
The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve - zimpenfish
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/08/the-guardian-wants-to-engage-with-readers-but-how-we-do-it-needs-to-evolve?CMP=share_btn_tw
======
lhnz
Whenever I read an article on the Guardian and think "wow, this is an
extremely one-sided perspective" I can almost guarantee the comments will have
been disabled.

In fact, the presence of comments against an article has begun to act as a
signal of quality. I assume that on some level the writers realise that well-
argued articles backed with facts and figures mostly dissuade idiots and
trolls even when comments are switched on.

While the quality of comments on the Guardian and many other news websites are
generally low, if an article gets 100s of comments the top voted comments will
often be decent rebuttals or positions overlooked by the main article.

A relatively decent way of reading the news is to understand the gist of an
article and then head straight to the comments to see if there is a punchline.
The value of comments on major media sites is to keep you open-minded and to
help you spot naturally-occuring biases.

~~~
tomp
I noticed, however, that they've added sorting by "Recommendations" (i.e.
"likes"/"upvotes") recently. That's something that was sorely missing earlier.

I still don't understand why the default sorting order is "Oldest", which is
basically the most useless - sorting by "Recommendations" gives best user
experience, sorting by "Newest" allows new comments to be rated, what does
sorting by "Oldest" do?!

~~~
x5n1
All this just creates an echo chamber. Reasonable discourse at the end of the
day is limited discourse. The real spectrum of thought however includes abuse
and profanity and perhaps aggressive tones.

IMO the best way to deal with this is to train an AI to recognize each of
these elements and then make the author reformulate the comment until it's
civil enough to be posted.

Give feedback like, the tone of this seems harsh, or it seems like you are
using ad-hominem attacks, etc.

~~~
acbabis
If the AI is trained by humans, the AI will have the humans' biases. Such an
AI would likely censor politely-worded yet counter-hegemonic views.

~~~
x5n1
Part of an open process is to make this information public, like what comments
were rejected and for what reason given by the AI, I guess it would probably
use a scoring system or something like that. If you made the process public
then it would not be a problem of it censoring anything that people could not
agree should be censored.

~~~
User2048
Creating an all powerful AI to control speech...

~~~
x5n1
massage speech.

------
Wintamute
The UK and world news writing in the Guardian is world class, but its social
commentary and feature sections are rather left-leaning/progressive (or
whatever words we use these days), to put it mildly. I don't think it's
unreasonable to suggest that their output is pretty politically polarised.
They have a target audience that enjoy their politics, and indeed that's who
they sell to.

But of course people from other political camps are obviously going to be
clickbaited and take issue from time to time, so comments on divisive articles
are going to get heated and fraught.

If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and the
right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might find
things simmer down.

The way the paper is describing the current situation is that they only print
virtuously correct articles, and then get mobbed by angry trolls. I look at it
slightly differently ... they publish heavily politically biased articles that
appeal to their readership, and in doing so troll differently politically
minded folk. They reap what they sow, and either way they get clicks and sell
ads. Fretting about online harassment is all part of the performance.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and
the right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might
find things simmer down."

I think it would just get worse. Currently you have liberal articles that
conservative trolls attack in the comments. Balance that with conservative
leaning articles and now the liberals have a comment section to troll in. The
solution in my opinion is to do away with the comments. I have never seen
anything useful in the comments on The Guardian and I read it quite often.

~~~
Wintamute
I don't know that it would, I have more faith in humanity than that. If the
ideas the Guardian championed were blind to overt politicisation and
consistently based on objective merit, rather than ideology I think the
strength of those ideas would be plain for people to see.

------
dingaling
> we want to create spaces on the Guardian for particular conversations and
> particular groups to speak - with each other and with us.

It would be interesting if they'd expand on _why_ they want to create these
'spaces'. There are two things I want from a news organisation:

1\. Accurate and insightful news, even if it's a bit later than the BBC

2\. A channel to make corrections to the published articles by those with
first-hand or expert knowledge.

I don't want to 'engage' any more than I engage with my ISP or electricity
company. Just give me a good, reliable product and a way to let you know when
you're not delivering that.

From my experience, comments pointing-out corrections don't feed back into the
article ( the editors and journalists are busy working on the next story ) so
it ends-up like Usenet with people arguing at each other and the story sitting
like an immutable monolith at the top of the page. What does the Guardian gain
from this? More ad views?

~~~
User2048
>we want to create spaces on the Guardian for particular conversations and
particular groups to speak - with each other and with us.

Sounds like they just want an echo chamber.

------
chris_wot
My experience with The Guardian has been very positive. There was a user
"ChangingWorld" who was a complete anti-vaxxer and no matter what you said
ignored all reasoned discussion and reverted to personal attacks.

After a fair bit of discussion, I got sick of the personal attacks on anyone
who tried to engage with her and who didn't hold her view, so I started
flagging her abusive comments.

The Guardian moderators, to my great surprise, took notice and actually
started deleting posts that violated their policies. The tone of debate,
needless to say, took a turn for the better! No longer were participants held
to ransom by manipulative and personal attacks and no longer were articles
about vaccinations derailed.

She eventually stopped commenting after I posted the following:

[http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/14/california-
se...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/14/california-senate-
approves-bill-to-make-vaccinations-mandatory#comment-52300593)

------
blakesterz
Good on them for trying. I feel like we've been trying to do this on the web
since the 1990s though. Somehow it just never works.

>>And we are working to make our comment spaces more welcoming and more
connected with our editorial work

Are there any sites that have really good comment spaces? How did they do it?
Seems like moderation works, to a point, with a large enough user base. What
else is there?

(I'll add _other than HN_ , this is the _one_ place I come to actually read
the comments)

~~~
basch
Slashdot created their moderation (funny, insightful), metamoderation and
tagging and karma and thresholds and filters how long ago?

[https://slashdot.org/faq/](https://slashdot.org/faq/)
[https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml](https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml)

Everyone just ignores their accomplishments. Sites consider the solution too
complicated to implement. You end up with reddit style up/down/report/gold and
best/top/hot/controversial which isnt rich enough metadata to let users sort
comments in powerful ways.

The answers to these problems have been around for long over a decade. Yet no
one has even come close to one upping slashdots system.

~~~
mapgrep
You're very right that Slashdot developed an underappreciated system for
community moderation. Too many people treat this like a new problem when it's
one of the oldest out there (see, for example,
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)
)

That said, I've always assumed the Slashdot system was too elaborate and hard
to understand for anything other than the highly technical, highly dedicated
(in its heyday) Slashdot community. Maybe I'm wrong.

~~~
basch
I think tagging your upvote/downvote with metadata describing WHY you voted
that way is not complicated.

Upvote - important

Upvote - funny

Upvote - informative

Upvote - consensus

Downvote - spam

Downvote - rude

Downvote - inaccurate

Downvote - disagree

Randomly assigned metamoderation as civic duty is not too much to ask of
readers and contributors.

I also think the complication should reside in the algorithm and not be handed
to the userbase. If metamoderation algorithms can figure out which moderators
I agree and disagree with, let me favor the data those moderators i prefer
contribute to the system.

A well written algorithm will be able to figure out when a person is polluting
the system with noise and trying to watch the world burn. Disagreeing with
consensus moderation is different than being disruptive. That is a challenging
and complicated prospect, but that complexity lies on the backend, not the
user facing interface.

~~~
mapgrep
Sure, but commenters are going to ask questions like "who is moderating me"
and "why am I allowed to moderate sometimes but not other times."

On Slashdot, the answers to these seemingly simple questions are quite
complex, but generally understood and embraced by the audience. I'm not sure
that would be the case on a site like the Guardian.

That said, you may be right that the benefits outweigh the confusion and that
this could work fine at Guardian. (Although, even as a longtime Slashdot user,
I have no idea what "upvote - consensus" means...)

~~~
basch
fresh accounts woundnt experience metamoderation

upvote - consensus = i agree

poor wording maybe

------
ColinWright
Related story, different content:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478361)

------
alva
_Slightly modified cross post from another thread._

If you really want to understand the Guardians motivation, look at when they
realised that the vast majority of their left-leaning readers strongly
disagreed with them regarding Islamic terrorism and the refugee crisis. Closed
comments on certain articles due to “a change in mainstream public opinion and
language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.[0]

At least they didn't even pretend that it wasn't because the majority of their
readership disagreed with them.

It seems like they are trying to change their approach to convince people
censorship is the right path. Perhaps straight out telling the majority of
their loyal readership that their opinions are wrong/bad/racist/evil wasn't
the best approach.

[0][http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers-
editor-on-readers-comments-below-the-line)

------
Saad_M
I wonder if it’s worth having any media organisation run a comments section.
With so many commenting platforms that are available for the masses (Twitter,
Medium, Reddit, etc.), I wonder if a comments section is more or less a relic
of days when there wasn’t a plethora ways of getting your opinion across.

------
ajsgarage
> _Building a community is a difficult endeavour even under perfect
> conditions, and changing the way a community works once it has been
> established is even more difficult._

Very interesting - a friend forwarded me a piece about another online
community, The AV Club, which is quite relevant to this discussion. It looks
at the nature of Community, Cliques, and Cesspool behavior. Might be a good
companion, informal study to consider:

[https://medium.com/@LongTimeLurker1stTimePoster/the-av-
club-...](https://medium.com/@LongTimeLurker1stTimePoster/the-av-club-comment-
section-community-clique-or-cesspool-f9c2e3295786#.z9a2uycp1)

