
Approve or Reject: Can You Moderate Five New York Times Comments? - dotluis
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html
======
franciscop
> "Women and their monogamy obsession. Why are they so insecure and try to
> fight biology?"

> "Reject"

> "We would have approved. Whether we agree with a comment, we want to provide
> a space for interesting interactions to occur. Put simply, the replies to
> this comment may prove to be enlightening for many readers. The comment does
> not criticize a specific woman, so it is not a personal attack. While it
> might be considered an insult against a class, alleging an "obsession" is
> not a particularly inflammatory insult. We don’t seek to police opinions,
> only to help as many people as possible express themselves on nytimes.com."

It was about calling women "insecure" besides "obsessive" in a two sentence
comment in a pejorative tone. It is not about agreeing with the comment or
not.

~~~
chc
Yeah, their rationale on that is bizarre. Not only does the comment contain a
sexist insult, the comment is _nothing but_ a sexist insult.

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empressplay
There appears to be a double standard between insulting a race or religion,
and sex or sexuality... they appear to argue that insulting women or gay
people is okay because such discussion is somehow in the public interest, but
that insulting a race or religion (middle-eastern people and muslims in
particular) is not in the public interest? Seems arbitrary.

~~~
lallysingh
The part of the comment that got it rejected: >This problem will not end
unless a significant portion of the middle east is sterilized and even then
you would still have to sterilize Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia

The sterilization was the reason for rejection.

~~~
emodendroket
It just seems like an odd place to draw the line; the stuff about women isn't
really going to foster a productive discussion either.

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emodendroket
Frankly, I don't think they've given you enough info to moderate according to
their highly specific standards.

~~~
morsch
Well, it's not a contest. Whether or not your moderation agrees with theirs,
the explanation tells you about their standards for moderation. I think it's a
pretty cool demo.

Kind of reminded me of Slashdot's meta-moderation (no idea if that's even
still a thing), I wonder if they're analyzing the response to see if their
readers' intuitions agree with their policy.

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strictnein
On the first one, I've read "Repiglicans" and "Rethuglicans", etc so many
times that I didn't even notice "Repugnicans".

~~~
lostmsu
I don't ever read this word often, but still did not notice this as well. This
kind of stuff should be marked by robots.

~~~
chias
That is part of the basis for this whole exercise (that they're augmenting
their moderation efforts via automated means).

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danso
Anyone else who finished the quiz think that the comment moderation process is
bonkers in terms of work load? 11,000 comments a day. I got 2 out of 5 and it
took me 46 seconds, which means it would take me more than 28.1 hours to do a
day's work.

Even split across a few staff members that's insane. But this is something
they needlessly put on themselves by making comments _hidden by default_. An
editor has to read _every_ comment before approving it. This could easily be
fixed by having it show-by-default, queue-after-flags/downvotes (which is how
I assume HN mods act so quickly)

There are a few "trusted" users who are auto-approved. I complained that there
doesn't seem to be any automated filters or heuristics. If they know
"Repugnican" is a word used in name-calling, why isn't it blacklisted so that
all such comments either get thrown out or just thrown to the bottom of the
queue?

I've subscribed to the NYT paper edition for several years, which means I've
paid at least $1000, nevermind the ad revenue they get form my page visits to
the site. And yet I have to wait in the queue, usually 15 minutes to an hour,
before my comment is approved, like any of the free registered users. I
believe they have a million subscribers. I think it is a logical courtesy and
efficiency to give _paying_ members the benefit of the doubt. Not many people
pay 3x a Netflix subscription just to be an asshole on the comment boards.

edit: Made it clear that even longtime paying subscribers are treated as
untrusted commenters.

~~~
empath75
metafilter.com has a $5 lifetime fee to sign up. They have an extremely strict
moderation policy and fairly frequently ban people who don't interact in
positive ways, almost always refunding the sign-up fee. They have one of the
most readable comments sections of any site i read, although it has it's own
problems.

~~~
JoelBennett
In that regard, I've been kind of curious to know how Hacker News deals with
comments. It seems like there's only a single upvote button (no downvoting),
and you can't see how much something has been upvoted. It kind of kills the
popularity contest part of things.

The whole psychology of online commenting and having groups rate things is
quite interesting.

~~~
Yen
I believe there is a 'downvote' button, but it's only available once you've
scored above a certain karma threshold.

Also, while you don't know how often something has been upvoted, a comment
with a higher score will be at the top of the page, and you'll see it first
and be more likely to give it an additional upvote.

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ja30278
"And again if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold
out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best
book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise
man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool,
that which being restrain'd will be no hindrance to his folly"

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SilasX
So, I get their broader point: It doesn't scale; too much human time and
effort to read the comments and apply policy correctly.

What _would_ scale, then? You'd want to a) use free labor from readers, and b)
have a way to punish trolls.

I imagine something like:

1) Some central identity/commenter rep provider (CIRP) that shares rep across
forums. (privacy issues discussed below)

2) If you're registered with a good CIRP at all, you get a big bump in
visibility -- maybe even a trashed account appears before anons. The higher a
rep your CIRP vouches for, the more visible your comment.

3) Readers upvote and downvote as before, but this doesn't directly affect
visibility; it just decides probability of the comment being placed before a
human reviewer, who can pass a more focused judgment on it.

4) If multiple, non-communicating human judges agree on good/bad, that users'
rep is adjusted in that direction.

5) Privacy: the CIRP just signs a token indicating your rep (within a range),
not your ID itself. (They don't even need to store your comments, just your
login and rep, though comments are nice for later auditing.)

The advantage are:

A) If you establish yourself as having good comments on other forums, that
carries over to the NYT (or whatever) comment section, creating an bigger
incentive for good comments.

B) Humans can take the time to carefully judge your comments, since they only
need to see a sample of them.

C) It has a nice hierarchy of checks and balances: forums can discount bad
CIRPs; CIRPs can check that their judges are doing it right; judges validate
other judges.

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firasd
I understand the issues with comments but I feel publishers are making a
mistake. NPR recently said their comments are non-​representative of their
total listeners and are annoying to users and take time to moderate, so…
they’ll remove them and let you comment on Twitter, Facebook, etc. But are
people talking on Twitter, Facebook, etc always making delightfully erudite
comments on shows? Are social media posters representative of all NPR
listeners? Hell no. So publishers make this decision to send the user base and
activity to other internet platforms, then they complain that all their
traffic is being captured by and funneled through social media…

Maybe publishers should start competing head-​to-​head with internet
platforms: going for network effects, monthly active users, making
recommendation and personalization systems, that kinda thing. Not going “oh,
some people don’t like reading our comments, so we deleted our user activity
system.” At least the NYT is making an effort keep the comments in place and
use tech to help with moderation.

~~~
webwanderings
Makes sense. Each news outlet is a platform in itself (if they choose to be
one). They should "own" their own platform, instead of relying on others. It
is one thing to not set the stage for the world to interact on your platform,
but it is another to not own your own thing.

Speaking of NPR. I got tired of their non-stop coverage of one particular
presidential nominee. I thought NPR should be the last news outlet in the
world to be going for the rating wars, but they did.

~~~
emodendroket
> Makes sense. Each news outlet is a platform in itself (if they choose to be
> one). They should "own" their own platform, instead of relying on others. It
> is one thing to not set the stage for the world to interact on your
> platform, but it is another to not own your own thing.

Then they scream bloody murder when Facebook acts in its own interests and
demotes their stories in the feed, as though that weren't totally predictable.

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segmondy
5/5 in 35 seconds. It's mentally taxing. Some I wanted to reject, but i had to
think of fairness. If I rejected everything I agreed with, I would probably
have rejected them all. I would have to be paid at least $350,000/yr to do
that everyday for hours. I would still hate my life.

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InclinedPlane
And, here we see the problem with the whole system. None of these comments
truly adds to the discussion, they are all aggressive, insulting, and biased.
Yet it's difficult to achieve a level of moderation that doesn't seem
overzealous without allowing some of this garbage into the conversation.

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cft
With the help of Google Jigsaw the results will look like this:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors)

~~~
gohrt
Replied to wrong post?

EDIT: Oops, I skipped to the quiz and missed the intro about Jigsaw.

~~~
ksenzee
No, the NYT is going to use Google Jigsaw in an attempt to improve their
comment moderation.

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pfarnsworth
This is why reddit-style upvoting works well. Of all of the systems I've seen,
reddit has hit enough critical mass such that the upvoted comments are truly
great.

~~~
SCdF
Wow really? I have the opposite opinion: easy and safe (for reddit's hive mind
/ what is currently popular / anti-popular) rise to the top, things people
disagree with get downvoted.

The effect lessens the further you get from the front page, but the formula is
the same.

NB: this is not true for some of their _highly_ moderated subreddits like
AskScience / AskHistorians or whatever. The rest of reddit does not operate
that way though.

~~~
SilasX
Right, but (per parent), it's still _better_ than the alternatives. You can
cite flaws, but it was an improvement over what we had before (yabb, slashdot,
etc).

You can do better -- like the AskScience/AskHistorian forums -- but only at
the cost of investing a lot more work. Is there something more scalable?

~~~
SCdF
> You can cite flaws, but it was an improvement over what we had before (yabb,
> slashdot, etc).

FWIW I considered /. to be a better system than reddit. But I mean, it all
depends on what you consider "better". Reddit is certainly more popular, so
clearly it's better by some metric.

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kchoudhu
"You can partake in moderation in a limited fashion"

Didn't/Doesn't Slashdot do this?

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CPLX
I believe pretty strongly that commenting on articles is generally a waste of
time and doesn't add much value for the reader, or the discourse in general.
And no, I can't reconcile that with what I am doing at the present moment.

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webwanderings
>> In response to an article that quotes the United States House minority
leader, Nancy Pelosi, criticizing her Republican counterparts for agreeing to
pay for the legal defense of a federal ban on gay marriage: “This is so much
political correctness. The family, men plus women = children is the basis of
society. Scientific facts are not altered by political correctness and neither
is the law and design of man by God. Two men can create a relationship, but
not a child. This is not marriage. This is sodomy. Check out Sodom & Gomorrrah
if you would like God’s opinion about it. A lie is not the truth. Stop it
Obama.” <<

You should reject because it shouldn't be about Obama.

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lallysingh
Note that it's just Jigsaw, not "Google Jigsaw."

~~~
harryh
[https://jigsaw.google.com](https://jigsaw.google.com)

~~~
lallysingh
Despite the domain, Jigsaw's under Alphabet directly.

