
Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit - twampss
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/02/were-turning-comments-off-for-a-bit/
======
youngian
Bold. This makes me really happy. Comments sections are the cesspools of the
Internet, so it's great to see someone say "This is going away until you think
about what you did wrong."

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric
site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least
cesspoolish place I've found so far.

~~~
pg
Comments really are a hard problem. 90% of the thought I expend on HN is
devoted to saving the site from bad comments. Spammers and overt trolls are
easy. The really hard problems are fluff comments and subtle trolls (people
who are fundamentally nasty, but who are sophisticated enough to stop short of
name calling).

~~~
michael_nielsen
If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be
an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've
found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of
the topic.

Two useful links on the subject are
<http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html> and
<http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/>

~~~
pg
One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my
strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that
most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.

~~~
blasdel
You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because _community
doesn't scale_

~~~
Perceval
I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of
scale: <http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000>

------
michael_nielsen
For an example of blogs with very high quality comments, see, e.g.
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.html).
It's an essay describing the use of blogs and blog comments to solve a
difficult open mathematical problem. The average quality of the comments made
in that project - more than 800 comments in all - was extraordinarily high.
Several strongly research-oriented blogs in mathematics and physics routinely
have very high quality comments, e.g., the blogs of Richard Lipton, Terence
Tao, Tim Gowers, and the n-category cafe.

(I should perhaps disclose that I'm one of the authors of the linked article.)

~~~
javanix
Well, the content of that particular blog has something to do with that. You
need a certain level of sophistication to come up with something coherent to
post, and most of the trolls out there know they'd be instantaneously obvious
to everyone else on a topic like that.

------
benologist
Engadget has written _54_ articles about the iPad in the last 12 days. I'm
honestly surprised that _they_ are surprised their audience are idiots.

~~~
potatolicious
The funny bit is that Engadget's commenting community seems to be vehemently
anti-Apple, but the fact that Engadget keeps writing huge numbers of Apple
articles implies that these generate traffic still (gut feeling: most of the
non-commenting visitors).

This seems like complaining about a movie theater while sitting in the first
row munching furiously on popcorn.

~~~
gamble
Apple gets so much press precisely because few people have the capacity for
indifference toward them. Write a story about a new Microsoft product, and
half the audience will yawn. Write a story about an Apple product, and the
other half will be pounding their keyboards in fury.

------
dotpavan
After reading Siver's post (<http://sivers.org/punish>), this development
seemed like a perfect data point (though I am unaware of the extent of threats
etc which drove them to take the decision)

------
mattcrest
We haven't enabled comments on our blog precisely for this reason.

Are there any success stories or best practices for quality comments and
discussions on blogs? What makes Hacker News commentary successful? User
accounts required and therefore no anonymity? Guidelines?

~~~
gr366
I wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts,
and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less
likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by
search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to
their comment.

~~~
_delirium
They might be less likely to post lots of other stuff too, though. Do you
really want any potential future casual acquaintance, boss, or what have you,
to have instant, easy access to a transcript of every conversation you've had?

------
s3graham
They're almost universally total garbage on engadget anyway (and not just
recently). I don't see any loss of value in leaving them off permanently.

To be clear, I like engadget just fine, but the comments never seem to provide
any insight/value.

------
phatboyslim
I noticed a while ago Jeff Atwood did this on codinghorror.com too (I believe
citing a technical reason, although they have not yet come back). Also, Seth
Godin does not have comments on his blog either.

Is this a trend going forward? I'm not against it...

~~~
prawn
Kottke's blog is without comments also. More should follow their lead.

------
seiji
I think this should go a bit further. The next time Google or Apple announces
something major-ish, the entire Internet should just be turned off for two
days.

Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better
answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they
have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are
regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in
the first place.

~~~
anigbrowl
Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular
are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because
it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because
the 'comment crew' there are _so_ obnoxious.

I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20
years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host
public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more
likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to
the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly
stupid.

~~~
newsio
Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some
of the comments below even mundane articles.

The NYT has a good approach: Approve only those comments which present
reasoned arguments in a semi-intelligent way. There's a lag, but the comment
threads are excellent reading.

Another approach: Force everyone to use real names when leaving a comment. I
am not sure how that would work, but the trolling would drop away if real
identities were tied to people's words.

Unfortunately, it might also inhibit people from commenting, too. Anonymity is
a great way to say what you actually think.

~~~
carbon179
I just had to register on HN to say how much I completely agree with this
statement:

"Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some
of the comments below even mundane articles."

~~~
awa
Welcome to HN! Please take some time to go through the guidelines:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>. And hit upvote when you agree
with somebody's comment.

------
marciovm123
It seems every new open web community tries desperately to stave off its own
Endless September. I think a scalable answer will probably look more like
multiple layers of authentication. Only some actions can be completely public;
you have to be respected before you are allowed progressively more reign. That
is what our society does with kids and things like drivers licenses, college
degrees, etc.

~~~
Super_Jambo
For anyone else who doesn't get the Endless September reference:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>

------
jrockway
Wow nice. Reading sites like Engadget without comments is almost better than
reading them without ads.

When I want to comment on something, I will come to a site designed for that.
There, I have a single place to track replies, so I can actually _discuss_
things, rather than which blog I commented on today.

I know for my own blog redesign, I will not allow comments. I just don't see
the point.

------
Gormo
Spam and flame wars are not at all a new phenomenon. The decline of
intelligent conversation amidst the noise does seem pretty new.

I think this may be more related to the nature of these sites and the
communities that form around them, rather than merely to the scale of the
community.

Sites that go for a very broad appeal rather than targeting a specific, well-
defined audience tend to have much lower-quality comments. Engadget is a great
example - it is a consumer-oriented tech blog, and it's structured more like a
traditional publication than an online community. The comments there are
almost always not worth reading.

On the other hand, I visit sites like HN, Slashdot, and Ars Technica primarily
for the discussions.

------
muffins
News Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with
the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress.
Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to
kick and scream more than before.

This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.

------
madair
People need to chill-out their self-righteous and frequently hypocritical
disgustometer. If you're gonna have a worldwide open discussion you're gonna
have some trolls. How about thinking about how amazing it is? How about not
having your emotions triggered by the trolls. There are things to learn on all
sides.

~~~
stingraycharles
How is it self-righteous to turn off a feature on your site that you feel is
currently causing more harm than doing good? Are they in some way obligated to
give the trolls a place to troll?

~~~
madair
I'm responding more to the outburst of (self-)righteousness happening right
here on HN right now.

~~~
stingraycharles
Sorry, I misunderstood that then, my bad.

------
gioiam
I'm not sure what was being said in the comments, but I always think its a bad
choice to cut off the medium that your users voice their opinions on.

------
jorsh
I love this. Absolutely love it. I've always kind of dismissed comments as
mostly empty white noise on the internet, and have never figured out why so
many CMS systems/Blogging software/Web apps/etc are so eager to add comments
to EVERYTHING.

Give me the content, I can form my own thoughts on it, and if I actually feel
like my thoughts are worthwhile for reading I can publish them myself.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
You just added a comment to a story.

How is your comment on HN not _exactly_ what you're dismissive of?

~~~
jorsh
YES I REALIZE THE IRONY HERE

I will admit HN is one of those rare sites with a pretty good signal to noise
ratio in comments.

~~~
qjz
There is no irony here. This is a discussion forum. If I check out a book from
the library, I don't want to see comments scribbled in the margins, but I'm
more than happy to join a lively discussion about it on HN or reddit.

