NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments

This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

I see comment moderation as one of the &#x27;unsolved problems&#x27; left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise.<p>Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there&#x27;s just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.<p>Maybe moving comments to people&#x27;s own social groups on FB&#x2F;Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re really seeing any discussion value for the most part.

95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.<p>The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they&#x27;re smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.<p>Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.

Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.<p>Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.<p>I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you&#x27;d like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging.<p>On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.<p>I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.

I propose the following system for commenting on news sites:<p>-comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only<p>After the comments are published, then a voting&#x2F;ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam<p>This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.

The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc.<p>Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don&#x27;t really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable.<p>In short, allowing comments != community.

&gt; The conclusion: NPR&#x27;s commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.<p>If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn&#x27;t say), shame on them. People <i>reading</i> the comments should count too.

&gt;But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not that fake accounts don&#x27;t get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on).<p>I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.

Rude reader comments can warp people&#x27;s perception of what was being reported.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;this-story-stinks.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;this-story-...</a>

I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author&#x27;s self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.

In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to &quot;engage&quot; with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for not having comments on his site).<p>But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have &quot;Letters to the Editor,&quot; which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every article?

We don&#x27;t need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them.<p>It&#x27;s fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments.<p>What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.

That&#x27;s a shame, one of my favorite comments ever on a news site is from NPR: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;monkeysee&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;162383428&#x2F;mandy-patinkin-25-years-after-the-princess-bride-hes-not-tired-of-that-line#comment-674582040" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;monkeysee&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;162383428&#x2F;m...</a><p>That said, it&#x27;s hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you&#x27;re tied to Disqus, which doesn&#x27;t seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.

Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who&#x27;ve not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it&#x27;s likely a much smaller percent.)<p>Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;297690717&#x2F;why-doesnt-america-read-anymore" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;297690717&#x2F;why-doesnt-america-r...</a>.

With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

I always liked slashdot&#x27;s comment system back in the day. It allowed you to adjust what you saw and how many points a &quot;funny&quot; post got vs how many an &quot;informative&quot; one got and then set a point threshold based on that.<p>Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either it wasn&#x27;t working or they just didn&#x27;t see it as worth reimplimenting when they moved away from their old code base.

Their argument is bogus. It&#x27;s either cost or a laziness in moderation.<p>The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.

I think that maybe hosting comments alongside the original article isn&#x27;t the best approach. Half the fun of internet comments is discussing with other commenters, but that works a lot better when you know the community that you&#x27;re discussing with. You can&#x27;t reasonably keep track of the dynamics of hundreds of different content provider&#x27;s comment sections, nor can all content providers have interesting commenting communities.<p>We need a standard comment syndication format like RSS so that sites like HN and Reddit can continue to provide good communities for discussion, but content providers can still display comments below their content to show off reader engagement.

I totally understand why they&#x27;re doing this. Their comments section was terrible. I&#x27;m not at all surprised by the findings that a couple hundred to low few thousand commenters are posting the vast majority of comments.<p>I&#x27;m really surprised at the energy that the trolls on NPR spend. You&#x27;ll see the same account posting rude comments on just about every article. Who has that kind of time?

This is a shame.<p>Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the article&#x27;s author is advocating for.<p>There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.

Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.

I have found comment sections on news websites to be reliably awful. It seems every discussion thread deteriorates into an attack on the other side&#x27;s politics even when the link to get there is non existent. (&quot;Thanks Obama&quot;)<p>That being said, I love reading all the comments. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I often spend more time reading NPR&#x27;s comment section than I do reading the actual content. I don&#x27;t think this change will cause me to consume less NPR content, but I&#x27;ll definitely spend less time on their website.

They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all comments on their entire system.<p>I don&#x27;t know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their comment system, but I will bid $500&#x2F;month to handle those 2600 users comprising half of all comments, or $1000&#x2F;month for all comments. All inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest system.<p>My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.

I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in.<p>What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?

Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.)<p>It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR to have an image hosting service.

maybe the problem isn&#x27;t comment moderation, but rather the expectation that anyone should be able to &quot;control&quot; the dissemination of human thought through mediums like the internet?<p>the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance they stand in the future.

&gt;There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting<p>Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than &quot;infinite comments&quot; or the fragmented social media discussion.

Of course not a lot of users comment - the comment section is more or less hidden on the articles...

Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or scorched earth flame wars.

Can we also use this time to talk about Live chat for Youtube? It is literally filled with scrolling garbage and promotes so much of negativity. What purpose is it solving when there 10K users throwing garbage at each other?

Being good at content doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re good at running a public forum.<p>We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning.<p>Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a &quot;Comments on HN&quot; link at the bottom of a post.

They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social networks to compare with though.<p>Still a incredibly stupid decision though.

It&#x27;s going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.

Don&#x27;t they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?

It&#x27;s nice irony: This article, about a site removing commenting, now has more comments than upvotes (although such a ratio almost always indicates a flame war).

&quot;If there is hope, it lies in the comments threads.&quot; -- John Derbyshire

My first thought reading this is, well, &quot;conversation doesn&#x27;t scale very well&quot;, as David Weinberger said (regards some recent Reddit contretemps).<p>Looking at NPR&#x27;s own article, I&#x27;m findng the justifications given to be strongly suspect. NPR&#x27;s focus on how many participants are engaging, and from what platforms, rather misses the boat. It&#x27;s not that I feel the decision itself isn&#x27;t without merits, but the merits given are exceedingly poor ones. I&#x27;m hoping they&#x27;re not the ones actually used.<p>I&#x27;ve done my own measurement of public user activity on large sites.[1] In the case of Google+, my and Stone Temple Consulting&#x27;s independent analysis[2] showed that 0.3% of all users actually engage in public posting on the site.<p>The real question isn&#x27;t &quot;how many users are commenting&quot;, but &quot;what is the quality of the comments received?&quot;. Following critiques of my first study, I performed a second follow-up looking at where intelligent conversation was happening online, using the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list as a proxy for intelligent conversation, and the arbitrarily selected string &quot;Kim Kardashina&quot;, as its obverse. This gave the world the infamous FP:KK index -- the ratio of mentions of <i>any</i> of the FP Global 100 Thinkers per instance of a spin-off of the OJ Simpson trial fall-out.[2] A few results stood out -- Facebook&#x27;s scale, Reddit&#x27;s relatively high quality, Metafilter&#x27;s phenomenally high S&#x2F;N ratio, and the amount of high-quality material posted to blogs (though perhaps never seeing the light of day). I&#x27;d be interested in some further follow-up along these lines.<p>One of the problems is that at Internet scale, Sturgeon&#x27;s Law is far worse than six-sigma compliant.[3] Not only is there an <i>awful</i> lot of crud, but simple mechanics mean that no one person can see more than the tiniest fraction of what is transacted online daily. The simple acquisition cost and assessment of &quot;is this worth reading or not&quot; is absolutely prohibitive.<p>Or as Clay Shirky says, what we&#x27;ve got isn&#x27;t content overload but filter failure.[4]<p>On the problem of idiots, my personal solution is simple and surprisingly effective: block fuckwits.[5] At scale, this evolves to the problem of figuring out who is and isn&#x27;t a fuckwit. The ability for individual actions <i>against specific authors and publishers</i> to be applied generally strikes me as a useful tool. Not a complete fix (there are controversial voices who do deserve to be heard). But if the cost of being an asshat is being an asshat screaming into the void, part of the problem is addressed.<p>(Yes, this means some form of 1) persistent reputation, 2) tools for applying reputation as filters, and 3) limitations on newly-created profiles. The idea of vouchers (again, with a reputation penalty applying) to bootstrap new identities may help. There&#x27;s much in common to approaches against email spam in this.)<p>NPR in particular are counting the fact that many messages come from desktop users as a failing of their system. I see that as absolute insanity. <i>Desktop systems are hugely more useful than mobile devices for composing content.</i> Especially <i>thoughtful</i> content. I know this because I&#x27;ve been trying, and losing, that battle myself, using a 9&quot; Android tablet and Bluetooth keyboard -- one of the better mobile authoring configurations possible, and it <i>still</i> stinks. The six lines by 45 characters I can see in HN&#x27;s edit box certainly don&#x27;t help. I&#x27;ve written a long rant at Reddit on this specific problem.[6] Whilst composing this comment I&#x27;ve had Firefox&#x2F;Android crap out from under me, continuously popped out of the edit box, and unintentionally navigated from the page. Thankfully persistence of user state in edit dialogs has improved slightly, but the experience is frustrating to say the least.<p>I&#x27;d use a proper editing environment, say, vim, <i>except that under Android, </i>VimTouch doens&#x27;t interact with the clipboard<i>. I can neither copy content </i>into* it, nor <i>out</i>. Termux&#x27;s vim client is slightly better -- I can paste through the Termux clipboard, but copying <i>out</i> is virtually impossible, and doesn&#x27;t capture more than one screen at a time.<p>The fact that few people are entering thoughtful comments on mobile likely says far more about the state of mobile tech than it does about NPR&#x27;s audience.<p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3hp41w&#x2F;tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers&#x2F;?ref=search_posts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3hp41w&#x2F;trackin...</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1yzvh3&#x2F;refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network&#x2F;?ref=search_posts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1yzvh3&#x2F;refutat...</a><p>4. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-no...</a><p>5. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;drLZV8sm7Tq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;drLZV8sm...</a><p>6. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ideasfortheadmins&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4y2k5r&#x2F;longform_selfposts_and_intelligent_discussion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ideasfortheadmins&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4y2k5r&#x2F;l...</a>

i think a good way to fix toxic comments is to have a &quot;tag as troll&quot; button. if enough people think a particular commenter is a troll then they lose their commenting privilege. it should be pretty easy to detect if a person is creating more accounts.

I wonder how many comments said something about &quot;Obama&quot; or &quot;left-wing&quot;

I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting as a president is one of &quot;Fuck you, gov still pays me&quot;. They do not need to adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding<p>Edit: I should clarify &#x27;partially funded&#x27; but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.