"Carefully handle your "troublemakers". They're both the bane and life of your site."

In other words, it's often your outspoken (and sometime inappropriate) members that are driving the most interesting discussion. I see this on Facebook quite a lot (I moderate a very large group) where the people who are often stirring up trouble in one thread are also generating a very lively discussion in another.

It's hard drawing the line sometimes between what seems like a vehement disagreement in opinion and insulting of someone else, and a tap on their shoulder to "hey, just keep in line please" can either set them off, or defuse the situtation.

But either way, it is difficult. Too heavy-handed in moderation and you drive them off the site, leaving a lot of silent people sitting around with little discussion, and therefor, little reason to stay. Too little moderation and your comments and threads become a cesspool, eliminating any beneficial conversation and catering to the lowest common denominator.

I don't blame Vice for finding this difficult, and really, I'm not sure I'd prescribe a solution for them. I agree with them in the sense that it comes down to their resources and best use of their time, and given that they produce their own content (and not reliant on their members to do it as in other social forums) then it may be better to dispense with them altogether.

But dispensing with a forum is a sort of "scorched earth" policy of eliminating an out of control board, a "nuclear option" when you're just finished with it all. It'll provide some relief, but they lose at the chance of growing something better in the end.

I disagree. I'll admit that I haven't done any kind of exhaustive analysis, but every now and then I'll click on the profile of an obvious troll on HN or Reddit. 9/10 times they are consistently trolling and contributing nothing to the community.

Trolls are a bit like political extremists: if they weren't here, you wouldn't talk about the ugly stuff so much and make sure it's kept in check.

Why not leave community management to the experts? For example, the dialogue here on HN--which is a well-managed community--will be way more substantive and productive than it would have been on Vice's site.

What percentage of "articles" on the web are valuable enough to be published on their own? One percent? Less? Most sites, including HN, I visit because of the comment sections. Many times the comments are the most insightful part of my interaction.

And it was great! People took time to formulate arguments or counterpoints (this didn't guarantee they were correct or even sensible) in a long form that actually contributed to the discussion.

If you want to troll people in response to a post, it meant you had to do it on your own website!

I hope we go back to this. It's dirt cheap now to get a wordpress blog or similar. I wish wordpress came with comments disabled by default and all that pingback and RSS stuff would get more attention. It was a much more interesting time to read on the web.

http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention is the one you're looking for.

Many sites seem to be turning toward a manual moderation model now. This doesn't seem too whacky as a next step for many of them.

[0] http://dish.andrewsullivan.com

Coates had a very well-policed comments section, which for several years attracted some high-quality comments and really excellent exchanges - the equal of anything here on HN within its chosen domain (essentially, race and history). Coates is black, of course, so there was a lot of moderation needed. It proved unsustainable and his posts don't have comments any more.

This retrospective article sums up the trajectory of a lot of high-quality comments sections, like Sullivan's and Coates': http://blog.longreads.com/2015/02/04/its-yours-a-short-histo...

Basically, it needs organic growth and a lot of personal attention. And it seems to have a finite lifetime.

Your editorial email address will be swamped for a while until people get bored with the lack of near-realtime debate.

"...our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more reporting than attempting to police a comments section...".

That's why you appoint trusted moderators. Anyway, your 'resources' are now going to be split between processing email, visiting Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...

We'll see.

You're making the assumption that people want this.

They don't.

16 people post the same comment 45 seconds after the article goes online (without reading it properly).

8 people post more thoughtful but identical comments 15 minutes later.

I wake up 16 hours after the article goes online and post my tuppence worth into a rely to whatever is at the top. (without bothering to read the other 362 comments).

[Updated to fix rubbish formatting]

> You're making the assumption that people want this.

That might actually be a useful filter. The people out to cause trouble who seem to get off on the reaction to poor comments are more likely to be put off by the lack of immediacy than those who are more interested in a proper debate and take their time writing something well thought out and coherent.

They are, but only for you. They're still options for the author and everyone who hasn't opted out. That's what opting out means - your choice not to use a communication tool only affects you. The impact of your choice will be that you can't discuss something with the article's author directly.

If the editorial email address is swamped then they'll close it, or make it harder to find. That's all.

Made me consider a shared (fake) facebook account - one that would be used just for such interactions, shared among folks that are averse to creating an account themselves. Sharing the username-password combo itself would soon lend itself to trollish password reset attempts though, so perhaps there could be a service that accepts email and makes facebook posts on your behalf using its own account. The email format could be something like:

    Type: Wall post [or "comment" or "private message"]
    Page Url: <Vice's page>
    Content: First!

Perhaps a weekend project for someone with this itch to scratch.

For example, no SaaS startup should be writing their own payment system unless they're a fintech startup doing payments. If you're wasting time building things that you buy in for much lower cost then you will fail.

Vice seem to have correctly identified that the quality of that discussion (and the branding) was not adding much to their content. Thumbs up for trying something different.

It's interesting commenting about the quality of comments on a site that is nothing but. Maybe Hacker News, etc. is the future, although I'd like to think that on-site and off-site comments can co-exist (and for 'off-site' read twitter, facebook, etc.) The problem with all the off-site options is that you have to know they exist. At least on-site comments provide a fixed, available 'place' for discussion to take place.

I have a feeling the solution is just better moderated comments sections. Many sites just chuck up a form and auto-publish anything entered into it; that might work at really small scale, but soon descends into chaos once a critical mass is reached. One day, I think, more comment sections will looks like mini-HNs.

That one wouldn't be actually bad if people stuck to good solutions in terms of usability. I mean, half of the forum boards on the Internet would be an order of magnitude better if the owners started them as a subreddit instead.

I think there's a place for both, but the Reddit-style boards make every discussion ephemeral. No matter how interesting the topic or diverse the discussion, it's gone and forgotten in 2 days at most. On old-school boards, a major thread of discussion can last for months, or longer. Plus there's something to be said for a chronological presentation of posts. Yeah, trolls get more exposure, but it also means everyone sees every view (up to whatever the moderation policy of the site is), so you don't get the Reddit hivemind effect nearly as much.

Now, given the decline in quality recently, one can only hope VICE employs the moderation tactic to their own articles too...

User-generated commentary can be done right. it can be done in a way that minimizes trolls.

"I think that our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more reporting than attempting to police a comments section in the hopes of marginally increasing the number of useful comments."

I tend to worry, though, that what people label as trolling ranges from the idiots who spam bigoted nonsense to anyone who doesn't believe what the moderator does. I think it's better to moderate only incivility, bigotry and the like, as bans on "trolling" appear to have morphed into bans on dissent at some point, possibly due to some corollary of Poe's Law, even though what used to be labelled as trolling is still just as present and obnoxious.

I say that as someone who moderated quite a lot of different forums and who has banned all manner of spammers, flamers, etc., but I'd never ban someone for expressing, in a civil manner, why they did not agree with me and I've been left feeling in the minority in that regard.

A direct insult is easier to enforce.

The reason trolling succeeds is that it is extremely easy to induce powerful cognitive dissonance into people with strongly held unprovable beliefs. (Human life has value, god exist, humans are equal and the likes) And the only answer is aggression. The right are as easy pray as the left - mostly because there are large logical holes in any ideology.

That is because we use some axioms when we build our social order - but any attack on the axioms leave us unsecure and that the virtual tribe is under attack.

The more a person has allowed himself to degrade to a single identity - the powerful the potential blow is.

Probably one of the best (unintentional) trolls I have done is reducing old communist to tears by stating the rumors that Che was betrayed by Fidel with Raul as the organizer of said betrayal.

With grater availability of free expression that can reach many people, the arguments that used to be civil and intelligent quickly devolve nowadays into shouting matches, where the messages shouted are the most extreme, and often the most idiotic, version of any given side's message.

It's true on any board nowadays, even something like HN. It's very sad to see well meaning and intelligent people devolve to this, especially considering how ineffectual the actual messages people are shouting are.

I generally try to form my own opinion about things. Which basically means that my views are generally hated by both sides in this increasingly polarized society. To the left I am a bigot and to the right I am a morally deprived tree hugging liberal.

Not sure if comments are to blame exclusively though. Perhaps another lesson to take out if it would be the quote from one of the cinematic masterpiece of this century, Harold and Kumar: "There is no reason to get riled up every time a bunch of idiots give you a hard time. In the end the universe tends to unfold as it should."

I'm sure someone might say, "what if I really hate Nazis?" in reply to that, but then I'd have to point out that the Nazis hated others to the point of mass-murder, which is a lot more than they're hated and say that I balance things out that way.

In other words, some hate is just blowback and how willing you are to harm others for disagreeing with you is something to take into account when figuring out what people to socialize with.

Edit: Hating or Loving the Nazi ideology is another beer - ideas are immortal.

He found it funny how irate people would become with his extreme views.

I convinced him to knock it on the head when I found out he was posting from work, and warned him his work will be recording that it was him, but it's a good example of how pointless anonymous comments can be.

This is a built-in problem (the built-in problem?) with censorship. There can not be community oversight of the censor's work because the censor's work is to hide things from the community. The result is that the censor is free to extend its power at will.

If you're weary of answering the same questions over and over, you can make a FAQ. I've made plenty of those myself. But if your community has questions that have to remain unasked that you're hiding from, I have to believe that's a problem with your group, not with the questioner.

So I have to disagree: I would prefer to be up front and answer questions, rather than hide from them by banning people.

---

the term "concern troll" focuses not on what the person is actually saying, but on some alleged agenda. Thus, if misused, it is the perfect refuge for someone who has no counter to the actual argument: simply ignore the points made, allege some other position, and then accuse the other person of lying if they deny that that is what they're really saying. It's a combination of straw man and argumentum ad hominem: make up something to attack, and ignore their actual points on the basis that since the points were made by someone acting in bad faith, they need not be addressed.

---

So no, I wouldn't ban them. I might disagree with some burdensome "reform" on the basis of it being burdensome or of questionable value, but I would not hesitate to answer those concerns with argument rather than by questioning the motives of anyone who might question me.

If the question comes up too often, it's a good candidate for a FAQ, not a ban.

Those methods usually involve "asking questions" about meta stuff. Some forums exist in uneasy balance between a group who'd ban a lot more people and another group who'd ban many fewer people. A skilful concern troll destroys that balance and has those two groups arguing.

Slashdot didn't seem to be run by morons, the stories were filtered by editors the user moderation was complex and nuanced yet it still succumbed to the lowest common denominator.

Maybe the fate of all online communities is to die of popularity, or die by its users abandoning the site and it devolving into a clique of a few unconditional regulars; the key is to make good use of them while they last.

The biggest drops in Slashdot quality have been due to botched rollouts of badly implemented features not changes in the commenters.

Although, they have started down the path of censoring stuff they don't like and promoting stuff they do like, so it'll likely start withering away as people start finding alternatives.

It's just the general audience here is different but the technical details about commenting are exactly the same. You bring the mainstream audience here and you will end up with Reddit.

Technical solutions are not enough by themselves to solve social problems. However, the threaded system, user moderation, and aggressive reputation enforcement are useful tools for keeping a healthy environment with a controlled volume of regular readers.

I'm not saying that this site could survive going mainstream - but right now it's an example of working user-generated commentary.

But the thing is, of course, that you are framing your answer to not include the original case. In my book that is just a non-answer.

You even started out with "a funny" saying "look at this site you're reading". You didn't care if it fitted the case, you just wanted to say something clever. Very Reddit-like (and I do like Reddit).

But in what we could call an open environment where people do not care about their reputation - such as Vice - what can you do?

That's your interpretation. I interpreted the original claim by erdojo that "User-generated commentary can be done right" as a general assertion that there are ways to achieve meaningful conversation, just like the one we're having now.

> In what we could call an open environment where people do not care about their reputation - such as Vice - what can you do?

Now you are framing the answer. If you want to know how to build a good comment system, my answer is "don't create an open environment where people do not care about their reputation".

If you find this to be a non-answer, maybe it's because I didn't reply to what you thought was the question - but that question had not been made explicit, so there was leeway in how to address it.

It's not even the general audience. It's the subject matter, which is carefully selected.

HN is the best place on the internet for discussing a specific kind of subject, mainy technical matters, programming and the like. But post anything half-way political, and the comments look no better or more informed than anywhere else on the web. Which is why the moderation doesn't allow it.

Then half the "side" is upvoting, and the others are downvoting. Pick a topic like Taxes or regulation, and watch from the woodwork.

In all seriousness, it's probably a good move for Motherboard to do this. By and large, comments sections are kinda terrible, but this appears magnified on Vice Network sites in my experience.

The very first sentence of the Vice post:

>As a kid, whenever I'd get some BMX or car magazine in the mail, I'd always dive in first to the letters to the editor.

I notice theregister.co.uk has shoved comments off onto a separate less important page. So you only follow the link when your blood is really boiling (and put yourself into a self-selecting group).

Comments work for the www.dailymail.co.uk because their articles are generally written to bait their readers, and drivel in the comments is how they measure success. Stories are marked up with how many thousand comments they have generated. The real challenge is to get your comment to the top of the "worst" rated category.

The comments section is where the errors and baiting and propaganda gets called out, which has exploded with click-revenue media. Plus you can get a feeling for different community viewpoints.

'Tis a shame.

No, you most obviously do not; Otherwise you wouldn't remove comments sections.

The same thing happens on Facebook. Slashdot has discussions on Slashdot; and then they link to sites on their Facebook page. Another discussion happens on Slashdot's Facebook page.

What's interesting about contextual discussion like this is that the flavor changes quite dramatically. Slashdot's discussions are a bit more lively... Hacker New's discussions are a bit more, uhm, "grown up." Sometimes, an article linked to on Hacker News has a much better discussion on Hacker News than whatever is on the article's message board.

And being a Linux nerd who uses a lot of "old tools" like vim, grep, etc. I still can't understand why people switch from any communication technology X to email nowadays. Email is slowly dying, no reason to jump on that train if you don't have a lot of fancy configs/setup/knowhow in that area already.

I'm gonna take a stab at this and say that I think what they're banking on is that the added effort needed to compose an email (and the lack of a public audiance) is going to raise the barrier of entry and lower the potential payout to eliminate all of the "low-quality, impulse commenting" they felt they were getting flooded with.

And that they're basically equating email to writing a letter in magazine days says a lot about the state and view people have of email, in line with your point.

Naturally, this method of commenting raised the ire of many who accused the BBC of 'censoring' views. Now anyone can comment on BBC news articles and, in my view, the comment sections are of such low quality, they are completely unreadable.

So in a way, as a reader, I preferred the old practice of publishing a selection of comments (a bit like sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper), because what was published was varied, generally well-composed and of managable reading length. But as a user commenting I can see how frustrating it would be to repeatedly submit comments that were never selected for publication.

The problem is not the medium, the problem is sites seem to expect the medium to be something it isn't.

Vice seems to consider it an obvious flaw that most comments aren't publishable as standalone articles, as if users should be expected to run every comment through several drafts and past a copy editor before posting, and yet comments by definition tend to produce low quality content, because they're discussions between individuals, or between an individual and the site. The immediacy and lack of polish is the feature, not the bug. Do you want your community to be a tavern or a symposium?

Focusing on the comment as a standard of quality is understandable for a site which is using comments as an easy way to drive engagement, but I think doing so disregards the actual purpose of the medium. If what you want from a comments section is a steady stream of high quality, long-form content you can control then what you don't want is comments, what you want is to crowdsource copy writing without compensation.

Even on HN, which is obsessed with "quality" above all else, most comments are worthless on their own, but in aggregate the entire conversation has value. And yes, comments can be full of trolling and bigotry and stupidity and chaos. Hacker News has its share of that as does any active forum. But that has to be the price you're willing to pay, even with moderation, to have an open community. Many sites are discovering the return for the amount of effort required to maintain even moderate civility is not worth the effort.

So often you're not really seeing what the public thinks, you're seeing what particular interest groups think, and if comments are dominated by bitter fights between adherents of, say, different political parties then a lot of people will just check out because there's no point in trying to have a civil discussion in a roomful of screaming ideologues.

But that is the only NewsPaper I consume and my relationship with it is way more personal than any online portal.

All websites that I visit are based on links shared via my friends on FB, people on Twitter and Discussions on HN. I really have no personal connection with any online content platform.

So unless Vice has a captive audience that visits it religiously and has that personal connection, I am not sure how this section is going to help.

It is pretty much the same as stating that “Comments are Turned off. Period.”

Could you name some publications that do this? I miss IRC. I know it's still around but Slack could be a better implementation of it, with the file sharing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client

I think not.

Basically you either build a community for two-way discussion from the start or instead you end up with a blog that tries to tack on discussion later on and end up "surprised" that there aren't quality comments.

Filtering of comments that may be valid and important critiques of the work published as well as the publisher / online venue. The thing I like most about the Internet is that many to many communication mode. Basic things like fact checking and or just awareness of something not being inclusive are powerful things. They force authors to really think hard about what they write.

Obviously, there is a lot of noise too, and that's the standard excuse for strong moderation, but it's really difficult to understand when the moderation is strong in the sense of promoting signal and demoting noise, and when it's censorship or manipulation.

Frankly, I'll take the noise because I would rather determine this myself, or at least have the data needed to make that determination.

Traditionally, it's been an editorial thing. Major news outlets have been in the position to manage questions related to their product as well as themselves and aren't comfortable with the masses feedback. Though the noise level was high, it was also possible to see manipulations and just general lack of accuracy or inclusive commentary and reporting too. Net good, for those who went looking.

This also brought bloggers and basically anyone really interested in something on par with the majors. One guy who really cares can make an impact and fact check the biggest of the big. It's important we continue to make this a reality. We may not like it, but we need it.

The other bit that gets broken here is dialogs. People just saying stuff is kind of noisy. But where the moderation encourages dialog, that dialog can often have as much or more value than the effort being discussed does. Of all the things I appreciate about the Internet, having conversations with people all over the world is right there at the top! If anything, we should be finding better ways to have conversations. Efforts like this do not do that.

I also suspect the strong desire to do that will see some corrective type service or norm that the conversations will move to. Maybe back to critical blogs again? Something else? For sure it's not gonna be Facebook. At least not for me. FB is a raging mess. Useless for this.

Having a large degree of free speech online means our speech does bring others speech in response. So there will almost always be haters, but there will be validation and recommendation and augmentation in there too. We want this. It's important that we don't create a place largely filled with walled off, largely one way, broadcast type efforts no different than the already lame broadcast type, one way efforts that dominate so much media now anyway.

Really, I've sworn off most traditional media for this reason. It's much more informative and inclusive to seek it globally, get various perspectives and see those be critical as well as affirmative.

What I do like:

Low noise. Maybe comments are just doomed. In some places they aren't, but in many they are just crappy. Perhaps it is time to turn off comments, but what then? I really don't feel good about a "best of" type action where they pick some they feel are representative.

If they offer up something here, it could be meaningful. I have no idea what that would look like though. Here's to hoping...

To a degree, discouragement of hate and or just a lot of ugly speech. Many comment sections are filled with some vile stuff that does not add value, other than to remind us that a few too many of us do not get the basics of being a good quality human yet.

As for Sullivan, yes he did not allow comments, and I never did think much of his site for that. Mostly, I ignored it and read through the lens of other places, who would cite him, and then critical dialog could be incorporated as part of the experience. To me, this is vital. It's not that I didn't necessarily like Sullivan. It's more that I saw his work as a platform for discussion, not primarily consumption.

I really don't like one way productions for that reason.

This site is a great example. We link to a lot of stuff that may or may not allow comments, but then we enter into what generally is a pretty great dialog. There are lots of points of view, people adding value with other references and thoughts of various kinds, and fact checking happens fairly consistently. Additionally, as I get to understand others here better, that dialog improves in value. Sure, we've got some biases, but the dialog is constructive enough for it to work well anyway. Very high value here, and that value comes from "the hive mind" where our collective responses actually augment the piece and give us food for thought about that piece. Overall, given people actually do read and interact some, it's a great bull shit filter as well as a path to a more inclusive perspective.

Maybe people don't understand the value in that, or maybe worse, people aren't able to, or simply do not desire that value. I harbor hope the former is true and we can get more people there more of the time.

For me personally, it's just not acceptable to read and not go seek the thoughts of others related to some material I find online. I've simply lost the trust in the vast majority of cases related to media organizations. I do continue to trust individuals and some organizations that are focused in some way or other and who do not derive primary income from publishing.

Vice is a cool platform, and they offer up some frank commentary and news. I've enjoyed a lot of what I read there. Maybe they can replace comments with something that works and that I can trust. Hope so.

Whilst I'd be interested to know how this experiment from Vice plays out, the main concern I have is over editorial bias. Sometimes interesting ideas are expressed poorly, do these make the cut, and is it the substance or the way in which they are expressed that gets commented on? Also, will we lose out on some of the funny comments that are only funny in context? Will have to wait and see how diverse the feedback section turns out to be.

I have a love hate with editors these days. Back when communications were largely broadcast, and largely one way, editors really mattered. We needed them to make some sense of the limited resources, and we were in a more firm position of forced trust.

Think national TV anchor in the 60's kind of thing, though many examples abound.

Today, it's much different. We don't really require standards and news has gone to a for profit, entertainment model. I would reluctantly argue that is a good thing, but not by much, and only because we also got the Internet. The Internet brought checks and balances to the political dialog.

Say a cable host just isn't based in reality somehow. Doesn't matter who. Just that they are. Today, that's not hard to find out, unless one is tuned into just a few one way channels. Then it's a bubble.

So there is that.

Of course, the other bias is that commentary critical to the entity itself. Big companies are crappy at owning errors and failure. They just don't do it. When is the last time you got good, solid reporting on the FCC and whatever decency or other rules it may be contemplating, for example. Net Neutrality as another one?

People to people, largely driven by people who really cared and took the time to help others understand well enough to care, and John Oliver who is awesome, got the latter out there. John with, "cable company fuckery" and HBO who really only cares about profit seem to work. But the major news outlets don't seem to work.

Vice runs a lot of material that people would want to comment about, and I fear that bias may actually not bring us real commentary, and that would be a shame because Vice seems to be about real people, events, places, news, issues and also appears willing to cover things most other organizations will not touch at all. (and good for Vice on that)

And here is where my argument is subtle: I want that stuff Vice covers to not only inform, but generate conversations. Good, critical ones. I think we need it, and a filtered representation of comments might not get us there.

But, to be fair to Vice, maybe they actually can't get there themselves. In my experience, many organizations just don't seem to get it, or have attracted the masses who just vomit online too. Those that do seem to attract niche demographics who can actually carry on a conversation.

It may be that we continue with a model where majors produce stuff we talk about, but we never, ever talk about it there.

This would be kind of broken in that they can live in the glass house speaking with relative impunity. You all know a few of the types. Might I suggest David Brooks? He's in that position, completely isolated, able to write stuff that he really should have to experience some feedback on, yet he's where that will never happen.

So we talk about Brooks in other places, but not enough places for it to be meaningful in terms of Brooks actually experiencing what others may think of his speech. There is no shield in the First Amendment, however some of us do have an effective shield in this way, and that's not really what the First Amendment is about.

Maybe that is as good as it gets. Maybe Vice brings us an alternative that is better somehow. Maybe Vice has balls, in other words. We shall see.

Back to editors for a moment. They still do what they do well, and we still need them, but the nature of the need has shifted some with the Internet, and that's good as we see more kinds of speech compete out there for mindshare.

I find this important and high value, even when it can be very difficult to read or contemplate at times.

Out of interest, who is David Brooks and why do you believe he could use some unfiltered feedback? I've never heard of him.

He often writes everybody is bad type columns that present highly questionable political conclusions and that contradict his own works from the past..

And he's insulated to a degree where nobody will actually call him on any of it. And it's not like he is alone in that either. He is one that I find particularly painful.

Throw Web 2.0 right into the trash.

I think that's the far more urgent task.

Edit: And after reading it closer, it seems to be from someone who doesn't understand how neither reddit nor food work. I wonder why they felt the need to print it.

The description of your average reddidiot was also accurate.

They could have shown the many bright sides of the reddit cooking community if people claim the article is one-sided. But they didn't.

If vice.com wanted to show only comments that agreed with them, they could do that already.

Perhaps comments are being deleted for not being respectful, because they're considered spammy, or for some other reason.