> "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.
> What the New York Times community desk demands most of all is that some effort is made to justify your views. The desk must also be convinced that your intention is to inform and convince rather than to insult and enrage.
So. How is this person justifying their comment? There's at least three [citation needed]s in there. And saying you'll keep it because the replies will be enlightening even though it brings no inherent value is basically admitting that you're deliberately allowing a flamewar, which seems contrary to the idea that it's not trying to enrage.
Apparently the times' idea of an 'interesting conversation' is to have feminism 101 conversations over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Because groups can't do anything badly (e.g. statistically significant percentages of their members or in their core ideology is they are something like a political part, a religious sect etc), and shouldn't be criticised and/or made fun for that?
TBF, the difference is that the comment about women didn't call for sterilizing all of them, which NYT pointed out as the reason for rejecting the Saudi Arabia comment.
I wonder if their rationale is that a negative comment is more insulting and less constructive if it has a more specific target. E.g., there are fewer Saudis than women. That seems a bit backward to me, though.
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.
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
To be honest, he did not suggest to sterilize them. So his statement might be technically correct (the best kind of correct). E.g. it might actually be true.
I guess telling all women to be sluts and procreate against their own desires is acceptable, but only forced sterilization is bad. We live in interesting TIMES…
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.
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.
Minor gripe: that's the time it takes you to read both the introduction, think about the context and judge the comment. Presumably, one would save a few seconds (and thus a lot of time in the long run) by being aware of the context and the article while working.
Still: major amounts of work. Though I presume that having comments hidden by default would take off some pressure: commenters won't know/notice their comments takes 14:55 or 13:29 to show up publicly.
The flagging solution does not necessarily work for a biased readership. Valid comments that go against the echo chamber will be flagged more often than those that don't, and will rise to the top. This will bury inappropriate comments that go along with the echo chamber to the bottom.
It could act like the downvote on YouTube, in which something registers but the actual tally is not visible to the public. It'd take some tweaking depending on the actual dynamics of how NYT readers interact. Maybe have a threshold of 3 to 5? And perhaps have a hidden karma score that drops (like in StackOverflow) with each downvote, so that chronic flaggers have diminishing influence
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Yeah, reddit tends to dogpile. Mildly controversial comments in popular subreddits get massively upvoted or massively downvoted depending largely on the first few votes.
> HN political discussions, which overwhelming praise Hilary Clinton
I'd really like to know how HN has implemented the feature which occasionally allows posts from readers of instances of HN in alternate universes to be shown on the instance of HN in our universe.
It would be great to be able to have debates over Trump's policy positions, but until that becomes possible, one has to simply guess at motivations of supporters.
If the people are explaining politely why Trump is a bigot and why they support Hillary, what's the problem? Just because people having a discussion don't share your viewpoints doesn't make the discussion less valid.
It really doesn't work though. Maybe it works for the Pokémon Go subreddit or whatever, but the hive mind is out of control on issues where there are multiple sides. Even sports subreddits suffer from it, and those are hardly that serious.
I love reddit, but I don't think a lot of upvotes indicates "truly great".
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.
>>
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.
> "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.