
We're Replacing Comments with Something Better - pmiller2
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/im-on-twitter-too
======
ckozlowski
A fellow IRC moderator once warned me:

"Carefully handle your "troublemakers". They're both the bane and life of your
site."

In other words, it's often your outspoken (and sometime inappropriate) members
that are driving the most interesting discussion. I see this on Facebook quite
a lot (I moderate a very large group) where the people who are often stirring
up trouble in one thread are also generating a very lively discussion in
another.

It's hard drawing the line sometimes between what seems like a vehement
disagreement in opinion and insulting of someone else, and a tap on their
shoulder to "hey, just keep in line please" can either set them off, or defuse
the situtation.

But either way, it is difficult. Too heavy-handed in moderation and you drive
them off the site, leaving a lot of silent people sitting around with little
discussion, and therefor, little reason to stay. Too little moderation and
your comments and threads become a cesspool, eliminating any beneficial
conversation and catering to the lowest common denominator.

I don't blame Vice for finding this difficult, and really, I'm not sure I'd
prescribe a solution for them. I agree with them in the sense that it comes
down to their resources and best use of their time, and given that they
produce their own content (and not reliant on their members to do it as in
other social forums) then it may be better to dispense with them altogether.

But dispensing with a forum is a sort of "scorched earth" policy of
eliminating an out of control board, a "nuclear option" when you're just
finished with it all. It'll provide some relief, but they lose at the chance
of growing something better in the end.

~~~
untog
> In other words, it's often your outspoken (and sometime inappropriate)
> members that are driving the most interesting discussion.

I disagree. I'll admit that I haven't done any kind of exhaustive analysis,
but every now and then I'll click on the profile of an obvious troll on HN or
Reddit. 9/10 times they are consistently trolling and contributing nothing to
the community.

~~~
haylem
Sure, but I think what ckozlowski was saying is that even though these
particular users may have no value in themselves and their (lack of)
discourse, they bring attention of other well-mannered users that then get
into intelligent discourse.

Trolls are a bit like political extremists: if they weren't here, you wouldn't
talk about the ugly stuff so much and make sure it's kept in check.

------
forgetsusername
> _" What percentage of comments on any site are valuable enough to be
> published on their own? One percent? Less?_"

What percentage of "articles" on the web are valuable enough to be published
on their own? One percent? Less? Most sites, including HN, I visit because of
the comment sections. Many times the comments are the most insightful part of
my interaction.

~~~
rokhayakebe
On HN the comments are the product. On Vice the content is.

~~~
eimai134
I agree with the OP. Vice is pretty much a trash site.

------
jalfresi
I remember when people would post stuff on their website and people would
respond by posting their own retort on their own website, linking to the
original article. Then there might be another retort back, or others would
chime in on their own websites...

And it was great! People took time to formulate arguments or counterpoints
(this didn't guarantee they were correct or even sensible) in a long form that
actually contributed to the discussion.

If you want to troll people in response to a post, it meant you had to do it
on your own website!

I hope we go back to this. It's dirt cheap now to get a wordpress blog or
similar. I wish wordpress came with comments disabled by default and all that
pingback and RSS stuff would get more attention. It was a much more
interesting time to read on the web.

~~~
catbird
Have you taken a look at Tumblr? It's almost exactly what you are describing.

~~~
pmlnr
Not really; tumblr makes reposting too easy, not requiring any effort to do
so, therefore it's not as it's described.

[http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention](http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention) is
the one you're looking for.

------
pkkp
Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish[0] did this for its entire existence. It was a
driving point of the site's culture, to the point where certain topics gained
frequent contributors that were probably better recognized because of the
advantageous signal-to-noise ratio.

Many sites seem to be turning toward a manual moderation model now. This
doesn't seem too whacky as a next step for many of them.

[0] [http://dish.andrewsullivan.com](http://dish.andrewsullivan.com)

~~~
mturmon
And to pursue this point, one person greatly influenced by Sullivan was his
ex-colleague at _The Atlantic_ , Ta-Nehisi Coates (who just won a MacArthur
fellowship).

Coates had a very well-policed comments section, which for several years
attracted some high-quality comments and really excellent exchanges - the
equal of anything here on HN within its chosen domain (essentially, race and
history). Coates is black, of course, so there was a _lot_ of moderation
needed. It proved unsustainable and his posts don't have comments any more.

This retrospective article sums up the trajectory of a lot of high-quality
comments sections, like Sullivan's and Coates':
[http://blog.longreads.com/2015/02/04/its-yours-a-short-
histo...](http://blog.longreads.com/2015/02/04/its-yours-a-short-history-of-
the-horde/)

Basically, it needs organic growth and a lot of personal attention. And it
seems to have a finite lifetime.

------
linker3000
I don't 'do' Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, so those contact options are out.

Your editorial email address will be swamped for a while until people get
bored with the lack of near-realtime debate.

"...our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more
reporting than attempting to police a comments section...".

That's why you appoint trusted moderators. Anyway, your 'resources' are now
going to be split between processing email, visiting Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn...

We'll see.

~~~
reitoei
> people get bored with the lack of near-realtime debate

You're making the assumption that people want this.

They don't.

~~~
RegW
Agreed.

16 people post the same comment 45 seconds after the article goes online
(without reading it properly).

8 people post more thoughtful but identical comments 15 minutes later.

I wake up 16 hours after the article goes online and post my tuppence worth
into a rely to whatever is at the top. (without bothering to read the other
362 comments).

[Updated to fix rubbish formatting]

------
danpeddle
There are similarities here to the adblocking debate, in terms of having to
load 3rd party scripts. Disqus, FB etc - load through another request once the
page is up and running, degrading the experience. Removing these parts will
mean a quicker web, if as others have mentioned, at the cost of less immediate
interaction.

Vice seem to have correctly identified that the quality of that discussion
(and the branding) was not adding much to their content. Thumbs up for trying
something different.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Personally, I think third-party comment widgets are a terrible idea:
security/privacy issues, page weight, loss of ownership of content,
homogenisation, etc.

It's interesting commenting about the quality of comments on a site that is
nothing but. Maybe Hacker News, etc. is the future, although I'd like to think
that on-site and off-site comments can co-exist (and for 'off-site' read
twitter, facebook, etc.) The problem with all the off-site options is that you
have to know they exist. At least on-site comments provide a fixed, available
'place' for discussion to take place.

I have a feeling the solution is just better moderated comments sections. Many
sites just chuck up a form and auto-publish anything entered into it; that
might work at really small scale, but soon descends into chaos once a critical
mass is reached. One day, I think, more comment sections will looks like mini-
HNs.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _homogenisation_

That one wouldn't be actually bad if people stuck to good solutions in terms
of usability. I mean, half of the forum boards on the Internet would be an
order of magnitude better if the owners started them as a subreddit instead.

~~~
gipp
Not sure I agree; to be honest I miss old-style discussion boards, since they
seem to have phased out in favor of Reddit-style aggregation and comments.

I think there's a place for both, but the Reddit-style boards make _every_
discussion ephemeral. No matter how interesting the topic or diverse the
discussion, it's gone and forgotten in 2 days at most. On old-school boards, a
major thread of discussion can last for months, or longer. Plus there's
something to be said for a chronological presentation of posts. Yeah, trolls
get more exposure, but it also means everyone sees every view (up to whatever
the moderation policy of the site is), so you don't get the Reddit hivemind
effect nearly as much.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think I agree with your sentiment. I should have been more precise; I don't
think all discussions should be done in an ephemeral, upvote-based format, but
_threaded discussion_ would be a big improvement for most of the old-style
boards I participated in. Also, Reddit UI strikes the right balance between
simplicity and functionality. Most boards are overloaded UI-wise.

------
erdojo
Mistake #1: thinking reporters should be moderating comments (see quote
below). Mistake #2: Sending their readers elsewhere on the web to comment on
stories. Media outlets are looking for a revenue stream/value-added features.
Web companies are all about engagement. What an opportunity they are missing!
Why? Because they are scared of a little honest feedback?

User-generated commentary can be done right. it can be done in a way that
minimizes trolls.

"I think that our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing
more reporting than attempting to police a comments section in the hopes of
marginally increasing the number of useful comments."

~~~
Natsu
Part of the problem is that many people don't have (or want) any reputation on
most sites they might comment on and creating accounts is generally trivial.

I tend to worry, though, that what people label as trolling ranges from the
idiots who spam bigoted nonsense to anyone who doesn't believe what the
moderator does. I think it's better to moderate only incivility, bigotry and
the like, as bans on "trolling" appear to have morphed into bans on dissent at
some point, possibly due to some corollary of Poe's Law, even though what used
to be labelled as trolling is still just as present and obnoxious.

I say that as someone who moderated quite a lot of different forums and who
has banned all manner of spammers, flamers, etc., but I'd never ban someone
for expressing, in a civil manner, why they did not agree with me and I've
been left feeling in the minority in that regard.

~~~
venomsnake
Since bigotry lately means "anything the person that call the other bigot
don't likes" it is still quite broad.

A direct insult is easier to enforce.

The reason trolling succeeds is that it is extremely easy to induce powerful
cognitive dissonance into people with strongly held unprovable beliefs. (Human
life has value, god exist, humans are equal and the likes) And the only answer
is aggression. The right are as easy pray as the left - mostly because there
are large logical holes in any ideology.

That is because we use some axioms when we build our social order - but any
attack on the axioms leave us unsecure and that the virtual tribe is under
attack.

The more a person has allowed himself to degrade to a single identity - the
powerful the potential blow is.

Probably one of the best (unintentional) trolls I have done is reducing old
communist to tears by stating the rumors that Che was betrayed by Fidel with
Raul as the organizer of said betrayal.

~~~
Natsu
I go by the 'hate' metric. The more someone is motivated by hate, the less I
tend to agree with them.

I'm sure someone might say, "what if I really hate Nazis?" in reply to that,
but then I'd have to point out that the Nazis hated others to the point of
mass-murder, which is a lot more than they're hated and say that I balance
things out that way.

In other words, some hate is just blowback and how willing you are to harm
others for disagreeing with you is something to take into account when
figuring out what people to socialize with.

~~~
venomsnake
Well if someone says that he really hates Nazis and is younger than 60 years,
he is probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer... which is a huge red
flag. Same with loving them - both require some form of temporal closeness.

Edit: Hating or Loving the Nazi ideology is another beer - ideas are immortal.

------
ablation
Great example of innovation from Vice. If only those starchy ol' newspapers
could have thought of something like a 'letters to the editor' section...
What? Oh.

In all seriousness, it's probably a good move for Motherboard to do this. By
and large, comments sections are kinda terrible, but this appears magnified on
Vice Network sites in my experience.

~~~
yohoho22
>Great example of innovation from Vice. If only those starchy ol' newspapers
could have thought of something like a 'letters to the editor' section...
What? Oh.

The very first sentence of the Vice post:

>As a kid, whenever I'd get some BMX or car magazine in the mail, I'd always
dive in first to the letters to the editor.

~~~
mvanvoorden
You failed to see the sarcasm ;)

~~~
danneu
yohoho22 was disarming the sarcasm by specifying that the article already made
the point literally.

~~~
ablation
How could anyone fail to see it? I still wanted to include it in my point. Not
a lot of disarming to do.

------
iamphilrae
I know I know, comments 99.9% of the time are non-constructive; but goddam it,
I enjoy reading them. Sometimes they're good, but most of the time just a
laugh. I like you're attempt to try something new (old) but as others have
said, I don't do social media other than Twitter which is just too restrictive
for decent comments. Its ironic though that I'm using HackerNews to comment on
this. I'm a big fan of building a community who can self-police comments. It
may be a pipe dream to be full proof that a bad comment will be down voted
enough to remove it completely, but I really think there's a better way than
resorting to email and social media.

------
RegW
I think this is a matter of value. If someone puts work into an article, then
it must be disappointing to find credit being given to a pile of dross
attached to the bottom, by people who can't be bothered to think before they
type.

I notice theregister.co.uk has shoved comments off onto a separate less
important page. So you only follow the link when your blood is really boiling
(and put yourself into a self-selecting group).

Comments work for the www.dailymail.co.uk because their articles are generally
written to bait their readers, and drivel in the comments is how they measure
success. Stories are marked up with how many thousand comments they have
generated. The real challenge is to get your comment to the top of the "worst"
rated category.

------
CookieMon
Why not both?

The comments section is where the errors and baiting and propaganda gets
called out, which has exploded with click-revenue media. Plus you can get a
feeling for different community viewpoints.

'Tis a shame.

~~~
reitoei
Like YouTube?

------
aikah
User engagement will drop. But again, open standards to the rescue. RSS and
pingbacks were meant to solve this very problem at first place, but since
content creators are focused on "impressions", they are unable to take
advantage of it.

~~~
pmlnr
[http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention](http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention)

------
gloves
Couldn't agree with this more. Comments in my experience have been so spammed
to death with bots that the benefit of a comments section is diminishing when
valued in terms of time spent moderating vs. value added to the reader
experience. Social media has effectively superseded the need for comment
sections in my humble opinion, providing a similar experience.

------
lagadu
> In the end, we just want to hear from you.

No, you most obviously do not; Otherwise you wouldn't remove comments
sections.

~~~
caractacus
"We want to hear from you and use your material if (i) you take the time to
actually email us; (ii) you do so with a coherent and well-thought out
response to one of our articles; (iii) you decide to do this even though there
is likely little prospect of us publishing your email; and (iv) if we do
publish it, cutting and highlighting your material in a separate article from
which we can make ad revenue."

------
downandout
Why not create a comments section that runs split testing on the comments? So
you enter a comment, and that comment will be randomly shown to a certain
percentage of others. Based on up/down votes and response count, eventually
the system could deduce the most relevant comments without moderation.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I like this idea. It's a _bit_ like how slashdot works: random moderation.

------
gwbas1c
I really like contextual discussion, specifically what we're doing here. The
article is linked to on Hacker News, and then we return to Hacker News to
discuss.

The same thing happens on Facebook. Slashdot has discussions on Slashdot; and
then they link to sites on their Facebook page. Another discussion happens on
Slashdot's Facebook page.

What's interesting about contextual discussion like this is that the flavor
changes quite dramatically. Slashdot's discussions are a bit more lively...
Hacker New's discussions are a bit more, uhm, "grown up." Sometimes, an
article linked to on Hacker News has a much better discussion on Hacker News
than whatever is on the article's message board.

------
xiaq
A blog I frequent has more interesting thoughts on disabling comments:
[http://prog21.dadgum.com/57.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/57.html)

~~~
pmlnr
I could also add this: [https://www.hughrundle.net/2014/02/27/why-i-moved-my-
blog-fr...](https://www.hughrundle.net/2014/02/27/why-i-moved-my-blog-from-
wordpress-to-ghost-and-why-i-turned-off-comments-along-the-way/)

~~~
mturmon
Both this and your other link are nice summaries of the problem. Thanks.

------
erikb
Why something better? The title (of the article) should read "we close
comments, write an email if you really need to".

And being a Linux nerd who uses a lot of "old tools" like vim, grep, etc. I
still can't understand why people switch from any communication technology X
to email nowadays. Email is slowly dying, no reason to jump on that train if
you don't have a lot of fancy configs/setup/knowhow in that area already.

~~~
ckozlowski
"Something better (for us)".

I'm gonna take a stab at this and say that I think what they're banking on is
that the added effort needed to compose an email (and the lack of a public
audiance) is going to raise the barrier of entry and lower the potential
payout to eliminate all of the "low-quality, impulse commenting" they felt
they were getting flooded with.

And that they're basically equating email to writing a letter in magazine days
says a lot about the state and view people have of email, in line with your
point.

------
chestnut-tree
The BBC news website used to do something similar. You could submit a comment
below an article but it would be up to their editorial staff to pick which
comments would be published. In typical BBC fashion, they would try and
publish equal numbers of consenting and dissenting views. Later, they modified
this practice so that _" The comments published below reflect the balance of
views we received."_ (their words).

Naturally, this method of commenting raised the ire of many who accused the
BBC of 'censoring' views. Now anyone can comment on BBC news articles and, in
my view, the comment sections are of such low quality, they are completely
unreadable.

So in a way, _as a reader_ , I preferred the old practice of publishing a
selection of comments (a bit like sending a letter to the editor of a
newspaper), because what was published was varied, generally well-composed and
of managable reading length. But as _a user commenting_ I can see how
frustrating it would be to repeatedly submit comments that were never selected
for publication.

------
krapp
>"What percentage of comments on any site are valuable enough to be published
on their own? One percent? Less? Based on the disparity in quality between
emails we get and the average state of comments here and all over the web, I
think the problem is a matter of the medium."

The problem is not the medium, the problem is sites seem to expect the medium
to be something it isn't.

Vice seems to consider it an obvious flaw that most comments aren't
publishable as standalone articles, as if users should be expected to run
every comment through several drafts and past a copy editor before posting,
and yet comments by definition tend to produce low quality content, because
they're discussions between individuals, or between an individual and the
site. The immediacy and lack of polish is the feature, not the bug. Do you
want your community to be a tavern or a symposium?

Focusing on the comment as a standard of quality is understandable for a site
which is using comments as an easy way to drive engagement, but I think doing
so disregards the actual purpose of the medium. If what you want from a
comments section is a steady stream of high quality, long-form content you can
control then what you don't want is comments, what you want is to crowdsource
copy writing without compensation.

Even on HN, which is obsessed with "quality" above all else, most comments are
worthless on their own, but in aggregate the entire conversation has value.
And yes, comments can be full of trolling and bigotry and stupidity and chaos.
Hacker News has its share of that as does any active forum. But that has to be
the price you're willing to pay, even with moderation, to have an open
community. Many sites are discovering the return for the amount of effort
required to maintain even moderate civility is not worth the effort.

------
pmlnr
Not all the things need a comments section. I welcome this change and hope it
will bring good.

------
eimai134
I see a number of websites that don't have comments. I also notice that when
an article is controversial, sometimes a site that usually has comments has
them turned off for that article. I think this is a kind of censorship.
Newspapers used to do this by taking letters to the editor, but carefully
selecting the ones they wanted to print. Obviously, every website owner has
the freedom to choose to have comments or not - I hope that things don't shift
that way though. One of the great things about online comments is seeing what
the public thinks vs. what the media is portraying.

~~~
anigbrowl
I used to think that was a great thing about comments. Now I quite like
websites where they're switched off, because comment communities can be easily
dominated by a small number of stupid or malicious people who drive out more
thoughtful or nuanced commentary that doesn't suit their worldview.

So often you're not really seeing what the public thinks, you're seeing what
particular interest groups think, and if comments are dominated by bitter
fights between adherents of, say, different political parties then a lot of
people will just check out because there's no point in trying to have a civil
discussion in a roomful of screaming ideologues.

------
RaSoJo
I am a big fan of letters to the editors in my local newspaper. I try often to
send in my opinions. (though they rarely get printed)

But that is the only NewsPaper I consume and my relationship with it is way
more personal than any online portal.

All websites that I visit are based on links shared via my friends on FB,
people on Twitter and Discussions on HN. I really have no personal connection
with any online content platform.

So unless Vice has a captive audience that visits it religiously and has that
personal connection, I am not sure how this section is going to help.

It is pretty much the same as stating that “Comments are Turned off. Period.”

------
tefo-mohapi
More and more publications are giving serious thoughts to user engagement.
Some have gone with forums, some slack groups for readers and I like the
letters (e-mail) by Vice. Better quality, definetly.

~~~
intopieces
>some slack groups for readers

Could you name some publications that do this? I miss IRC. I know it's still
around but Slack could be a better implementation of it, with the file
sharing.

~~~
phonephone
Most IRC clients support DCC file transfer.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-
Client](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client)

------
desult
It's not Vice. It's just Motherboard, Vice's tech and science site. Every
other Vice site except Broadly (the newest) still has comments.

------
ck2
So you are saying broadcast TV media had the right idea all along and
communication should be one-way.

I think not.

Basically you either build a community for two-way discussion from the start
or instead you end up with a blog that tries to tack on discussion later on
and end up "surprised" that there aren't quality comments.

------
6stringmerc
When Reuters did this (shut down comments), I wanted to chide them for giving
up, yet I couldn't disagree with the rationale. Tough call.

------
ddingus
What I don't like:

 _Filtering of comments that may be valid and important critiques of the work
published as well as the publisher / online venue. The thing I like most about
the Internet is that many to many communication mode. Basic things like fact
checking and or just awareness of something not being inclusive are powerful
things. They force authors to really think hard about what they write.

Obviously, there is a lot of noise too, and that's the standard excuse for
strong moderation, but it's really difficult to understand when the moderation
is strong in the sense of promoting signal and demoting noise, and when it's
censorship or manipulation.

Frankly, I'll take the noise because I would rather determine this myself, or
at least have the data needed to make that determination.

Traditionally, it's been an editorial thing. Major news outlets have been in
the position to manage questions related to their product as well as
themselves and aren't comfortable with the masses feedback. Though the noise
level was high, it was also possible to see manipulations and just general
lack of accuracy or inclusive commentary and reporting too. Net good, for
those who went looking.

This also brought bloggers and basically anyone really interested in something
on par with the majors. One guy who really cares can make an impact and fact
check the biggest of the big. It's important we continue to make this a
reality. We may not like it, but we need it.

The other bit that gets broken here is dialogs. People just saying stuff is
kind of noisy. But where the moderation encourages dialog, that dialog can
often have as much or more value than the effort being discussed does. Of all
the things I appreciate about the Internet, having conversations with people
all over the world is right there at the top! If anything, we should be
finding better ways to have conversations. Efforts like this do not do that.

I also suspect the strong desire to do that will see some corrective type
service or norm that the conversations will move to. Maybe back to critical
blogs again? Something else? For sure it's not gonna be Facebook. At least not
for me. FB is a raging mess. Useless for this.

Having a large degree of free speech online means our speech does bring others
speech in response. So there will almost always be haters, but there will be
validation and recommendation and augmentation in there too. We want this.
It's important that we don't create a place largely filled with walled off,
largely one way, broadcast type efforts no different than the already lame
broadcast type, one way efforts that dominate so much media now anyway.

Really, I've sworn off most traditional media for this reason. It's much more
informative and inclusive to seek it globally, get various perspectives and
see those be critical as well as affirmative._

What I do like:

 _Low noise. Maybe comments are just doomed. In some places they aren 't, but
in many they are just crappy. Perhaps it is time to turn off comments, but
what then? I really don't feel good about a "best of" type action where they
pick some they feel are representative.

If they offer up something here, it could be meaningful. I have no idea what
that would look like though. Here's to hoping...

To a degree, discouragement of hate and or just a lot of ugly speech. Many
comment sections are filled with some vile stuff that does not add value,
other than to remind us that a few too many of us do not get the basics of
being a good quality human yet._

As for Sullivan, yes he did not allow comments, and I never did think much of
his site for that. Mostly, I ignored it and read through the lens of other
places, who would cite him, and then critical dialog could be incorporated as
part of the experience. To me, this is vital. It's not that I didn't
necessarily like Sullivan. It's more that I saw his work as a platform for
discussion, not primarily consumption.

I really don't like one way productions for that reason.

This site is a great example. We link to a lot of stuff that may or may not
allow comments, but then we enter into what generally is a pretty great
dialog. There are lots of points of view, people adding value with other
references and thoughts of various kinds, and fact checking happens fairly
consistently. Additionally, as I get to understand others here better, that
dialog improves in value. Sure, we've got some biases, but the dialog is
constructive enough for it to work well anyway. Very high value here, and that
value comes from "the hive mind" where our collective responses actually
augment the piece and give us food for thought about that piece. Overall,
given people actually do read and interact some, it's a great bull shit filter
as well as a path to a more inclusive perspective.

Maybe people don't understand the value in that, or maybe worse, people aren't
able to, or simply do not desire that value. I harbor hope the former is true
and we can get more people there more of the time.

For me personally, it's just not acceptable to read and not go seek the
thoughts of others related to some material I find online. I've simply lost
the trust in the vast majority of cases related to media organizations. I do
continue to trust individuals and some organizations that are focused in some
way or other and who do not derive primary income from publishing.

Vice is a cool platform, and they offer up some frank commentary and news.
I've enjoyed a lot of what I read there. Maybe they can replace comments with
something that works and that I can trust. Hope so.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I agree with you ddingus. Even if a comment section is flooded with nonsense
the chance to read an insightful or funny comment still exists, and I'd rather
be the one who decides what adds to the conversation.

Whilst I'd be interested to know how this experiment from Vice plays out, the
main concern I have is over editorial bias. Sometimes interesting ideas are
expressed poorly, do these make the cut, and is it the substance or the way in
which they are expressed that gets commented on? Also, will we lose out on
some of the funny comments that are only funny in context? Will have to wait
and see how diverse the feedback section turns out to be.

~~~
ddingus
Yes, exactly.

I have a love hate with editors these days. Back when communications were
largely broadcast, and largely one way, editors really mattered. We needed
them to make some sense of the limited resources, and we were in a more firm
position of forced trust.

Think national TV anchor in the 60's kind of thing, though many examples
abound.

Today, it's much different. We don't really require standards and news has
gone to a for profit, entertainment model. I would reluctantly argue that is a
good thing, but not by much, and only because we also got the Internet. The
Internet brought checks and balances to the political dialog.

Say a cable host just isn't based in reality somehow. Doesn't matter who. Just
that they are. Today, that's not hard to find out, unless one is tuned into
just a few one way channels. Then it's a bubble.

So there is that.

Of course, the other bias is that commentary critical to the entity itself.
Big companies are crappy at owning errors and failure. They just don't do it.
When is the last time you got good, solid reporting on the FCC and whatever
decency or other rules it may be contemplating, for example. Net Neutrality as
another one?

People to people, largely driven by people who really cared and took the time
to help others understand well enough to care, and John Oliver who is awesome,
got the latter out there. John with, "cable company fuckery" and HBO who
really only cares about profit seem to work. But the major news outlets don't
seem to work.

Vice runs a lot of material that people would want to comment about, and I
fear that bias may actually not bring us real commentary, and that would be a
shame because Vice seems to be about real people, events, places, news, issues
and also appears willing to cover things most other organizations will not
touch at all. (and good for Vice on that)

And here is where my argument is subtle: I want that stuff Vice covers to not
only inform, but generate conversations. Good, critical ones. I think we need
it, and a filtered representation of comments might not get us there.

But, to be fair to Vice, maybe they actually can't get there themselves. In my
experience, many organizations just don't seem to get it, or have attracted
the masses who just vomit online too. Those that do seem to attract niche
demographics who can actually carry on a conversation.

It may be that we continue with a model where majors produce stuff we talk
about, but we never, ever talk about it there.

This would be kind of broken in that they can live in the glass house speaking
with relative impunity. You all know a few of the types. Might I suggest David
Brooks? He's in that position, completely isolated, able to write stuff that
he really should have to experience some feedback on, yet he's where that will
never happen.

So we talk about Brooks in other places, but not enough places for it to be
meaningful in terms of Brooks actually experiencing what others may think of
his speech. There is no shield in the First Amendment, however some of us do
have an effective shield in this way, and that's not really what the First
Amendment is about.

Maybe that is as good as it gets. Maybe Vice brings us an alternative that is
better somehow. Maybe Vice has balls, in other words. We shall see.

Back to editors for a moment. They still do what they do well, and we still
need them, but the nature of the need has shifted some with the Internet, and
that's good as we see more kinds of speech compete out there for mindshare.

I find this important and high value, even when it can be very difficult to
read or contemplate at times.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I agree with you again.

Out of interest, who is David Brooks and why do you believe he could use some
unfiltered feedback? I've never heard of him.

~~~
ddingus
Brooks is s political pundit writing for the NYT.
[http://www.nytimes.com/column/david-
brooks](http://www.nytimes.com/column/david-brooks)

He often writes everybody is bad type columns that present highly questionable
political conclusions and that contradict his own works from the past..

And he's insulated to a degree where nobody will actually call him on any of
it. And it's not like he is alone in that either. He is one that I find
particularly painful.

------
aeris
Closed comments on a website are clear sight that the editorial staff can't
take public criticism.

~~~
ghaff
Or simply that they feel low quality comments detract from the site relative
to whatever engagement/informational value they add. Some types of sites in
particular (consumer gadgets for example) seem to attract lots of warring
fanboy-ism without much in the way of signal. Yes, turning off comments is
something of a nuclear option but you can't chalk it up purely to blocking
criticism.

~~~
talmand
Why not both?

------
imaginenore
Seems like a huge step back.

------
mashed_potato
What we really need is a nice and cosy safe space.

Throw Web 2.0 right into the trash.

------
okasaki
Will they also be replacing writers like these
[https://archive.is/cEGD4](https://archive.is/cEGD4) with something better?

I think that's the far more urgent task.

~~~
scrollaway
That is an absolutely pathetic article...

Edit: And after reading it closer, it seems to be from someone who doesn't
understand how neither reddit nor food work. I wonder why they felt the need
to print it.

~~~
kagamine
While that was a pointless article to write anywhere outside of reddit itself,
as it is in essence just a reddit rant, it is actually spot on imo. /r/food is
parody of a food blog by people who are either in on the joke or, due to heart
disease, won't live long enough to get in on the joke.

The description of your average reddidiot was also accurate.

------
throwawaygeu
And that is how only favourable and aproved comments will be shown. No more
diversity of opinion.

~~~
blowski
Not necessarily. Newspapers have been doing this for years, and (the quality
ones at least) frequently show letters that disagree and point out errors.

If vice.com wanted to show only comments that agreed with them, they could do
that already.

~~~
throwawaygeu
And most sites (cant speak for these ) mostly do it alreadyly. Try saying that
eg:wage gap doesn' exist and link some articles by economists - 9 out of 10
times such comments get "moderated".

~~~
jamespo
I like how you have created a throwaway to express your opinions on commenting

~~~
talmand
These days anything coming close to controversial on the "wrong side" requires
it.

