Writer: Internet Comments Belong On Personal Blogs, Not News Sites 299
sixoh1 writes: Nicholas Jackson at Pacific Standard suggests that internet comments are permanently broken (in response to an issue Jezebel is having with violent misogynist GIFs and other inappropriate commentary). He argues that blogs are a good-enough solution to commentary and dialog across the internet. "They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly."
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience. It seems unlikely that using only blogs for responsive dialog with authors and peers could come close to matching the feedback and community feel of comments such as we see here. Is there a technical solution, or is this a biological problem imposed on the internet?
This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience. It seems unlikely that using only blogs for responsive dialog with authors and peers could come close to matching the feedback and community feel of comments such as we see here. Is there a technical solution, or is this a biological problem imposed on the internet?
Re:gotse (Score:2, Insightful)
A good troll is better than a bad human.
Don't allow jpg or gif or ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether you agree with the politics of a particular site or not, the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics.
If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?
Imagine /. with goatse images.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the latest events on Jezebel proves the point of many of Jezebel's authors, which is that much of the internet is openly hostile to women. Jezebel is an awesome blog and has fantastic stories about the crap that women have to put up with in this country and around the world every single day. They call out misogyny on the internet, and are promptly spammed with rape gifs. They aren't the problem at all; it's the jerks who posted the gifs who are the problem, so yes, their example is a perfect example.
As for "militant", I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup. As soon as I saw "Jezebel" I knew what was up, and I knew that they brought it upon themselves. I also knew that they love it, because they get to play the victim card while spewing their hateful misandrist shit.
Re:Don't allow jpg or gif or ... (Score:5, Insightful)
the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics.
Except in the case of Jezebel, they WANT the misogynist graphics. Very few news sites allow graphics in the comments. Jezebel allows it specifically to keep their readers riled up, and to justify their existence.
The way to have a good comment section is right in front of you: A moderation system, like Slashdot has. It isn't perfect, but good comments (like this one) tend to bubble to the top more often than not, and the filth goes to -1.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the irony in your use of stereotypes to exert power
Re:Jezebel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot, as a site, has been known to pander to fairly extreme, militantly fanboyist views, while trashtalking and flaming any counterpoints or opposition.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh please, put your mangina back in your bloomers and explain this shit to me: http://jezebel.com/294383/have... [jezebel.com]
Muh soggy knees!
No, internet is openly hostile period (Score:5, Insightful)
much of the internet is openly hostile to women.
You (and they) are making this out to be something related to women when in fact it's far more simple.
ANY subject brings in trolls, and the more easily trolled the subject is the worse the trolls will be. Jezebel is not seeing anything different than any other place on the internet does that has people who issue strong opinions. They just have much suckier automated blocking techniques, algorithms for first time users and moderation tools period.
irony ahoy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jezebel? (Score:3, Insightful)
All varieties of feminism without exception are based on patriarchy theory, which holds men as the eternal oppressors and women as the forever oppressed. No amount of twisting or turning or excuses or circular logic will ever change that fact, which is why feminism uniformly wreaks havoc on men, women and children when feminists try to apply it to the real world. It's flat out wrong. So wrong a child clutching crayons could see how wrong it is. Feminism is the embodiment of the phrase "it takes brains to be this stupid". The nearest thing to equity feminists would be the likes of Paglia and Sommers, who merely use it as a flag of convenience as far as I can see, which I'd expect them to drop before too long.
Call yourself a humanitarian or something that doesn't have any ideological millstones attached instead, would be my advice.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Much of the internet is openly hostile, period. That has nothing to do with women, beyond the fact that Jezebel panders to a certain type of mock-indignation-queen so the trolls serve up relevantly offensive volleys of crap.
Jezebel is an awesome blog and has fantastic stories about the crap that women have to put up with in this country and around the world every single day.
Jezebel is a misandristic rag that pays the bills by targeting a niche demographic, no different than any other specialized news aggregation site out there. They get a pass on shit that would get modded into oblivion, or outright get the poster banned, on most other websites because patriarchy, grar!
Note that I don't specifically hold that against them (though not my cup of tea, personally). Slashdot does the same pandering to geeks, with attitudes toward certain areas of established law that sound borderline insurrectionist. Metafilter does the same with taking the progressive liberal stance to such an absurdity it almost bends around and becomes a parody of itself. 4chan... Well, let's just not go there. And Reddit has pretty much cornered the market on having subreddits that allow them to both pander to and offend every group all at the same time.
All that just pays the bills, nothing more, nothing less.
Welcome to the internet, ladies. People here don't play nice, your university's PC police have no power here, and you can't do a goddamned thing about it. Adapt or leave, simple as that.
News websites vs. Aggregators vs. Blogs (Score:4, Insightful)
disclaimer : I was an admin for fark.com.
The problem as I see it is that news sites started adding the ability for user comments to try to make their websites more 'sticky'. They wanted people to keep coming back ... but the ones that do are the trolls.
Unless you've modeled your whole site around people commenting, and build up a community, you don't tend to get useful comments -- you either get trolls, people advertising 'work at home', or someone with a follow question about the article that no one every responds to. Once in a while you might get some actually useful information from the general public, the 'I was there' accounts and such ... but it's few and far between.
(note, I'm not commenting on how Fark handles things ... most of their measures were implemented after I left, and I only know some of it; my experience comes with managing other websites)
Allowing anonymous posting that immediately gets shown to the public is just plain stupid. It's begging for trolls. At least with accounts you can monitor the new users, as in most cases you either have the throw-away account (which might have been registered months ago, specifically for use later), or the person who's just constantly obnoxious.
If I ever set up another website, I'm going to the model of 'invitations' where you have to know someone already in the community to get an invite -- because then if we get someone being an ass, we can suspend their friends' accounts, too (giving them some external pressure to not be a dick), or prune the whole tree of accounts if that doesn't help.
So, anyway, my basic categories:
There are some successful hybrids out there ... but if you're going to allow comments, you have to know how to handle them ... and I don't want to say too much, because I don't want to give the trolls info on how to bypass some of the more interesting systems I've seen.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting idea about how the victims are to blame. I spose it's pragmatic advice. Still kind of comes off as douchey. I disagree. I think people, bullies especially, but even dickhead assholes like yourself need to learn manners. Shoving someone and calling someone a name is unacceptable in the real world. That's assault. And yet that type of shit is perfectly acceptable in elementary school. Why is that?
Empathy yada yade bullshit bullshit. People have no fucking empathy. At least be fucking polite. Is that too much to ask for? Sigh... One of these days I'm going to have to give a lethal lesson in manners.
Re:Don't allow jpg or gif or ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether you agree with the politics of a particular site or not, the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics. If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?
People like posting funny animated GIFs in the comments. Losing that capability hurts the users. But image-posting isn't the problem.
The real problem on Jezebel (as described in its article but strangely ignored in the NY Mag article and the Slashdot summary) is that Gawker/Kinja allows anyone to create a burner account and post comments, but there's no IP logging or blocking. There is literally no way to block an abusive user from commenting short of manually banning each new burner account after it posts. This is supposedly to allow anonymous "tipsters" to provide information. As a practical matter, it means the Jezebel editors are having to wade through 4chan-style images on a daily basis to keep a clean comment section. Would you like it if your job forced you to look at 4chan? No, you would not. Hence their complaint.
Re:Moderation? (Score:4, Insightful)
A website without comment section is basically a propaganda machine, telling people what to see and think. A website that's all comments - like Slashdot and yes, even 4chan - is a community discussing matters. Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle,
Not everything that mixes two extremes ends up in the middle.
People were capable of having informed opinions before the Internet, when newspapers was all we had. You simply had to read more than one and make up your own mind. It also heavily depends on the topic. Don't forget that /. is not a general news site - many of us here are actually experts in the topics being discussed, and when you post an article about, say, a new encryption scheme and you get comments from people who are in security, hacking or even cryptography itself, that's worthwhile.
What do you expect from an article about the Ukraine crisis on a general news site? How many of the readers could even find Ukraine on an un-labeled map? How many have been there? How many know anything at all about the political and economic situation, if you substract what they read in other news articles?
No, sir, the comments section on /. and on some news site are not comparable, and mixing them does not result in a "best of both worlds" scenario.