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?
Comments Belong With the News (Score:5, Interesting)
I enjoy comments on mainstream news sites. To me, at least, random public sentiment is at least as important as the sanitized news version, if not more so. Public opinion is a lot more likely to affect me, and provides a better indication of what I'm more likely to face in "reality" than what the news writers provide. Does people's anonymous behavior suck sometimes? Yes. But is it more honest? Absolutely. On any given topic, maybe one in four people secretly agrees with the worst of the worst trolls, and it pays to be away that other people around you actually do think/feel that way, even if it seems foreign and alien.
I read the news to prepare for life. Other people (even terrible trolls) exist in real life. I value learning their opinions, even if only to prepare myself for dealing with them.
It sucks that people can be offensive, but... hiding it doesn't help anyone.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:5, Interesting)
What it proves is that there are people that find enjoyment in pushing other people's buttons. It has very little to do with hating women and much more to do with entertainment.
There are of course some people out there who do actually hate women, and they may be involved in this as well, but I very much doubt it is anything but a minority.
Re:Moderation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? Because while there's certainly a lot of views I don't agree with, I see little if any trolling at +2.
Nor do you, nor the restaurant, want PETA to hold a "meat is murder" demonstration outside. And it's all too easy to use anti-flasher policies to squash a protest that, whether you agree or disagree with it, is legitimate. And while a privately run website certainly has the right to disable comments, we should not forget that this results in it turning into an echo chamber where no dissenting voices are heard. People love to spend their time in such echo chambers, getting endless reinforcement for their identities and no challenges. The problem is that they get to vote in the real world, and will likely do so according to the fantasy world.
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, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with. On the other hand, a comment challenging your most dearly held beliefs can pop up anywhere.
User moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
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 bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem [polygon.com]. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.
The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.
If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse [discourse.org], but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.
Re:Jezebel? (Score:2, Interesting)
What it proves is that there are people that find enjoyment in pushing other people's buttons. It has very little to do with hating women and much more to do with entertainment.
There are of course some people out there who do actually hate women, and they may be involved in this as well, but I very much doubt it is anything but a minority.
In real life they are most certainly a small minority, but on the Internet the failed and frustrated people get an outlet that let's them become a so vocal minority that they dominate many forums. One online newspaper I read about had done research on their comment section and "hate" posts and found that thousands of posts came from something like 30 nicks, that came from 5 consumer ISP IP adresses. So in this case just a handful of very angry, very frustrated people with a ton of time on their hands, generated thousands of hate posts on this single newspapers online forum and completely dominated.
Re:Don't allow jpg or gif or ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Solution, adjust the moderation system so users can filter out +5 Funny, and only see +5 Insighful/Informative/Interesting.
I'd say completely remove the Funny option, but human nature is that moderators will just moderate humorous comments as something else instead.
Re:Don't allow jpg or gif or ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Banning images isn't the problem. Why do you think /. has a lame-ass "lameness" filter? Because people were posting ASCII porn.
i.e.
8====> or whatever the penis bird crap was back then.
As another user pointed out, the ability to FILTER and MODERATE allows the community to self-police itself. You can post offensive stuff _solely_ with text using words. The "classics" are the N, C, or F words. i.e. http://southpark.cc.com/clips/... [cc.com]
Sites that only allow upvotes are retarded as they don't give people the option to filter out the "noise".
A _good_ site allows people to upvote the signal and downvote the noise
Re:Jezebel? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
A very, very loud minority of people is openly hostile to women/gays/atheists/muslims/mexicans/elderly/children/redheads/any-minority-of-your-choice.
The Internet as a whole - much like the real world - is openly hostile to extremists who act like dicks and think everyone who is less extreme than they are is pure evil, even if you're agreeing with them in principle. That's why feminazis get rape gifs (I'm not surprised) while thousands of other women don't - because trolls do to you what they know sets you off.
I'm not saying women don't get offensive comments. They do. But firstly so do men (of a different kind, physical violence takes the place of sexual innuendo) and secondly the problem isn't hostility to women, the problem is trolling. It just happens that for women the low hanging fruit for the trolls is their sex, just like race is if the victim is black.