There is crap in every comments feed everywhere. There is crap on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube.
If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.
I don't think I disagree with any of that. But if you're implicitly arguing that more of the GP would be just fine for HN, then I do have to disagree.
Moderation comments are an unfortunate evil. To some extent they do the very things we're scolding others for. I don't feel very good about that and I'd love to find a better way—especially because they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Unfortunately, the system doesn't regulate itself with community and software mechanisms alone. There needs to be a moderation mechanism as well, i.e. humans who are giving the system their primary attention and giving feedback to it. I'd never claim that the way we do it is the only way or the best way, just that it's better than nothing.
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
maybe the problem isn't comment moderation, but rather the expectation that anyone should be able to "control" the dissemination of human thought through mediums like the internet?
the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance they stand in the future.
> Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.
> What are the downsides?
Unless you're a professional moderator that is paid for your moderation... time.
The primary thing we have a finite amount of....
No blogger with a blog post of substantial views is well served by a system that requires any moderation on their part at all.
Link to a thoughtful and dedicated moderation platform and let that community decide if your thoughts are worthy of sharing and discussing.
Saves everyone time.
Here's a thought that just struck me, let me try it out:
By not having a comment section you reduce your blogs filter bubble, because without knowing how people feel about your writing your blog post simply becomes a single entry in the aggregate "wisdom of crowds", once you engage a comment section you begin to locally meta cognate on what people think of your position and you end up with less original and diverse thought for the dedicated aggregators to surface.
I can't imagine not having comments on my blog. With no comments it's basically just a diary. You can track pageviews, but you never know if anyone actually read or learned anything from your post. You have no idea if anyone cares.
I have comments on my blog. I'd never consider removing them for all but the most touchy of subjects. Yes, sometimes people say things I don't agree with. Welcome to the real world.
I do moderate my comments (100% pre-moderated, because I hate captcha and yet also hate spam) but I don't get enough comments to actually make that a burden. I also don't moderate out anything that's not pure obvious spam (though to be fair, my posts don't usually cover anything terribly controversial either).
You're right, of course, but the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation comments and unfortunately my job involves posting them. They're a necessary evil, in the same way that some medicines are toxic: one uses them when the alternative is worse.
If it helps at all, such comments are even more tedious to write than to read.
This was more or less solved with the deanonimisation of users and/or karma systems. When we have skin in the game the comments are more useful. I am not in favor of that all the times, it has tradeoffs, I very much prefer moderation, although it is not an easy job.
For some websites I like reading comment sections too.
Perhaps a good moderation strategy would be to have a minimum length rule for each comment? It would not prevent spammers and bots, however putting those aside only people who want to deliver a thought-out message would participate. Not saying there wouldn't be controversial messages though.
We have software to detach the comments and do mechanical things like that, but finding ways to vary the message about civility seems important to me, so I force myself to do those by hand. Sometimes I throw in variations to counter tedium, even with the idea that it might have entertainment value... though that is dangerously easy to overdo.
There's a design point here too. After two years, these comments have shown themselves to be partly formulaic and the sort of thing that could benefit from software support. I'd like that software support to be something available to users, not just moderators. If there were a way for users to convey to each other that a comment could be edited to better follow the guidelines, that'd be great, because we (actually just I in this respect, since I'm the only one currently posting moderation comments) would no longer be the bottleneck. The long-term vision for HN is to make it a self-regulating system.
It's true that such moderation comments break some of the same rules they're advocating. But this a necessary evil, for the same reason that many medicines are toxic. If it's any comfort to you, I can tell you after writing 20,000 of them that they are more tedious to write than to read.
Interpretations differ, but mine is that the comment is unsubstantive because it is in equal parts obvious and dismissive. This is the sort of thing whose general purpose is to make the writer, and some readers, get a cheap hit of smart-feeling, while alienating the frankly more valuable part of the audience.
You're right, though, that it really wasn't that bad a case, especially relative to other top comments in this thread. I wouldn't have singled it out except that it was the first one posted.
If you're doing anything vaguely resembling moderation, or have some sort of reputation to maintain, then every on-line comment comes with costs & benefits.
Fairly sparse comments on fairly-routine stories are generally a good thing. Occasional commenters may add details to the story, and a few random comments can at least look good.
Vs. reams of posting-in-anger comments on some hot-button story? Huge cost, and minimal-at-best potential upside. Let 'em scream on someone else's site.
(I'm an admin; sorry that wasn't clear.) It's true that those comments are annoying. They're even more annoying to write than they are to read. But we don't know a better way to semi-preserve the quality of the forum. I wish we did.
reply