conuly | I'm tilting at windmills today!

Emailed three different news sites asking when the hell they intend to start moderating their comments. Seriously, a free-for-all where everybody shouts as loud as they can is not conducive to free speech.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cloudsinvenice

Ugh, yes. And you never know who you're not hearing from because the screaming morass of people comparing penis size- sorry, opinions - makes them think that it's not the place for them. Of course, the screamers don't miss those voices.

From:

conuly

Actively chase them away, in fact.

From:

moem

I support your tilting at these particular windmills. Also 'free speech' does not mean that anyone gets to say absolutely anything, anywhere, at any time.

(Of course, being Dutch means that I know alll about windmills. I just noticed my own icon, just now.)

Edited Date: 2017-10-19 09:27 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

And honestly, I don't want draconian moderation. I just want a minimum standard.

From:

elf

Yes yes. And if they say, "well, what kind of minimum standards could we possibly use? There are no objective standards!" the reply is, "would you accept these things being said in your front lobby, or would you ask the person to shut up or leave?"

From:

nodrog

I'm a libertarian, yet I agree completely - because civility is a virtue. Time was, more people were taught things like logical fallacies and reasoned arguments, which are seldom found today and usually answered by shrill ad hominems by people who know no better way to debate.

From:

monanotlisa

LOL!

But yes, private venues including most if not all US news can and should moderate, JFC.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

The thing is, there are different kinds of free speech, and not everyone feels comfortable in all of them. Some people who prefer the free-for-all won't speak up in moderated forums, losing their perspectives. And some who prefer moderated won't participate in a free-for-all. What makes people feel safe isn't always the same. Ideally, we need both so everyone can chime where they feel comfortable.

And of course, nobody has to read the comments.

From:

conuly

Honestly, if you'll only speak up if you're allowed to call other people libtards and rethuglicans, I'm not going to cry over your loss of free speech.

From:

pauamma

I wouldn't use those or similar terms myself, but I feel more comfortable in environments where others are/feel free to apply them (or other unpleasant-to-me terms) to me.

From:

author_by_night

+1

It's also counterproductive to trying to get anyone to see your point.

Edited Date: 2017-10-20 11:32 am (UTC)

From:

moonhare

I specifically avoid comments on news articles for this reason.

From:

conuly

Yes, but we shouldn't have to.

From:

sapphire2309

i sent a few awkward and sometimes difficult pms today too! (telling people that i unsubscribed from them on one social medium because i follow them on another, asking a couple of people to cut superlong entries.) idk if that counts as tilting at windmills, because i'm not familiar with the expression, but it's a thing i did?

From:

conuly

Don Quixote went out riding, and he saw some windmills. Because he was Don Quixote, he was sure they were giants, and so he attacked them on horseback.

This failed miserably.

The idiom has traditionally meant "fighting imaginary enemies", but a newer meaning is also "fighting impossible causes".

From:

sapphire2309

ah, i see. then no, these aren't windmills i'm tilting at. people on this corner of the internet are very nice. it's just really difficult for me to speak up in the first place.

Edited Date: 2017-10-19 03:52 pm (UTC)

From:

conuly

How're things going, btw? Your two week break seems to have ended a bit earlier than anticipated!

From:

sapphire2309

Yeah! I have an exam on Monday, but i'm handling things a lot better than expected. I can't promise I won't take a break again - i still have a not-functional relationship with my mom - but i feel saner than I did? (and i was managing my circle today and kinda missed you c: )

From:

conuly

From:

silveradept

Some entities believe they can't moderate the comments because of free speech grounds, and even systems like upvoting don't help.

Given what the US newsmedia is writing about interference in the last election, it's thoroughly possible that many of those voices that clog the comment sections are paid trolls with political agendas. So those people could probably be banned, assuming they can be found.

From:

conuly

It's too easy to game upvoting/downvoting (and stupid Disqus has effectively disabled downvoting anyway).

From:

nodrog

That turns out to be a well-founded suspicion.

… It's of course impossible to tell whose vitriol is genuine and whose is
being bankrolled, but at least some anti-Western comments appear to come
from staffers the Russian government pays to sit in a room, surf the
Internet, and leave sometimes hundreds of postings a day that criticize the
country's opposition and promote Kremlin-backed policymakers…

A Russian journalist who visited one such comment-mill, the St. Petersburg
Internet Research Agency, met with a coordinator who said the job was not
unlike writing copy for a hair dryer: "The only difference is that this
hair dryer is a political one."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/russias-online-comment-propaganda-army/280432/

From:

thewayne

There was, IIRC, a Scandinavian news org that added a comment troll preventer where you had to answer two or three simple questions about the story before you could comment. Apparently it tremendously cut down on trolling. Sadly I don't have any links for you.

From:

conuly

That'd be great....

From:

thewayne

I love the concept, requiring people to prove that they'd read the story before they comment. It eliminates almost all drive-by trolling because they're not going to want to spend 5-10 minutes actually reading what they want to blast. It does add a bit of work for the writer to create the questions and answers, plus modifying the infrastructure to support it. And it only takes one troll to read it and [ost the answers to Troll Central for a given article to be spammed, but I don't think they're that organized.

From:

deaderthandisco

That's an interesting idea. It still allows for opposing viewpoints, but it stops spammers and low-effort trolls.

From:

elf

Set up 5 questions, and have one assigned at random, like the math-based captchas. The answers could still all be posted at Troll Central, but a person would be going back and forth to figure out which one was asked.

5 questions per article may be a lot, but they could be very simple. "Who is named in the third paragraph?" "On what date was the law signed?" "What city filed an objection?" and so on. People wouldn't even have to seriously read; skimming for keywords would get that - but even that would slow down trolls.

From:

nodrog

Copy protection for DOS-based games was often like that: “What is the third word on page 14 of the game manual?”

[Electronic Arts’ Starflight (1986) included a code wheel, and the game gave two pieces of information you had to line up on it and provide the third thus revealed. As this was of course finite, brute-force compiling of every possible query eventually defeated this; there was a txt file you could download…]

From:

the_siobhan

It is a worthy, if doomed caused.

From:

author_by_night

I don't think news sites have ever had moderation, as a rule. Or if they have, it's basically been that nothing happens unless it's a death threat or something. I agree that they should go beyond that, though. There's free speech and there's trolling and ad hominem. They should have standards. And I can't imagine it's that hard to hire someone to do mod stuff. It's not like there aren't tech savvy people looking for jobs. Or have volunteer mods. Something.

I mean, as a mod myself I will say you have to choose your battles. You can't quash all debates. But I've always put the cap on when things got heated, and things have been pretty heated. (Almost destructively so. I came close to losing my comm at one point. But that's when the mod team set standards. I'm actually not that active a mod, but that's also because I think my fellow mods and I fostered a community that doesn't need excessive moderation. We set the expectation that you're not an asshole, and for the most part, we have amazing members who meet that expectation. It involves s a lot of work and posts and wank wrangling, but it can be done.)