
How Ta-Nehisi Coates built the best comment section on the internet - Thevet
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/02/04/its-yours-a-short-history-of-the-horde/
======
blackbagboys
Ta-Nehisi Coates's commentary is explicitly political and ideological, and
those ideological affinities defined the limits of acceptable discourse in his
comments section. You may or may not be sympathetic to those politics (I am,
to a degree), but here's another way to describe what made this 'the best
comment section on the Internet': it intentionally excluded any viewpoint too
far outside the mainstream of the community (and, contra the author's
implication, those comments were not necessarily racist trolling).

A similar phenomenon happens on HN; the community centers itself around a
particular set of values or opinions, and opinions which differ too radically
from the center are very effectively marginalized - like a wave losing
strength as it ripples outward. This allows for productive discourse, but
explicitly describing the benefits of collective censorship as such makes some
people uneasy.

(It's important, then, to ensure that you participate in communities with many
different "opinion loci".)

~~~
swatow
HN does strike a good balance between civility and diversity of opinion. Or at
least they get a lot of one controlling for the other. I tend to post from a
right wing perspective but only had one comment flag killed (where I pointed
out that it was hypocritical of French Americans to say that France needs to
preserve its culture, while at the same time saying that the US has no
culture, and anyone who says it does is a racist).

The one thing that bothers me is the flood of social justice themed articles,
including one that was flag killed but revived by the mods. I guess the mods
felt that they were reacting against over-zealous flaggers. But I think in
practice they are overriding the opinion of the community who are sick of
articles about issues like sexism in tech.

~~~
cbd1984
> the US has no culture

How anyone can believe this is beyond me. It is like saying a given atom has
no protons, or that a given region of a country has no area. It's such a gross
misunderstanding of basic concepts it should mark anyone who says it as
someone who has no basis for continuing the discussion.

~~~
beobab
I've always understood the statement "The US has no culture" as meaning that
the speaker thought the citizens of the US weren't "posh enough" in some
manner or other.

I imagined it was probably something terribly elegant and refined like eating
breadsticks with a knife and fork.

~~~
Ntrails
I would probably interpret it as saying that there isn't a single cohesive
culture throughout the US? I'm not sure how true it is (I've never been) - but
I have certainly observed anecdotally that some states are more keenly
independant than others?

~~~
cbd1984
> I would probably interpret it as saying that there isn't a single cohesive
> culture throughout the US?

By that token, no country has a culture, because every country (except, maybe,
postage stamps like Luxembourg or Liechtenstein) has regions with a
distinctive cultural heritage which they don't entirely share with other
regions.

So, put that way, it's trivially true that the US doesn't have _one_ culture,
but then neither does France, or the UK, or China, or Russia, or Italy.

Culture is everything which is passed down from generation to generation which
_isn 't_ encoded in the genes. For example, my dark hair isn't in my culture,
even though I got it from both of my parents; my language, however, most
certainly _is_ part of my culture. So's most of my taste in food and drink. Do
I share all of my culture with the people I live close to? No, but I share a
lot of things, some of necessity (language, clothing) and some because it was
just how I was raised and what I see around me (hair style, meal times).

Here's an interesting website on the culture a large percentage of Americans
more-or-less shares:

[http://www.zompist.com/amercult.html](http://www.zompist.com/amercult.html)

There's similar pages for Canadians, Russians, Chinese, etc all linked off
that page.

------
DavidAdams
The Hacker News crowd and the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem in general has a
deserved reputation for a bias toward trying to fix problems that are
prominent in their own line of sight. In other words, a lot of startups trying
to fix problems that vex prosperous, tech-savvy single people in San
Francisco. But here's a geek-world problem that's staring us all right in the
face.

Despite the enormous potential benefit of the internet as a place for open,
respectful discourse among people from all walks of life, it seems that every
forum must eventually devolve into ad-hominem rancor and trolling, unless it's
aggressively and time-consumingly moderated by dedicated human beings.

I've been involved in trying to crack this particular nut since 1997 as
publisher of OSNews, and I've been a participant in some relatively good
forums such as HN over the years, but I can't help but think that there's an
opportunity start with what Disqus has done and take it to the next level.

In the article, Coates bemoans the limited moderation toolset that he got from
Disqus, and I can't help but think that there's a potential big data play to
fingerprint the most obvious kinds of trolling and give human moderators a
quiver of time-saving tools to keep their forums on the straight and narrow.

If anyone here has some ideas about how we might go about executing on this
idea, let me know. I'd be interested in being involved.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
I think the value proposition of Disqus is just comparatively low maintenance.
You include a snippet of JS and you get a minimally functional commenting
system that includes antispam and requires running no backend server software
or security risks. In return Disqus gets analytics and a little bit of ad
space. It's not imo going for discussion, it's meant to be flypaper for
readers who get a good-feelings boost thinking they're being heard, so it's a
monetization tool more than anything. The extreme end of this is Youtube
comments, which accumulate so fast and so voluminously that actual discussion
is near impossible, and the limited nesting actively fights replying. You
can't follow anything. But millions of people pile their worthless comments
into the void because it feels good to have your say. Old, crusty ugly forums
are better for conversation than new, shiny JS comment systems because they
were actually made for conversation, that was their raison d'etre.

Have you tried Discourse? It's almost as good as the hype.

So this is kind of related. I've been reading OSNews since the very beginning,
and I really, really love it. It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is
about the highest praise I could give a site. In large part it's because it
covered stuff I couldn't see anywhere else and the commenters were positive
and knowledgeable. But in the last few years there are so many articles about
non-OS political stuff, which in turn causes fighting in the comments. Don't
underestimate that the types of articles published determines the type of
commenters :-(

~~~
smcnally
> It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is about the highest praise I
> could give a site.

Slashdot's meta-moderation contributed to discussion quality and high
signal:noise.

I'm still skeptical of parent comment's fingerprinting as a sole solution --
it takes humInt and humInvolvement. Arm willing human mods with tools like
fingerprinting, provide incentives for many to moderate and for some to
moderate the mods, and good discussions can happen.

------
A_COMPUTER
I have read and commented on his articles for years. I am opinionated on them.
His were only moderately better than most other places.

>these days I tend to believe that comment sections are just tumors on
otherwise good journalism, and that we’d all be better off without them.

Comments sections are great when the writer is lying or obfuscating, which
happens with shocking regularity. It's great when someone in the comments
section adds context to a story that the writer neglected to include, either
though ignorance or malice. I would say for local news, you quite often have
to go to the comments section to even find out what really happened.

------
snowwrestler
> Those threads were where the regulars started to really get to know each
> other, and develop their own shorthand, nicknames, and inside jokes.

Online communities, like any communities, need to develop the right culture in
order to thrive. People have to get to know each other; then they'll engage in
shared defense of the culture against hostile outsiders (trolls, in this
case).

If you're trying to create on online community, then you can short-cut the
process a little bit by attempting to install your own culture via
participation (modelling the values you want to see in your commenters) and
moderation (excluding those who violate the culture).

But to do that effectively is very hard work. Hard work that most people and
most publishers don't seem willing to do. So they end up with crappy pointless
comment threads.

------
mturmon
His blog is one of the most thought-provoking American political/social blogs.
He writes from a unique perspective and really challenges you to think.

