
Have Comment Sections on News Media Websites Failed? - leephillips
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/04/18/have-comment-sections-on-news-media-websites-failed?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
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stirner
I sympathize with the desire to avoid racism, sexism, and the other forms of
abuse the writers mentioned, but people with nasty opinions should be
discouraged with voting systems, not with complete silence.

By all means, go ahead and remove comment sections from your site. But I
imagine there are people beside me who will move on to other sites when they
see discussion being shut down.

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mozumder
Voting systems are probably the worst option, since it just encourages
negative group behavior. The entirety of Reddit is a good example.

The best thing is to just shut down the comments, and encourage trolls to move
elsewhere. Remember that advertisers don't want all audiences - they want
quality audiences. No advertiser is interested in placing their ads on a train
wreck, even though a lot of people are looking at it. It just doesn't help
their branding.

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stirner
Well, I agree that Reddit's voting system encourages groupthink, but I'd
rather that unpopular opinions were silenced by other commenters rather than
all opinions being silenced.

Do you think that comments belong anywhere on the web (on aggregator sites,
for example)?

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mozumder
Unmoderated commenting doesn't belong anywhere that relies on advertising as a
business model.

At the very least, have a human editor filter out comments, based on editorial
guidelines.

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tim333
They seem to be doing ok on the whole. Being able to vote comments up and down
helps loose the bad stuff.

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dandare
I keep wondering for years now why nobody copied the reddit comment system? It
is simply the best comment system invented so far and I don't see a single
reason why ALL newspapers should not implement a variant of it.

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jack9
The reddit comment system is not that good and has been duplicated many times.
Almost every comment system is comprised of multiple recognizable elements.

1\. The presentation (this is probably what you meant). Reddit's comment
threading and hiding is excellent. /. does something very similar, but with
more decoration.

2\. The voting system. Reddit's comment system is for rewarding comments that
contribute to the discussion for some value of "contribute". Instead it's used
as a popularity score, which has resulted in the same problems you see in
Stack Overflow where accuracy falls prey to enthusiasm (for good or ill). The
systems that do not have a "downvote", instead starting at an anonymous (or
some incremental) threshold. I thought maybe a floating filter based on the
average or some group-specific setting or a manual setting (e.g. /.) would be
optimal, but there are some readability problems that can only be solved with
good presentation. I have not seen many that have good presentation AND
technical sophistication because the last item is a deal-breaker.

3\. Automation/tooling. Manual and/or automated moderation + bot mitigation is
a fairly complex issue. Thread locking, deletion, account banning, anti-spam
measures are not things that traditional media are prepared to deal with. You
find they sometimes just abandon or delete articles that have been bot-slimed.
Reddit's tools are a combination of watchful (time-investment) community
leaders, automation, and network level blocking.

4... there's probably more, but those are what comes to mind.

