
NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments - hampelm
http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/npr-website-to-get-rid-of-comments
======
overcast
This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends.
I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just
toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment
sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn
into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has
reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only
civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

~~~
gr3yh47
>Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a
discussion to at this point.

the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage
dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It
seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.

~~~
e40
Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News
Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it
easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely
check for replies. Bums me out.

~~~
overcast
Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you
really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?

~~~
iLoch
Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a
question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it
contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer
to keep things the way they are.

~~~
overcast
Fair, I think they could simply just sort by most recently commented posts
you've created, and that would just solve that issue.

~~~
dnautics
Click on your username in the upper right corner, then navigate to "comments"
on the left.

~~~
overcast
That's the same function as "threads" in the main heading.

------
showerst
I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this
generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to
integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just
buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise.

Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small
publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute
for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem
users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably
take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap
countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.

Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to
defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for
the most part.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a
Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content.

HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to
the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out
downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-
intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment
driven.

~~~
hx87
Which articles are you reading? I have yet to see a single article where that
has happened.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like
that.

~~~
Karunamon
Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting.

Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender
politics because they _always_ degenerate into political (i.e. not
interesting) mud slinging matches.

On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good
moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm
inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible.

Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something
like:

1) Ugh, _another one_. Let's check the comments..

2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article..

3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? _Flag._

~~~
jonathankoren
Of the article isn't interesting, the article wouldn't have been voted up.

Marking down the comments indicates a desire by some to to enforce groupthink.
Why? Because many people use votes to indicate agree-disagree instead of a
quality metric.

~~~
Karunamon
You don't think agree/disagree votes apply to articles like they apply to
comments?

And given what I've seen of the algorithm here, page positioning is a _lot_
more complicated than vote count weighted by time.

~~~
jonathankoren
I think it's harder to agree/disagree with the typical headlines featured on
HN. Most articles on HN appear to be straight.

But let's say that two articles were in the queue, one pro-X, the other anti-X
and the pro-X forces were dominant. Sure the pro-X article would hit the FP,
but the anti-X forces would still comment on it and be down voted.

Also the bias is only visible in the comment section because down voted
comments remain visible, whereas a down voted article gets flushed down the
memory hole.

------
notadoc
95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The
other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant
opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an
unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.

The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments
well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes
funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.

Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one
included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of
cess pools.

~~~
robwilliams
The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a
frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal
guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column
([http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-
affluenc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-
fallacy.html)) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him
for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.

~~~
lucretian
i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web
with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing,
conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern
conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the
withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in
troll havens.

as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a
career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing
intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now
that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.

this comment articulates it well:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-
affluenc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-
fallacy.html#permid=19427985)

"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the
U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help
and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as
we get older, or fall short in some way.

But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia
where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard
the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall
Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times
entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the
unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality
in this country."

~~~
robwilliams
I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber
regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber
comment sections.

The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still
campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the
New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about
the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I
got bored of those comments instantly.

~~~
lucretian
neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is
free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another
way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative
comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and
replying by asking you to look around and find _anywhere_ on the web that has
a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you
realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different
conclusion...

anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an
even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for
example:

[http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html)

------
AdmiralAsshat
Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful
input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but
maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement
to use Facebook could be quite damaging.

On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing
hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section,
the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to
curtailing that kind of dialogue.

I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95%
of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way,
even if I am disappointed by it.

~~~
Analemma_
> the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to
> curtailing that kind of dialogue.

This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it.
People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's
not just an anecdotal feeling anymore:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study-
trolls-are-even-worse-when-using-real-names.shtml)

~~~
foob
It's interesting to see that real name policies can actually make trolls
behave more aggressively. On the other side of the spectrum, I anecdotally
find that they actually prevent me from posting _constructive_ things. I
frequently refrain from leaving reviews for restaurants and stores on Google
because I don't want them associated with my real name. It's not that I would
otherwise be leaving low quality or bitter reviews, I'm just not particularly
interested in anybody who knows my name having access to information about
where I shop, what I eat, etc (even though I would be happy to share this
information anonymously to help other people make informed decisions). I feel
similarly about commenting on news articles, blogs, and apps that I use. It
wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant factor in how real name
policies affect overall comment quality.

------
frankc
I propose the following system for commenting on news sites:

-comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only

After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for
automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam

This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online
letters to the editor.

~~~
dylanfw
I would imagine such a system would be mostly equivalent to no comment system
at all. I'm not going to bother commenting if nobody can even see it, and 3
days later when they can I won't even remember that I commented.

~~~
dredmorbius
Feature.

I'd hope that my comments mean something, even after three days.

------
chiefalchemist
The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of
people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a
community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc.

Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a
community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a
long way to making comments manageable.

In short, allowing comments != community.

------
acbabis
> The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more
> comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was
> budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.

If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on
them. People _reading_ the comments should count too.

~~~
coldtea
Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall
US audience -- should it be shut down too?

~~~
rexaliquid
Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10%
of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users
commented on articles.

No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does
anyone have lurker estimates?

~~~
dominotw
> ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly

~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social
networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.

~~~
rexaliquid
Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet:

[http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf](http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf)

------
intopieces
>But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be
more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not
that fake accounts don't get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the
predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on).

I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in
my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by
how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal
attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name
and photo.

------
jkeat
Rude reader comments can warp people's perception of what was being reported.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-
story-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-
stinks.html)

------
Grue3
I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's
self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles
with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless
medium articles much more entertaining.

~~~
justinlardinois
Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment
section before you start reading?

~~~
mynameishere
All the time. For many websites, the very first comment is a succinct and
correct refutation of the article or blogpost itself. And _that_ is why
comment sections are disappearing. People really don't mind "trolls" or
whatever all that much. They do mind being proven wrong.

------
mosburger
In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and
article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to
"engage" with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris
Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a
community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for
not having comments on his site).

But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with
which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really
question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily
unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now
online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have "Letters to the Editor,"
which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every
article?

~~~
incogitomode
I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem
outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on.

Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing
well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their
own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content.
Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't
feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author?

Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to
feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to
in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).

------
mrweasel
We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to
use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them.

It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be
heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even
Youtube barely need comments.

What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place
beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.

~~~
empath75
4chan is a cesspool.

~~~
jonathankoren
So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be
depressed check your local paper's comment sections.

~~~
astrodust
They're full of people who just _have_ to get things off their chest, but at
least they don't have cheerleaders encouraging them to be even more asshole
than they already are.

------
danso
That's a shame, one of my favorite comments ever on a news site is from NPR:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/m...](http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/mandy-
patinkin-25-years-after-the-princess-bride-hes-not-tired-of-that-
line#comment-674582040)

That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations
have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give
publishers the efficiency and control they desire.

~~~
andy_ppp
Amazing! I was at a play recently and Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) was outside
during the interval... Inconceivable indeed!

P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!

------
gnicholas
Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title,
by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus
commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much
smaller percent.)

Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise
point: [http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-
america-r...](http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-
anymore).

------
MollyR
With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening
for something like hackernews in other niches ?

~~~
lazyjones
> _I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other
> niches ?_

... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.

~~~
codemac
Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been
thinking of doing something similar in scheme.

[0]: via mousehole
[http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh...](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMousehole12.html)
/
[http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html)

------
jccalhoun
I always liked slashdot's comment system back in the day. It allowed you to
adjust what you saw and how many points a "funny" post got vs how many an
"informative" one got and then set a point threshold based on that.

Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either
it wasn't working or they just didn't see it as worth reimplimenting when they
moved away from their old code base.

~~~
mbreese
And it wasn't just that - it was the complex system of meta-moderation. How
you moderated posts was also scored.

One downside was that it could lead to a complete hive mind where your karma
was dependent upon how much you thought like others.

~~~
plasticsyntax
Meta-moderation was indeed a big part of it, and something I never saw
_anywhere_ else.

------
unethical_ban
Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation.

The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source
material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on
reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is
much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.

~~~
mtberatwork
> Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter...

Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, _NPR
's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a
public square," Montgomery said._

~~~
unethical_ban
I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR
talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations
have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign
called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a
public square is lazy and lacks vision.

[1] [http://idaretolisten.org](http://idaretolisten.org)

------
adrusi
I think that maybe hosting comments alongside the original article isn't the
best approach. Half the fun of internet comments is discussing with other
commenters, but that works a lot better when you know the community that
you're discussing with. You can't reasonably keep track of the dynamics of
hundreds of different content provider's comment sections, nor can all content
providers have interesting commenting communities.

We need a standard comment syndication format like RSS so that sites like HN
and Reddit can continue to provide good communities for discussion, but
content providers can still display comments below their content to show off
reader engagement.

------
initram
I totally understand why they're doing this. Their comments section was
terrible. I'm not at all surprised by the findings that a couple hundred to
low few thousand commenters are posting the vast majority of comments.

I'm really surprised at the energy that the trolls on NPR spend. You'll see
the same account posting rude comments on just about every article. Who has
that kind of time?

------
dba7dba
This is a shame.

Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more
time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find
out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the
article's author is advocating for.

There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more
knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.

------
bordercases
Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource
the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of
moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing
comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they
please.

------
hellogoodbyeeee
I have found comment sections on news websites to be reliably awful. It seems
every discussion thread deteriorates into an attack on the other side's
politics even when the link to get there is non existent. ("Thanks Obama")

That being said, I love reading all the comments. It has been a guilty
pleasure of mine for years. I often spend more time reading NPR's comment
section than I do reading the actual content. I don't think this change will
cause me to consume less NPR content, but I'll definitely spend less time on
their website.

------
dmatthewson
They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all
comments on their entire system.

I don't know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their
comment system, but I will bid $500/month to handle those 2600 users
comprising half of all comments, or $1000/month for all comments. All
inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest
system.

My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead
by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.

~~~
qu4z-2
Have you factored in that you need to serve the comments to every user, not
just ones that comment? I mean, to be fair, you could probably serve staticish
chunks of HTML and update-on-new-comment, but it's a consideration.

------
losteverything
I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call
in.

What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?

------
ebbv
Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that
can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site
toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.)

It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR
to have an image hosting service.

------
gallonofmilk
maybe the problem isn't comment moderation, but rather the expectation that
anyone should be able to "control" the dissemination of human thought through
mediums like the internet?

the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance
they stand in the future.

------
rrego
>There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from
discussion boards to individual story commenting

Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better
solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.

------
misingnoglic
Of course not a lot of users comment - the comment section is more or less
hidden on the articles...

------
jamiesonbecker
Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem
perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without
completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or
scorched earth flame wars.

------
perseusprime11
Can we also use this time to talk about Live chat for Youtube? It is literally
filled with scrolling garbage and promotes so much of negativity. What purpose
is it solving when there 10K users throwing garbage at each other?

------
brownbat
Being good at content doesn't mean you're good at running a public forum.

We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning.

Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a "Comments on HN" link at the
bottom of a post.

------
Johan-bjareholt
They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I
would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social
networks to compare with though.

Still a incredibly stupid decision though.

------
wangchow
It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.

------
davesque
Don't they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?

~~~
CM30
Pretty sure Disqus is often set up so comments are also stored in the site's
database. That's how it worked when I used it for a WordPress site.

So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with
Disqus.

~~~
ec109685
That isn't how Disqus works. It is a centrally hosted widget.

~~~
CM30
Not quite:

[https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data...](https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data-
synchronization-for-local-storage)

At least for the WordPress plugin, the default functionality is to sync the
comments in the database with those on Disqus servers.

------
eplanit
It's nice irony: This article, about a site removing commenting, now has more
comments than upvotes (although such a ratio almost always indicates a flame
war).

~~~
jessaustin
I think they've relaxed the upvotes-comments threshold.

------
bumbledraven
"If there is hope, it lies in the comments threads." \-- John Derbyshire

------
dredmorbius
My first thought reading this is, well, "conversation doesn't scale very
well", as David Weinberger said (regards some recent Reddit contretemps).

Looking at NPR's own article, I'm findng the justifications given to be
strongly suspect. NPR's focus on how many participants are engaging, and from
what platforms, rather misses the boat. It's not that I feel the decision
itself isn't without merits, but the merits given are exceedingly poor ones.
I'm hoping they're not the ones actually used.

I've done my own measurement of public user activity on large sites.[1] In the
case of Google+, my and Stone Temple Consulting's independent analysis[2]
showed that 0.3% of all users actually engage in public posting on the site.

The real question isn't "how many users are commenting", but "what is the
quality of the comments received?". Following critiques of my first study, I
performed a second follow-up looking at where intelligent conversation was
happening online, using the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list as a proxy
for intelligent conversation, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim
Kardashina", as its obverse. This gave the world the infamous FP:KK index --
the ratio of mentions of _any_ of the FP Global 100 Thinkers per instance of a
spin-off of the OJ Simpson trial fall-out.[2] A few results stood out --
Facebook's scale, Reddit's relatively high quality, Metafilter's phenomenally
high S/N ratio, and the amount of high-quality material posted to blogs
(though perhaps never seeing the light of day). I'd be interested in some
further follow-up along these lines.

One of the problems is that at Internet scale, Sturgeon's Law is far worse
than six-sigma compliant.[3] Not only is there an _awful_ lot of crud, but
simple mechanics mean that no one person can see more than the tiniest
fraction of what is transacted online daily. The simple acquisition cost and
assessment of "is this worth reading or not" is absolutely prohibitive.

Or as Clay Shirky says, what we've got isn't content overload but filter
failure.[4]

On the problem of idiots, my personal solution is simple and surprisingly
effective: block fuckwits.[5] At scale, this evolves to the problem of
figuring out who is and isn't a fuckwit. The ability for individual actions
_against specific authors and publishers_ to be applied generally strikes me
as a useful tool. Not a complete fix (there are controversial voices who do
deserve to be heard). But if the cost of being an asshat is being an asshat
screaming into the void, part of the problem is addressed.

(Yes, this means some form of 1) persistent reputation, 2) tools for applying
reputation as filters, and 3) limitations on newly-created profiles. The idea
of vouchers (again, with a reputation penalty applying) to bootstrap new
identities may help. There's much in common to approaches against email spam
in this.)

NPR in particular are counting the fact that many messages come from desktop
users as a failing of their system. I see that as absolute insanity. _Desktop
systems are hugely more useful than mobile devices for composing content._
Especially _thoughtful_ content. I know this because I've been trying, and
losing, that battle myself, using a 9" Android tablet and Bluetooth keyboard
-- one of the better mobile authoring configurations possible, and it _still_
stinks. The six lines by 45 characters I can see in HN's edit box certainly
don't help. I've written a long rant at Reddit on this specific problem.[6]
Whilst composing this comment I've had Firefox/Android crap out from under me,
continuously popped out of the edit box, and unintentionally navigated from
the page. Thankfully persistence of user state in edit dialogs has improved
slightly, but the experience is frustrating to say the least.

I'd use a proper editing environment, say, vim, _except that under Android,_
VimTouch doens't interact with the clipboard _. I can neither copy content_
into* it, nor _out_. Termux's vim client is slightly better -- I can paste
through the Termux clipboard, but copying _out_ is virtually impossible, and
doesn't capture more than one screen at a time.

The fact that few people are entering thoughtful comments on mobile likely
says far more about the state of mobile tech than it does about NPR's
audience.

________________________________

Notes:

1\.
[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq)

2\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/?ref=search_posts)

3\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/?ref=search_posts)

4\. [http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-
no...](http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-
overload/)

5\.
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq)

6\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/longform_selfposts_and_intelligent_discussion/)

------
kev8us
i think a good way to fix toxic comments is to have a "tag as troll" button.
if enough people think a particular commenter is a troll then they lose their
commenting privilege. it should be pretty easy to detect if a person is
creating more accounts.

------
carsonreinke
I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"

------
formula1
I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov)
makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for
services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one
another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to
provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is
necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for
them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting
as a president is one of "Fuck you, gov still pays me". They do not need to
adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding

Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is
because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is
controversail.

~~~
thaw13579
NPR's mission statement doesn't include "a open forum where the users can
speak to one another" though, and removing the comment section doesn't
constitute censorship.

The web and many social media services are available for people to publicly
and freely speak their mind, unlike some other governments, where censorship
does in fact exist. Ultimately, I think moves like this are good for promoting
a more decentralized version of the web where people host and manage their own
content, e.g.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-
creato...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-
looks-to-reinvent-it.html)

~~~
formula1
"Above and beyond" are the key words here. If this was a 100% private sector I
would be fine with it because its about the companies choice. But the fact it
is associated to the gov opens up many questions.

\- how do gov programs want to accept feedback?

\- does the government want open forums and discusion places?

\- how much anonymity does the gov want to provide in such discussions?

\- what types of contracts forve a company by law to abide by government
principles of discussion?

We have laws of what you cant do. We also have laws such as "you can not deny
a person water" in arizona [0]. Is the internet to be placed under similar
laws or can I run a non-profit with my own agenda in mind with no interest in
handling feedback from the taxpayers funding it?

[0] [http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked-
answered/201...](http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked-
answered/2014/09/17/asked-answered-free-water/15740067/)

~~~
tptacek
What other government resources should have comment sections? Should IRS.GOV?

~~~
formula1
Thats an interesting point actually. Their customer oriented subdomain doesnt
accept comments in either. Also is pretty inactive. Perhaps this has been a
long time coming and is only now happening to the bigger names

[http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta-
blog](http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta-blog)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c)

Edit : Fbi alo doesnt accept comments

[https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted-
federal-a...](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted-federal-
agents-killed-in-murder-for-hire-case)

