Quote-only orphan comments: useful context or noisy clutter?
Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)
@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.
The Context
These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.
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Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.
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Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.
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Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.
If you complete:
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Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.
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Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.
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Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.
Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.
The Question
Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?
It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:
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Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.
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Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.
In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.
This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.
@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.
So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?
I appreciate them for drawing attention to the important parts of the article for a more focused discussion on the actual issue. Like, if a news story gets posted and I just want to talk about what happened - which is often what will be quoted - I'll usually use the comment.
I guess, at the end of the day, a lot of the time what gets quoted is what I would have quoted anyways. Having it already there takes the burden off and prevents a full thread of people quoting the same thing; if it originally has one, you're not so likely to go ahead and post the exact same quote. If anything, I think it can be thought of as a "necessary noise" to avoid the likely much larger flood of noise that would come without it.
Then again, I'm pretty new to this environment and am adapting to a non-hostile website, so I might be missing the vibe.
This makes sense and I agree. With any typical article there is the meat and the fluff. People generally only want to talk about the main point of the article which is usually the part quoted.
It also conveniently separates the discussion about that specific part quoted (where discussion goes under that comment) and discussion about other points. This structure would probably develop anyway so I don't see any issue with the OP posting a summary of what they think is the most relevant part.
Not every link is something that needs a discussion though, although I agree that it should be something you keep in mind while submitting.
Example: Not a directly apples-to-apples comparison, but here's a post I made in a recent megathread.
I'm not really looking to provide a commentary or discussion hook beyond the gist of the article. Rather, it's just an attempt to inform anyone moderately interested what the link is about if they wish to read further. Unless you're deeply interested in the war, this is the kind of analysis that's easy to never hear of, hence the share. The quotes are there to a) provide a summary and b) make it clear what kind of article this is -- not everyone wants to wade through paragraphs of military jargon.
There have been quite a few past discussions on this:
On including submitter's thoughts in link posts: The natural place to put article excerpts, summaries or the submitter's thoughts on the article is in the post itself - that's how posts work on most blogs and and other discussion sites. But on Tildes, link posts can't include text, and any text by the submitter is posted as a comment underneath. Here is an important comment by Deimos that explains why that is:
This is Deimos' view, so the site is unlikely to change. But I'm personally more interested in what the submitter says about a link than the link itself. There are many other places on the Internet where you can get a feed of daily links to click on. For me the value of Tildes is not in the links to external content, but the discussion by the users of the site.
I would like to encourage submitters to highlight the part of the article that was most interesting to them and post some thoughts about it to start the discussion. This makes it more likely that other people will comment in response and that the original poster will remain engaged in the discussion. The current design doesn't prevent this, but it also doesn't encourage it, so many posts end up just being links.
On article excerpts: There is a separate discussion about whether people should post article excerpts at all. Some tildezens feel that this discourages people from reading the article before commenting. This is true, but it ignores the fact that many more people read the discussion without commenting on it. For all those readers, an article summary would be very helpful to provide some background to the discussion without requiring the user to open external links.
Another reason for encouraging article excerpts (or even better, summaries) is that often it's hard to tell if a link is worth opening just from the title. For example, yesterday there was a post with a title Reforming the free software message. This is a topic I am interested in, but I have also read a lot on this subject over many years. There's nothing in the title to tell me "Is there actually something new here? Is it worth spending the time to read the full article?" I would prefer scrolling through a list of articles with short summaries (similar to Slashdot's front page) and clicking on the one that interests me rather than seeing a list of headlines with no additional information.
I would advocate for encouraging article summaries in link posts and including them in the post itself rather than as comments underneath.
So would I. But that would require Deimos to change the Tildes code - and he's a bit busy right now, and even in the longer term.
In the meantime, we Tildes users should be able to come up with a consistent way to treat these quote-only orphan comments, rather than giving them votes and labelling them as noise, which is somewhat contradictory.
First of all, excellent round-up, thank-you.
I don't think this necessarily refutes what Deimos is saying here? I agree, context quotes should be encouraged, but people can link poor context quotes, put random noise and poorly constructed arguments in them or otherwise devalue them. Being able to separate that from the post does have some utility. If a top level comment out-competes the context, it's often a really good comment or the context wasn't very useful.
I would like to see the article summaries and submitter's thoughts in link posts included on the front page, just like we do it for text topics. It you split them into a separate comment, then they are not part of the post and they don't show up on the front page.
I get that there is a worry that the submitter's summary or thoughts might be of poor quality and make people not upvote the post, but in that case somebody else can make a different post with a better take on the same article and get more votes on the front page. However, this is exactly what Deimos' was saying that he doesn't want.
I think the difference is whether you want the front page to be a collection of links, with people's thoughts about them relegated to the comment page, or you want the front page to be a collection of people's thoughts and commentary on articles, with the links being secondary. The first option is a link aggregator, the second option works more like a blog post aggregator. Tildes is obviously a link aggregator and I respect it for what it is.
I’m guilty of this, though I try to also include a sentence or two of my own with the quote. I think a quote comment is helpful: as a pointer for why the poster decided to share the article; to highlight the relevant point for discussion if the article makes several points; as a little TLDR to help people decide whether the article might be of interest to them (titles are not always great at this!); to kick off the discussion.
I can also see why people might see them as noise, but I think they’re useful enough that they should just be skipped over if unhelpful to you, rather than labeled and penalised to the bottom of the thread.
I didn’t say it saves people a click, I said it helps them decide whether to click. I also think it’s easy to read between the lines and figure out what the poster is saying with that quote - why they’ve made the choice to include this section over that one in a comment is usually as easy to see as if they’d written a few words about it
I think they’re useful for all the reasons others have stated but I think they lose functionality when they become orphaned and (depending on your sort order I think) can float around. If I read the article, then dive into the comments and only find the orphaned quote comment 10 comments later, it’s probably noise at that point.
I think it would be great if in Link + Text posts the text could still go where it normally does, instead of into a comment. But I don’t know if that is technologically possible.
It is technologically possible. The input form for posting topics, and display of topics, could easily be tweaked to permit posting a summary quote and having that quote appear in the main topic.
However, when @cfabbro and I discussed this, we acknowledged the reality that Deimos has a lot more important things on his plate right now than tweaking the input form for topics. Hence this post.
Also... it is possible, even with the current input form, for summary quotes to not become detached and float around. If you post a topic with a link and a summary, and put the URL and the quote into the Text field, then Tildes will treat that topic as a text topic, and will include all the material (URL and quote) in the main body of the topic.
But, that would require a huge education campaign and massive enforcement to achieve - and there would still be hold-outs, so we will still have these quote-only orphan comments to deal with.
Text posts with a markdown-formatted link at the top are a minor downgrade from link posts. Clicking on them on the front page goes to topic page, but maybe some people just wanted to follow the link? Also, Tildes doesn’t add metadata for the link and it won’t detect duplicates.
There are similar issues with posting a link as a comment in a megathread. It would be nice if these were indexed in the same way as top-level links.
It’s also a bit more work to write the Markdown. It’s become such a habit for me that I now do it accidentally on websites that don’t support Markdown, but learning to use the right parentheses without looking it up took some practice.
So I’m in favor of keeping the special link functionality and making it available in more places. Maybe you should be able to do it at the top of any top-level comment, or any comment?
See... I think this is the right approach.
If the poster is just quoting from the article, then that should be shown as part of the main body of the topic. It's not an opinion, it's just information about what's being posted.
If the poster wants to opine about the article, then they can make their own comment - kind of like what I did in this case. I posted the (hopefully) neutral discussion topic, and then added my own opinion in a separate comment.
But, at the moment, we're getting comments which consist solely of quotes from articles, which are being treated inconsistently by various users: 'Vote' versus 'Noise'.
I agree. This question is asking how readers should handle orphaned-quote-comments when the real answer is that they shouldn't be comments at all. Link+text posts should include both link and text in the main post body. The question shouldn't exist.
I'm certain Deimos has bigger things to deal with right now, but I think this is a good example of a case where it's really the design of the site that needs fixing, and not the community norms around content.
If there's consensus that this is the right way (I agree it is) I'm happy to have a stab at a PR.
Why not both? I think pulling a few quotes from the article can be helpful in deciding whether an article's worth reading, but once a discussion has emerged, the quote comment has probably outlived its usefulness (so it rightly belongs at the bottom of the thread).
If a few quotes can help generate some discussion, I don't see the harm in keeping them around. At any rate, I generally think providing a few quotes is better than providing no context at all.
My opinion is this quote-only orphan comments are useful, for the following reasons:
So, I’m subscribed to most of the publications that get posted here, so a paywall isn’t an issue for me. That being said, I’d imagine most people don’t—for those people, I’d imagine it’s helpful.
I do also think it might dissuade people from reading the actual article, which isn’t great. Perhaps just an archive link could be the answer there?
Previous discussion
I really like the article quote comments. I don’t really care if they are orphaned or built into the post, but I do appreciate them. Also, for people who don’t read the article anyways, they’ll at least have more context than the title when they inevitably decide to comment.
I am of course in favor of doing this, since I do it all the time and probably popularized it on Tildes?
One purely selfish reason for doing it is that Tildes has full-text search of your own comments from your profile page, which means that I have a way of finding a link to an old article that I remember posting here. This makes Tildes useful as a bookmarking site even though it’s not its primary purpose. I try not to post links that I think nobody will care about, but if it doesn’t generate discussion then that’s okay, it’s still archived.
From a more pro-social perspective, the person who starts a topic can act as the host of that topic, which I guess is officially called the OP in a bit of obscure Reddit jargon. You have very limited powers such as your comments looking different from other people’s, but that’s often enough to set the tone of the discussion, and I wrote more about how to do that in Tips on starting a good discussion topic.
It seems like starting a link topic isn’t that different? You’re still the OP and writing something to set the stage for discussion seems like a pro-social thing to do. Posting relevant quotes might help with that. The author of a text post could also be biased and we can always do better, but we generally assume people are well-meaning, and if you don’t like the framing, you can write a comment disagreeing or start discussions of your own.
Topics aren’t exclusive. Tildes does allow the same link to be posted twice, though you’ll probably get the “duplicate post” tag of shame. :) I hate it when I do that.
So maybe writing a link post should be just like writing a text post, but it has a link at the top and some special features for showing metadata about the link?
But I think the simplest change along the lines of helping the OP and avoiding confusion would be to make the auto-created post a stickied comment. I would even give the OP the ability to make more sticked comments. Maybe that’s going too far, we don’t want them to get drunk with power. :) But you can get your revenge by collapsing the comments or scrolling down.
I do tend to quote too much. If it’s not just me, some kind of character limit for quotes might be a good thing, but I don’t know how we would do that. Maybe a bit of JavaScript that counts quoted characters and shows a warning, like we have for reviving an old topic?
I also tend to write little else in a comment where I post some quotes because I want to be unbiased, or at least as unbiased as you can be when selectively quoting something. Also, it’s easier. But maybe if I did write more, it would be less likely to be seen as noise?
The problem is that, with the way Tildes works, those relevant quotes get separated out into an orphan comment that often gets buried halfway down the comment thread.
In my opinion, the format of topics needs to change so that any introductory material, such as quotes from the article, stays in the main body of the topic. However, we don't live in that reality.
Yep, not ideal. I was thinking about code changes, but your actual question was how to moderate them.
In my opinion, the context-less quote adds no value. People opening that topic and reading the thread can be assumed to have read the article before they read the comments. (If they haven't read the article, why are they diving into the comments?) Having one of those comments be just a quote from the article they've already read, is clutter.
I label these comments as 'Noise' whenever I see them.
I mostly agree, however, here are the cases I really appreciate them:
Edit: I also don't mind them being pre-collapsed unless there's discussion that spawned on them.
Your points 1&3 are why I think they should be allowed (the quotes).
On point 3, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been finding something incredibly interesting to be cut off by the paywall. Having the exert there means I can still understand the context of the discussion and possibly contribute
I also want to add that some articles/websites are just not friendly to mobile/desktop (either/or) and again, having an exert allows me to gain context if it’s just not loading coherently
You can’t always tell from a title whether the article is going to be interesting to you. Sometimes going in to the comments to see what’s being said/a small teaser paragraph is helpful for that! I wouldn’t consider it noise any more than I consider a movie trailer or an abstract from a journal paper to be noise
And, if that teaser paragraph is buried 5 comments down? Because comments don't stay where they're put: people vote on them, and label them, and they shift around the thread.
It’s not very difficult to scan the comments for one (although it’s definitely more helpful when it’s not buried at the bottom). I think the crux of this is that some people find them really useful and some don’t, and probably neither will change the others minds since it’s not so much an opinion thing but about the ways different people process and consume information. There won’t be a consensus, so it’s hard to see what the outcome could be here
Well, the issue was raised by a random user as confusing when they discovered, as I said, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels. That's a huge inconsistency, and @cfabbro and I hoped we might be able to discover a consensus.
Based on the feedback, we don't have consensus, but we do have a strong majority: people like these quote-only orphan comments.
So, maybe people like me will have to stop labelling them as 'Noise', if the majority of people don't see them as noise.
Maybe it sounded a bit snarky, if so I apologise. I didn’t mean “I don’t know why you’re bothering” more like you can’t please all of the people all of the time so it’s often hard to see a solution to something like this where everyone’s happy
I got your meaning and your intent. It's all good. :)
Glad to hear it!
Wish I could self label this comment as noise ;)
I really like summary comments, and for me selected quotes from the article is more than enough to be a good summary - they often help me decide whether to dive into a long read, or just act as a nice quick overview of an interesting topic I know I won’t have time to go deeper into. I read and vote for that kind of comment on at least 5x the number of articles I’d have time to read in full, and probably 10x or more the number I end up commenting on.
My point is that I happily can and do go looking for them - but admittedly as much because they’re useful to me as a reader as because they’re conducive to me being an active participant here. That’s also coming from a place of considering a 20 comment thread fairly large on this site, so how much I’ll still go digging if the activity level stays up is an open question right now.
I see where you’re coming from, but to me it’s honestly a little optimistic.
First, there are legitimate reasons to read a thread before its link. Chief among them is the very comments we’re discussing — if one is present, I can likely grok the important facets of the article in question faster, without having to potentially dig through things I don’t care about in the full article, such as ads or filler.
Second, I think we’re just going to have to live with some folks not reading the article before the thread, regardless of utility. Sometimes people are lazy, or don’t feel particularly invested in a topic, or maybe just don’t want to head off-site at the time. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, nor do I think there’s any realistic way to stop it. I’ve certainly done my fair share of this, and when I do, the quote comments are very helpful.
To me, the main concern with these comments is a question of ethics; namely, they risk lowering views for content in question, and therefore potentially reducing the creator’s revenue. I believe this was discussed here before, but I don’t remember if a solid conclusion was reached, and I certainly don’t have one.
How can we reasonably expect people who haven't read the article to discuss the contents of that article?
New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On
Is that really the sort of behaviour we want to encourage on Tildes?
That's true.
However, it's indicative of the behaviour on these forums - that people will jump to reacting to an article without reading it. Anecdotally, I have seen people on Reddit admit that they didn't read the article before diving into the comments discussing that article.
Don't get too caught up by the terms "voting" and "commenting". I consider them both to be examples of "reacting", which is why I think that article is relevant here.
I'm new here myself, so take this with a big ol' heap of salt, but this kind of comment was specifically called out as coming across a bit hostile for the tastes of Tildes. And regardless of the "formatting", I feel like this comment got a bit unfriendly.
I think sometimes tone gets lost in text and different people end up reading it differently. I didn't read your previous comment as hostile at all, if that helps.
I don't particularly want to encourage it, nor do I see it as a good thing per se. My argument is more along the lines that we can't realistically prevent it, and so our best option is to find ways to work with / around it. (That, and there are still good reasons to want to discuss but not read. Some folks have limited energy, for example; the article you linked even mentions cognitive fatigue.)
It's worth remembering that not all articles will require a full read for quality discussion. Some topics can be brought up and discussed just by virtue of their being related to the title alone. There's a million directions a thread can take, and many more of them open up when we have context comments (quote-only or otherwise) available for users to read, whatever their reason for not reading the article yet may be.
I imagine too that a large chunk of the reason why people might read only the title would be because of implicit trust, which would make it a lot safer of a bet on a site like Tildes. They trust that a) the user posting it is doing so in good faith and believes what they are posting and the title they gave it have value, and b) that if that's not the case, someone else who does read articles is likely to catch it, simply as a matter of reader volume.
That's risky in the case of something like Reddit which has a large noise-to-signal ratio and plenty of bad actors, but in the case of Tildes, I don't think it's so bad. I would feel safe, for example, taking the article you linked at face-value by default; I read it out of respect since you took the time to post it, but even if I hadn't I would've trusted the conclusion, as I trust you and don't believe you would link something like that if it had no value.
I never click on the article on my phone because most websites are ad-filled hellscapes. So I appreciate having a blurb/tldr to give me an idea of what it's about, especially with the click-bait titles
I almost never read an article if it's from a post with no comments (unless it's a rare article that appeals to me based just on the headline or something about the post). Headlines are frequently manipulative or at least don't succeed in telling me what the article is like, and the wider internet is a horrible place, full of tracking code, ads, bloated layouts, etc. So I look to the comments to help decide if I want to read it or not. A summary from the person posting it, including why they were interested in it, is far more useful than a quotation, but a few paragraphs from the article is better than nothing.
I find them to be antithetical to the spirit of Tildes. We want users to read the article in question and discuss the contents of the entire article. I think quotes taken out of context of the entire article without any descriptive commentary from the OP will enable users to skip the article and just discuss the highlighted quotes.
They also don't really provide any insight as to why the OP thinks the article is relevant to discuss. I think the onus is on the OP when sharing a link to start the discussion, and throwing in a few quotes from the article is a lazy way to do that.
I think it should be left exactly as it is.
After reading all the current comments and thinking of my own reading habits, I find that I often don't want to leave the site to read an article unless the title REALLY pops out at me, but that a quote, orphan or not, can give me a little additional context (obviously framed by the poster's choice of quote) on if I want to read the article or not.
That said, the benefits of having the quote orphaned are great, as they don't force pair the quote with the post for voting purposes, and allow that quote to be relegated if the discussion that arises no longer finds it relevant. The community can decide if the quote is noise or not. It could also be an incredible provocative quote that generates tons of great discussion.
So, leave it as it is - it's working fine IMHO.
I've been on Tildes, I dunno, maybe a year. I've always found it odd when sites like Tildes don't let the link sharer provide a summary of the link. I think it should be a first-class citizen in the UI elements. Title, link, summary; and then the second class citizens, the comments, below that. The summary from the very link sharer is not on the same level as a response/reaction comment from everyone else, in my mind.
The way it is now, the OP's summary comment often gets buried under other comments, often when I don't think it deserves to be.
The issue with allowing that is then the submitting user’s summary/commentary is merged with the link itself in everyone’s mind. So what if the link is still worthy of a vote, and worth sharing/discussing/reading, but the submission statement isn’t? That’s why they have been separated like they are here, so the OPs comment on the submission can be judged on its own merits and not get entangled with the merits of the submitted link itself. And it was also intended to help prevent soapboxing.
In that case, I would allow site admins to split off and demote such "unworthy" text blobs to become comments. i.e. let's have both, using one or the other where appropriate.
A lot of the time when I post a link, I want to provide key snippets from the posted thing, as a service to other users to help them save time, or help them decide whether they would get value from clicking through. On another site, I do that. On Tildes, I just don't summarize at all, because I don't want the summary to be a comment. I often would not be "commenting" on anything at all (not sharing my own thoughts or opinions) by way of the summary. (Though I might still contribute to any ensuing discussion.)
Yeah, having more of a hybrid approach, where people can choose to include the summary as part of the link topic and have it be up at the top, and if they abuse that then deal with it on a case by case basis (e.g. moving the summary to a comment, or removing their ability to post summaries), is certainly a possibility. And not one I would be opposed to either.
I can see arguments for how these excerpts might encourage reading the article by hooking interest, or discourage it by allowing readers to get a gist without investing further time. I used to mark them as noise in the early days, but eventually decided they served some role, even if it's not a perfect one.
However, I think this question also extends to the use of automatic summarization tools. They've improved greatly in the last year or so due to the advent of the transformer and LLMs.
Rather than asking submitters to extract a key paragraph or two, a bot that does this for you would reduce friction to submitting, and remove potential bias on the part of the submitter. It would also produce a more consistent-sounding extract, as it's not tying together multiple paragraphs to try to represent the whole.
If the summary is wrong or misleading, a moderation tool could be available to remove it. Possibly a "good summary" or "bad summary" vote link for regular users, with automatic removal at a certain threshold.
This is all considerable work, of course. The good news is that LLMs are quickly becoming accessible on consumer hardware, so it could theoretically run locally rather than requiring integration into a third-party service.
Additionally, this does tie into another recent suggestion: automatic tag generation. Since you're already using a tool to extract the "essence" of an article, then extracted tags could be cross-referenced with the known tag database to help submitters by suggesting possible candidates to tag their articles with.
Again, I don't know if this is a good idea for the overall direction of the site, but I greatly prefer an automated approach to one that requires submitters to fill in extra fields when sharing content.
But the poster is then conceding the framing of the discussion to the bot. For something that is going to inherently be the first word on the topic, wouldn't we want the poster to take the time to say something themselves?
I think that's okay. We concede the framing in other ways, such as using the original title in most instances. And oftentimes, unfortunately, that's all that users are going off when replying.
I'm mostly coming at this from the perspective of reducing friction on the part of the submitter. I wonder if @skybrian, for example, would be happy to not have to make his own excerpts when submitting.
Arguably, does this not free the submitter up to share just their own thoughts, without also feeling the need to contextualize them first?
I also want to mention that there's no need for such a summary to be "in your face". It could simply be in an expando under the title:
[Generated Summary >]Just a thought!
I would be in favor of an automatic summary provided that the OP can edit it if it’s wrong. I would like to see the title automatically filled in too, provided that you can then edit it.
Google+ (RIP) would automatically generate a pull quote, often with an image, whenever you posted a link there. This was usually quite nice, but it would often get the quote or image wrong (in my opinion), and then I would delete it and post a better quote myself. That’s how I got in the habit of posting quotes.
I know that not everyone is on board with that; in my opinion they can find somewhere else to be. Tildes isn't going to be all things to all people. If they don't want to have thoughtful discussions, what are they doing here?
Could it be made so that the comment always shows at the top regardless of votes/labels, but still gets collapsed if it gets labeled as noise?
Sometimes that comment is required context and it's buried in a sea of comments. It would be nice to see it by default, and if I see it's collapsed I'll know it's not important.
I like this compromise. Easy to find (at the top), and if it’s collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels, well you get a bit of a fair warning before opening.
This does make the most sense for me. If there was a "pinned to top" comment feature then the site in the background can just automagically pin that comment. In addition, if the need arises, an admin or moderator could pin comments on their own as well.
I don’t particularly care if they aren’t voted on honestly, but marking as noise is hostile and unnecessary. When I post a quote only comment it’s generally because I find the article difficult to summarize or I just want to include a stinger to encourage people to click on it. If a discussion starts that’s more valuable than my quote the discussion will naturally rise above and push the comment down on the sort and that’s fine. But it’s not noise in that case, it has simply either served its purpose (convinced enough people to click through and read the article) or had its purpose fulfilled through other means and been rendered unnecessary (someone else prompted a discussion that encourages people to read the article).
Therefore, I think the system as is works fine and there’s no reason to mark these as noise. If the quote doesn’t get overtaken in the sort naturally then clearly people found it valuable for highlighting something important or prompting them to click through. There’s no reason to try to put fingers on the scale then.
I mean, ideally it wouldn't be needed but maybe we should consider an 'un-noise' label?
I find them to be noise, and I feel they're unhelpful because they skew discussion to a particular framing of an article.
The UK currently has a mostly terrible print media (the Metro, the Independent, and the Financial Times are about the only exceptions) and so people have to be really careful with quoting to get a fair and accurate summary of the situation. (Not just a summary of what the paper says is happening).
I don't vote them up, but I also don't think I label them either.
I think the people posting them need to add more context - why is that interesting enough to you to post it?
I used to enjoy summaries when they were available, especially for paywall sites. For some paywalled articles, the summaries would be sufficient and I could take part in the conversation, and for many articles I would be up on the news from non-paywall sources and could converse anyways. However, they were not consistently added and often "noise"d so I opted to just filter things with the
paywalltag instead of trying to make them work for me (and to be clear, I could certainly use an archive for them if I chose to; I don't need instructions on that).For some articles, I check the comments to see if there's a reason to make me read the article, and a summary is helpful for that as well. There are thousands of articles about that current political news thing that's happening; why should I read this specific one? A quote or reference can help make the case that there's something in the article that makes it worthwhile.
I think the answer is situational and will always be at the mercy of context. Thankfully we already have appropriate tools for moderating these things and plenty of minds capable of using them.
To me, a minor issue is that the Noise label feels extreme for a comment that can be assumed to have been made in good faith, such as those being discussed here. Perhaps something as simple as a hint as to what each label is intended for in the expanded Label dialog would suffice, so as to nudge the user that Noise may also be used for redundancy, or a separate label entirely.
I don't see what the issue is.
If the quote is that useless, disagreeable, or whatever then it can be labeled noise by users on a case-by-case basis.
My bias being that I'm not as interested as others are in Tildes being this ultra-curated space.
I wonder if this could be resolved by the site including the text content as part of the post, below where it shows the scraped info, instead of as a separate comment. Maybe in the case that the content is just a quote, it could be put into a collapsed details block? Just a thought.
I just addressed this in another comment here.