Facebook now lets users and pages turn off comments on their posts
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's increasingly clear that if you want to have a community on the internet, rather than just host a warzone on your lawn, it has to have defense mechanisms in place. This post from Doreen the other day resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639182
For companies: Best place to put ads is between stories. You get 100% views for the ads and hence more engagement. That is why every company is running after it.
And then users decide/"vote" with what platform or network they align with based on if they use it or not; the issue of allowing users and their networks to being easily mobile/data and network operability is important then to reduce the friction of this being possible.
And then the layers of infrastructure are additional layers of decentralized control mechanisms, e.g. Amazon/AWS kicking off Parler, Parler then needing to eventually find infrastructure that was supportive of their lack of moderation against calls for violence, etc. At least then lines are drawn and we can see who's allying with who, and people can respond or behave accordingly.
So if this happened on HN, the subthread probably wouldn't survive long.
Worse, they tend to be completely uninformed emotional ramblings. I often wonder just how many of those comments and votes are from bots that only exist to provoke gullible people.
Do you really think acting like an emotionless robot is a good way to communicate with others?
1. made up facts from organisations trying to incite emotional responses rather than conveying accurate information,
2. comments from people who are ignorant on specific topics but still feel strongly enough about said topic to voice their opinion.
Clearly we are never going to remove emotion from content. That's as unrealistic as asking the news to be unbiased. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a little less emotive bullshit being argued as factual information....
Unfortunately turning off comments on select posts isn't going to fix the rot.
Once it exceeds Dunbar's number you are getting different tribes fighting each other, that's just the human nature.
Theoretically, bad actors would end up in everyone else's killfile, but in reality, it never really happened. Some clients at least allowed hiding a subthread so that you wouldn't see messages that were essentially a dispute between two people.
But one way to slow down the flame wars would be to rate limit the number of comments that can be posted. If you require people to wait 10 minutes to post a subsequent comment, that would definitely slow down the discussion and probably would lead to them moving on to something else.
News sites started stripping comments from articles so long ago. When you see a comment section on the bottom of an article or blog, it contributes to that feeling that the website hasn't had a remodel in a long time. Like an animated gif spacer from the 90's web.
Now we are seeing the social media hubs, technically places that are entirely comment threads, abdicating moderation responsibility to thread creators. Twitter users can hide replies to their tweets. Youtube creators can as well. Now this.
Overall a good trend, IMO. Moderation responsibility was so diffused that no one did it well.
The emerging pattern is that the site owner can provide global moderation of clear cut illegal activity. This doesn't meet anyone's bar for civil discourse, and there's not a good global solution for how to achieve that, so the site owners will place the next level of moderation in users' hands. This starts to model how it works in the physical world, so I think we're on the right track.
Anywhere else?
Users should be able to moderate though and moderation points should be earned and spent and provide some context. Users should be able to browse comments based on their preferences, revealing those posts which have been down-voted out of sight, or made anonymously, if they choose.
That doesn't mean that the publisher has to host your opinions on their site. It's their site, they choose what to put on it. They're under no obligation to amplify your opinions.
I would say the overwhelming majority of quality writing on the internet does not accommodate comments, from academic journals, to serious think-pieces and long-form essays.
User point systems are very lopsided to users that have the time to generate points, which is probably a negative selector for quality/experience/diversity in opinion.
Now that's pretty much all gone. Most 'blogs' have no personality and are producing the same kind of keyword-researched content every other site is. The writing is dry and lifeless, as if its only purpose is to be picked up by a search engine. Scroll to the bottom, no comments, just a grotesque "share" widget.
These sites look and feel like ghost towns now. It's a completely different atmosphere than what internet communities were envisioned to be.
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.
I know what a “GIF spacer” is (a 1x1 pixel image resized to the desired width and height), but what’s an “animated GIF spacer”?
https://www.oocities.org/itsamemario2000/english.html?202025 the animated green lines.
Alternatively, page visitor counters would have been another example of outdated web aesthetics.
I've noticed that this is correlated with AMP adoption. Many news sites still have comments on the "full" page but not the AMP page.
I'd like to see even more fine grained controls for comments on posts for social media. Facebook should emulate what Twitter has done and let me maintain an "Allow List" of friends that are allowed to comment on my posts, links, etc. The friends system was originally designed the way it was because you weren't supposed to open your Facebook friends to everyone, but 15+ years and the shifting of connections that time brings (good friends may now just be acquaintances) makes this feature a necessity.
I like that.
Hypothetically, aunt Joan just shared the post about the Ever Given ship containing tons of children in cages, and it's all Hillary Clinton's fault. Since she only allows her conspiracy theory believing friends to comment on her posts, there's no disagreement about the cause of the Suez Canal blockage. It's accepted as fact among anyone who can comment, and it's uncontested for the ones who could be swayed.
I would just remove the connection instantly in that scenario.
I like urbanism Facebook groups where we can discuss how to improve a specific intersection, for example. Where we are like-minded people and we try to find the best solution.
When we have the same discussion in the neighborhood group, the thread becomes a shouting match with drivers requesting to be able to run through the intersection at full speed with no inconvenience and to get cyclists and pedestrians out of the way. With the usual "they don't pay taxes". So it is less interesting.
Just how many missteps can one company make?