Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Vice doesn't shy away from taking a position that might be controversial or even extreme. A lot of their content borders on editorial which is fine if that's what you're looking for, but it's also full of fodder for those who want to argue about things.

Honestly the comment on most news sites are absolutely atrocious and there'd be little lost if they were shut off completely.

View on HN

Vice does nothing BUT write editorials and tries to pawn them off as objective journalism.

Hence, trolling.

The comments on the New York Times seem to be high quality.

A strong indicator of intense moderator activity.

They employ people to moderate comments and select high-quality contributions. Not cheap.

They also expend significant resources in moderating it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...

(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)

FWIW, a move towards automated assistance is what motivated that article in the first place: "The New York Times is partnering with Google Jigsaw to create a new moderation system that will help us review incoming comments based on decisions our moderators have made in the past. Our moderators will continue to protect these discussions, but once this new system is launched, we will have robot helpers."

I helped work on the interactive piece (though not the assisted comment moderation that they're rolling out).

I took that quiz. They have some terrible opinions on what should and shouldn't be deleted. They supported side tracking of the conversation, injection of baiting morals (for a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage).

You can have r/the_donald supporters, "Not my President", and apathetic individuals in the same place... but only if you have strong rules to keep the peace.

> a comment on gay marriage they said they'd allow someone to preach about their religious views on gay behavior and marriage

Unfortunately in that regard they're only following the same standards of acceptable arguments that hold in public spaces in the US.

I think that is in part because they are highly moderated, both by their internal team and user votes. Such moderation is costly, but I tend to think it is worth it for the good of the community.

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...

The NYT is the ONLY high quality comment "left" on the internet. It's sad that we are letting extremists mute comment sections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com