everyone. I can read through the BS of trolls, just
give the people a choice! If you want your comment section to be clean just
implement a HN-like upvote system.

~~~
fnovd
>When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me
really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their
opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really
nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it
again, just forget about it.

The argument that disabling comments is censorship is really nonsense (to me).
If you don't like the way a website works, just don't bother visiting it
again, just forget about it.

------
akshayB
I feel its about time we have thumbs up, thumbs down and a troll marker on
comment section.

~~~
kl4m
Full circle back to Slashdot's moderation? :)

~~~
Pete_D
I'm always surprised Slashdot-style tagged voting isn't more widespread, and
curious what would happen if more communities tried it.

One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to
have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to
filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might
see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked
"TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about
article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be
contentious).

------
alistproducer2
In a similar vein, CNBC quietly turned their comments off in the last couple
of weeks.

------
OldSchoolJohnny
I think that it's simply too easy to comment. If there were a cost or some
kind of difficulty in doing it that slowed down the process and made people
think twice it would be completely different.

------
kyrre
no comments = fake news

~~~
Neliquat
Not literally, there are thousands of counter examples, but it does seem that
you seldom see fake news sites with a comment section. More and more authors
are getting tired of being called out for shoddy reporting on the same page as
their article.

------
desbest
It looks like a move to control dissent as people comment their disagreements
with a refute, to articles they disagree with.

------
thaumaturgy
This seems like the ideal project for a ML experiment. Offer an integrated
comments section, attach the ability for humans to moderate it, and then feed
the moderated items into your favorite classifier for training and see if it
can learn how to mute the louder nuisances without blocking more civil
discussion.

Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to
do very much of it.

------
siegecraft
The great thing about anonymous comments is you can use them to justify any
behaviour you want.

------
alimw
I've always wondered at how few comments they get, maybe that makes them
sad...

------
PravlageTiem
Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you.

Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.

If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake
of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners),
then we will get 1930s results.

Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging
in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting
pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers.

I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be
realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the
1930s.

~~~
norea-armozel
"Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you."

It's called freedom of association. No one is owed a hearing by there mere
presence online or even offline from private organizations and private
citizens.

"If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake
of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners),
then we will get 1930s results."

That's exactly what the web is. It's a pull model. They post pages, you send a
GET request to see the content. Don't like the content then don't send the GET
request.

"Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging
in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting
pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers."

It's intended for individuals and private organizations to freely choose how
to disseminate/consume their content. If that offends you then maybe you're
the pearl-clutcher here perhaps?

"I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be
realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the
1930s."

Sure and magically cable tv and talk radio will disappear from the Earth. /s

------
scythe
I wish it didn't fall on me to point this out, but bigotry is a political
position, and trolling is a personality flaw.

Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've
been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE's comment section was a
liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it
had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which was
always pervasive.

The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the
_intelligentsia_ , have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike
us. What we haven't got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi's of the
world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering
them things you can't actually give them. I can't tell you how many times I've
criticized liberals who respond "But conservatives [...]!".

We're supposed to be better than them. That's the whole point.

~~~
kevinburke
> when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down.

There's zero evidence for this. Please read the article.

~~~
scythe
I read the whole article.

I don't believe you for a second, though.

~~~
kevinburke
The main complaint listed by Vice in the article was that the comments section
inevitably led to low quality debate, and commenters frequently had to be
banned for posting racist, sexist comments, and/or releasing private
information about Vice's writers or other people in the comment section. Those
seem like perfectly valid reasons to shut it down, and seem orthogonal to
"conservatives started winning," however you want to define that.

