Sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree with the basic premise of this article that news site comment sections are in any way a good thing. Has the author ever actually spent any time in the...
Sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree with the basic premise of this article that news site comment sections are in any way a good thing. Has the author ever actually spent any time in the comment sections of any news sites recently? They are almost universally the worst public comment sections on the internet IMO, full of the most insanely hateful rhetoric and open bigotry I have seen, largely due to their complete lack of moderation... which also makes them ripe targets for influence operations and disinformation campaigns. I say shut them all down and we will all be better off.
I also disagree with the article, but they do address the bigotry. What they're getting at is that news sites should hire moderators to clean up the comments section instead of closing them. They...
I also disagree with the article, but they do address the bigotry. What they're getting at is that news sites should hire moderators to clean up the comments section instead of closing them. They claim that the community a comments section fosters is worth more money than the moderators are paid. They also claim that if you don't have the comments in your news section, you're just handing your readers (and their money) to social media sites.
I disagree with their mercenary approach, and I think their strategy will lead to only as much moderation as protects profits.
that point itself is honestly its own can of worms worth discussing. if you take it from most of the people who actually do it (see our discussions on the articles The Life of a Comment Moderator...
What they're getting at is that news sites should hire moderators to clean up the comments section instead of closing them. They claim that the community a comments section fosters is worth more money than the moderators are paid. They also claim that if you don't have the comments in your news section, you're just handing your readers (and their money) to social media sites.
that point itself is honestly its own can of worms worth discussing. if you take it from most of the people who actually do it (see our discussions on the articles The Life of a Comment Moderator for a Right-Wing Website and The Comment Moderator Is The Most Important Job In The World Right Now, and the discussions spawned from them) it's a total shitshow and hardly worth it even in relatively good circumstances. purely financially, comment moderation is also going to probably be a superfluous, easily eliminatable position for most newspapers/news websites given the bad or actively dire financial position a lot of them are in and how needless most comment sections are. most places which have open-door comments or which want to just aren't going to be like the new york times which can afford machine learning to aid in moderation, and so that presents another big roadblock to preserving comments sections like they want to given the aforementioned "people-who-do-this" point.
I cannot speak for the author of the article, but I read comments on various sites quite often, and these comments are either part of the respective site or, less commonly, powered by Disqus (no...
Has the author ever actually spent any time in the comment sections of any news sites recently?
I cannot speak for the author of the article, but I read comments on various sites quite often, and these comments are either part of the respective site or, less commonly, powered by Disqus (no embedded Facebook comments).
Maybe I avoid most controversial topics; also, I cannot recall a really unmoderated (i.e., when a problematic comments stays for days rather than minutes) comment section—can you give an example of a site?
pretty much any news site which has comments at all, even if those news sites use something like facebook, but especially if they use something like disqus. disqus in particular infamously has a...
Maybe I avoid most controversial topics; also, I cannot recall a really unmoderated (i.e., when a problematic comments stays for days rather than minutes) comment section—can you give an example of a site?
pretty much any news site which has comments at all, even if those news sites use something like facebook, but especially if they use something like disqus. disqus in particular infamously has a problem with alt-righters and neo-nazis using it to recruit people, as shown by buzzfeed in 2018: How The Alt-Right Manipulates The Internet’s Biggest Commenting Platform
Sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree with the basic premise of this article that news site comment sections are in any way a good thing. Has the author ever actually spent any time in the comment sections of any news sites recently? They are almost universally the worst public comment sections on the internet IMO, full of the most insanely hateful rhetoric and open bigotry I have seen, largely due to their complete lack of moderation... which also makes them ripe targets for influence operations and disinformation campaigns. I say shut them all down and we will all be better off.
I also disagree with the article, but they do address the bigotry. What they're getting at is that news sites should hire moderators to clean up the comments section instead of closing them. They claim that the community a comments section fosters is worth more money than the moderators are paid. They also claim that if you don't have the comments in your news section, you're just handing your readers (and their money) to social media sites.
I disagree with their mercenary approach, and I think their strategy will lead to only as much moderation as protects profits.
that point itself is honestly its own can of worms worth discussing. if you take it from most of the people who actually do it (see our discussions on the articles The Life of a Comment Moderator for a Right-Wing Website and The Comment Moderator Is The Most Important Job In The World Right Now, and the discussions spawned from them) it's a total shitshow and hardly worth it even in relatively good circumstances. purely financially, comment moderation is also going to probably be a superfluous, easily eliminatable position for most newspapers/news websites given the bad or actively dire financial position a lot of them are in and how needless most comment sections are. most places which have open-door comments or which want to just aren't going to be like the new york times which can afford machine learning to aid in moderation, and so that presents another big roadblock to preserving comments sections like they want to given the aforementioned "people-who-do-this" point.
I cannot speak for the author of the article, but I read comments on various sites quite often, and these comments are either part of the respective site or, less commonly, powered by Disqus (no embedded Facebook comments).
Maybe I avoid most controversial topics; also, I cannot recall a really unmoderated (i.e., when a problematic comments stays for days rather than minutes) comment section—can you give an example of a site?
pretty much any news site which has comments at all, even if those news sites use something like facebook, but especially if they use something like disqus. disqus in particular infamously has a problem with alt-righters and neo-nazis using it to recruit people, as shown by buzzfeed in 2018: How The Alt-Right Manipulates The Internet’s Biggest Commenting Platform
Do you think this adds enough above the source article, or should I edit the link to point to that directly?
XKCD's comic yesterday was related to this topic: https://xkcd.com/2159/