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July 26th, 2010
11:44 am - Comments on News
The comments on Guardian online news stories have become pretty dire. Someone suggested as visits to the Times website have dropped by 90% since they started charging, all the old fogies are reading the G to save a few pennies, and going into apoplexy.
Comments about news on the BBC site have always been moronic.
What I find depressing, on both sites, are the comments that just seem to be a trotting out of 'the sort of arguments that might be made' without any reference to the actual case. So, a story which quotes a gaffe made by a politician in a speech, will be met with 'Yawn, bbc extremism is so boring, why not stick to reporting the FACTS?' Which doesn't even make sense for that story. And why are about a third of all comments affectations of boredom?
This kind of thing annoys me much more than cogent arguments from the right. It's like nutrition-free fibre. No, it's like those cheap sweets that look like fried eggs: no aesthetic pleasure or substantive value.
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Any totally open forum that doesn't have moderation tends to fall apart.
If they allowed people to moderate responses (like, say, Hacker News or Slashdot do) then at least the worst of them would float to the bottom.
Similarly, threading them would allow people to have proper discussions, which a single comment thread can't do. I think both the bbc and Guardian are pretty heavily moderated, but they just take out racism and calls for violence and the like. They leave the crappy arguments intact. You can look for the most-favourited, but that can be pretty dispiriting on some threads.
Actually I was just thinking that I almost wish they would leave the nasty misogyny intact, the 'bitches asked for it' - so the world could see that this is the place that a certain section of the community is coming from.
Most depressing lately - the Guardian article on FGM, followed by the usual arguments about male circumcision. Why must this always happen? By user moderation I meant some kind of weighted voting system like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545452They do take out the really horribly comments, but what I want is to see people rewarded for posting thoughtful things and punished for posting stupid things. On the Daily Mail web site, the most-favourited comments are the loopiest I'd expect that over there though, because it's Daily Mail readers that are voting for them. Incidentally, in this as in so much else, I think lj design is among the best. Yup. Threaded comments with notifications make it possible to have actual near-real-time conversations. I've not seen any other comment system that's as good. I agree. Even other blogging comms don't seem to have the lj thread structure and it really does work. That's why I stick with LJ, even though it isn't growing, and lots of existing users seem to be drifting over to Dreamwidth. (I guess DW has the same model, though. Hmmm...) It seems unlikely that Times readers would defect to the Guardian when the Torygraph is free online too?
I think the truth is, there are plenty of idiots to go around... I guess, it just seems it has got worse lately |
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