How Ta-Nehisi Coates built the best comment section on the internet

HN does strike a good balance between civility and diversity of opinion. Or at least they get a lot of one controlling for the other. I tend to post from a right wing perspective but only had one comment flag killed (where I pointed out that it was hypocritical of French Americans to say that France needs to preserve its culture, while at the same time saying that the US has no culture, and anyone who says it does is a racist).

The one thing that bothers me is the flood of social justice themed articles, including one that was flag killed but revived by the mods. I guess the mods felt that they were reacting against over-zealous flaggers. But I think in practice they are overriding the opinion of the community who are sick of articles about issues like sexism in tech.

If you haven't seen it already, you should watch Matt Haughey's "Lessons from 11 years of community" (link below), in which he describes some of the moderation tools and techniques MetaFilter has developed over the years.

"Lessons from 11 years of community": https://vimeo.com/21043675

Mozilla OpenNews, NY Times and Wash Po are partnering to create a new solution. I'm not sure if its exactly what you mention here.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/06/19/mozilla-announces-a...

I can't help but see your comment as a symptom of the problem it's describing. Not trolling, but geek bias... specifically the blind spot of assuming everyone is as sincere as you.

The big problem with comment sections isn't "trolling", it's that most people aren't there to have a fair, rational discussion in the first place. They are there to be entertained or distracted, that will be the main motivation of people doing the browsing. They want to see their opinions and choices validated, while uncomfortable and inconvenient facts are hidden or mocked. At minimum they will avoid anything that reflects badly on themselves and where they can't shift the blame easily. See for example the latest wave of "criticism = harassment" in news sections and on Twitter, where being called out for saying stupid things in public is frantically derided as "sea lioning" which must be stopped.

So trying to fix comment sections behaviorally does not work because they stop being comments. At most you can do something like StackOverflow, which follows a strict Q&A format and bans repetition. It's not really a forum, it's a wiki of googleable questions, and like Wikipedia, is mostly unappealing and unwelcoming to outsiders with fresh ideas.

Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation. The only forums I know of where everyone gets along with everyone are echo chambers. In real discussions somebody's toes always get stepped on. Real names do not help there btw, people still make plenty of dumb comments with their face next to it, it only helps the offendees play the victim card.

I think your "inevitable descent into trolling" is a bad description of how intellectual forums grow their audience: they become more superficial, more emotionally driven and more focused on presentation than merit. Like TED talks. But if you don't grow, you stagnate and turn into an echo chamber. Neither is desirable, you can only try to grow responsibly. You have to allow disruptive voices no matter what.

I think the value proposition of Disqus is just comparatively low maintenance. You include a snippet of JS and you get a minimally functional commenting system that includes antispam and requires running no backend server software or security risks. In return Disqus gets analytics and a little bit of ad space. It's not imo going for discussion, it's meant to be flypaper for readers who get a good-feelings boost thinking they're being heard, so it's a monetization tool more than anything. The extreme end of this is Youtube comments, which accumulate so fast and so voluminously that actual discussion is near impossible, and the limited nesting actively fights replying. You can't follow anything. But millions of people pile their worthless comments into the void because it feels good to have your say. Old, crusty ugly forums are better for conversation than new, shiny JS comment systems because they were actually made for conversation, that was their raison d'etre.

Have you tried Discourse? It's almost as good as the hype.

So this is kind of related. I've been reading OSNews since the very beginning, and I really, really love it. It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is about the highest praise I could give a site. In large part it's because it covered stuff I couldn't see anywhere else and the commenters were positive and knowledgeable. But in the last few years there are so many articles about non-OS political stuff, which in turn causes fighting in the comments. Don't underestimate that the types of articles published determines the type of commenters :-(

The difficulty is that the "trolling" folks like Coates want to eliminate is often simply a difference of opinion which is acceptable in one community but not in another.

One of the few times I read Coates' blog was discussing a black/white gap in dating site response rates. He immediately banned people pointing out statistics showing that black women are disproportionately fat. The HN discussion on the same topic was heavily upvoted and rationally concluded concluded that explanation was probably incorrect.

Building a system which will automatically detect that, e.g., statistics about race and obesity are trolling on Coates' site but useful contributions on HN is a difficult matter.

Collaborative filtering is the best way to create a bubble, but that generally requires a centralized communication medium like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit.

I wonder if rather than a pure software solution, there's an opportunity here for Disqus to provide a hybrid software-human moderation solution. It's clear that good moderation can revitalize a community (hi @dang), while bad comments are a vicious cycle that drive out the good ones. IOW, moderation is very valuable. But it's hard to hire for and do right if it's not already part of your org's thinking. Disqus could sell moderation-as-a-service, according to the customer's parameters, and take care of all those hard parts.