Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com

I think there actually might be a market here for Reddit...<p>Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Embed the relevant post on the news site.<p>Since &quot;karma&quot; is transitive across Reddit and across news sites, users are slightly less likely to troll. You could also do this with some sort of reputation system across websites (Disqus could add in something like that).<p>The big problem with news sites is that the communities aren&#x27;t big enough that there are any negative correlations associated with being a dick. Even facebook runs into this problem because there isn&#x27;t any way to &quot;punish&quot; someone for a rude comment. Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue (at least in my very non-expert opinion). Reddit helps, with comment karma and post karma... but it obviously isn&#x27;t perfect.

I think many people have realized that the costs (filtering &amp; moderation) vs. benefits (community engagement) of comment sections just don&#x27;t make sense for most websites.<p>I suspect that for comment sections to be <i>good</i> the users need to actually be invested in the &#x27;forum&#x27; they&#x27;re posting in. Without any skin in the game (reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to add value and the system becomes dominated by &#x27;low value&#x27; posts (like trolls, flamewars, spambots, etc.).

Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality).<p>A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I&#x27;ve always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to reach Reddit&#x27;s size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.

I think if you&#x27;re getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn&#x27;t encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you&#x27;re writing if you&#x27;re attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

Many sites have been closing their comments section. It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation, these sites just shut the community out and become a broadcast medium once again.<p>A notable removal of a comments section was NPR&#x27;s shutdown right around the time of the Democratic National Convention. The comments were overwhelmingly anti-Hillary, but they were for the most part civil. It looked really bad because these were progressives and liberals going after her rather than rabid right-wingers. Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.

I don&#x27;t buy the &quot;troll&quot; argument. Every site has low-value comments and people either ignore them or down-vote them. They&#x27;re not an issue. Take YouTube for example - they are known to have a cancerous comment section with little-to-no moderation, yet people don&#x27;t avoid YouTube, they just avoid reading the comments on most channels.<p>The real problem for VICE is when comments aren&#x27;t from trolls - when they&#x27;re debunking the article and pointing out flaws in real-time.<p>That being said, I&#x27;m happy to see them disable comments. This will open up an opportunity for someone else to take over managing comments on their content... Hopefully someone who cares more about open discussion.

It has been a long time since I actually dove into a comments section on any news site and found anything other than inflammatory arguments. It seems like people target out these news sites intentionally to start these arguments with no intent of listening to the other side. I would much rather come somewhere like here, and actually seem to have mostly civil discussions even when people disagree.<p>Does anyone find the comment section of any news site informative and useful? If so, where?

Hopefully the biker bar analogy* is correct. Every year it feels more and more like the bikers are actually <i>the majority</i>.<p>*<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chuqui.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-death-of-reddit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chuqui.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-death-of-reddit&#x2F;</a>

In my humble opinion perhaps websites might benefit simply from more sorting filters on comments.<p>Reddit allows sorting by most upvoted and most controversial which is cool. However I wonder if sorting by the reading age of the comment for example might work. Perhaps creating a set of words which are inflammatory and sorting by most negative comments to most positive comments. Perhaps combining filters could be constructive.<p>Of course there are performance concerns here but nevertheless I&#x27;m sure there are better alternatives to banning comments in general.

Part of the problem is that Vice promotes their posts all over facebook to (I presume) a bipartisan demographic based on target age range.<p>Because these are &#x27;sponsored posts&#x27; not ads, people who do not agree with Vice&#x27;s often highly partisan slant are constantly served their relatively provocative headlines with a really easy opportunity to leave a comment (both on fb and by clicking the link and heading to the comments section).<p>edit: changed &#x27;broad demographic&#x27; to &#x27;bipartisan demographic&#x27;

A healthy comment section needs active moderation. Consider getting your readership involved. You could, for example, follow the Stack Exchange model by giving frequent contributors more editorial powers in the comments section.

Comments are one of the only time effective ways to challenge news stories. Indeed editorials in newspapers used to be a mode of public discourse. If we consider VICE a legitimate news outlet, then this a sad day.

There&#x27;s something to the idea that comments are &quot;letters to the editor&quot;, as I believe that the biggest incentive for people to comment is when they feel that they have something to contribute. The problem, of course, is that hateful reasoning is usually something to &#x27;novel&#x27; to contribute. It is especially easy to contribute something novel when you skim an article and you don&#x27;t see any indication that the article is going to where your thinking.<p>I&#x27;ve been playing with this on a small side project (a literary journal, so the worst medium to try it out with), but it would be my dream to see a major publication try this out: Making commenting only available after correctly answering a quiz question that demonstrates that the reader has read the article. Initial questions have the ability to frame discussions, clarify controversial details, and discourage lines of thought - and on the other side, it requires little effort for an editor to implement.

I’ve wished that there was some kind of HTTP header I could have my UA send that told the server not to bother sending me the comments section, as I consider them to generally be a waste of resources. I even thought a little about how I’d go about formalizing it. After realizing that such a system would require an RFC, my brain broke from the irony.

Considering all the events that occurred in 2016 from the brexit to trump that came as huge surprises to the media, maybe media elites should be paying MORE attention to the comments.

I can&#x27;t comment on what might be the best technique(s) for retaining a high level commentary on news sites - I don&#x27;t have the expertise.<p>But I do know where I stand on my own digital interactions; if there appears to be the possibility of having a critical, constructive dialogue, I&#x27;ll try it out.<p>Everything else just encourages the mob. Walk away, don&#x27;t let my ego or emotion convince me to reply to non-constructive comments.<p>Non-constructive comments are, as the old chestnut goes, like love. Tough to define but you know them when you see them.

Looks like a good opportunity for a startup to provide efficient comment moderation.<p>I&#x27;ve seen big youtube channels switch to human moderation and that made the comment section a real place for discussion.

anonymity without oversight that actively kills toxic individuals is going to revert to the lowest possible quality.<p>there should be some rule: The lower the friction for anonymous commentators the greater the affinity towards resembling a low quality and toxic communities.

&gt;Besides, there are plenty of other ways for you to publicly discuss our work and the personal worth of our staff. We&#x27;ll still be reading your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook,<p>This may be the real reason. Or at least a big reason.<p>I have seen some other sites push comments to social media in order to bolster themselves on those platforms.

I don&#x27;t get the infatuation people have with comment sections. Most of the time they&#x27;re full of spam or really bad trolls. If you want to share your ideas maybe you should host a blog or a vlog (on YouTube) where people are willing to engage you. I know people like to socialize but not every site needs a comment section. Go on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Slack, or whatever. That site you think needs a comment section doesn&#x27;t owe anyone a space to share ideas.

Since the comments section of a news website is a major source of engagement, why not charge to make comments? Wouldn&#x27;t this discourage the worst of the them?

Translation: Like ever other MSM outlet we want to control the narrative, even on our sub-par and typically worthless articles.<p>There is a reason why Gavin McInnes left.

One possible solution to this problem is to use a crowdworking platform like Mechanical Turk to delete low quality comments. This is a lot cheaper than employing dedicated moderation teams, but there is a trade-off in that more low quality comments will slip through the net.

When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really nonsense (to me). If you don&#x27;t like a comment just don&#x27;t bother reading it again, just forget about it. However when a youtube video on 10 ways to keep me from being productive&quot; has its comments disabled I can live with that. In the case of Vice it is a whole new dimension. Guys, you are journalists. The comment section often is a direct indicator on the quality of your stuff. These days there are so many BS-articles written even by you guys that I can&#x27;t keep up and I really like how someone in the comment section can just point out wrong statements for everyone. I can read through the BS of trolls, just give the people a choice! If you want your comment section to be clean just implement a HN-like upvote system.

I feel its about time we have thumbs up, thumbs down and a troll marker on comment section.

In a similar vein, CNBC quietly turned their comments off in the last couple of weeks.

I think that it&#x27;s simply too easy to comment. If there were a cost or some kind of difficulty in doing it that slowed down the process and made people think twice it would be completely different.

no comments = fake news

It looks like a move to control dissent as people comment their disagreements with a refute, to articles they disagree with.

This seems like the ideal project for a ML experiment. Offer an integrated comments section, attach the ability for humans to moderate it, and then feed the moderated items into your favorite classifier for training and see if it can learn how to mute the louder nuisances without blocking more civil discussion.<p>Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it&#x27;d be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.

The great thing about anonymous comments is you can use them to justify any behaviour you want.

I&#x27;ve always wondered at how few comments they get, maybe that makes them sad...

Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you.<p>Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.<p>If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results.<p>Meanwhile, I&#x27;ll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers.<p>I&#x27;ll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s.

I wish it didn&#x27;t fall on me to point this out, but bigotry is a political position, and trolling is a personality flaw.<p>Honestly, I&#x27;ve never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I&#x27;ve been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE&#x27;s comment section was a liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which was always pervasive.<p>The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the <i>intelligentsia</i>, have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike us. What we haven&#x27;t got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi&#x27;s of the world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering them things you can&#x27;t actually give them. I can&#x27;t tell you how many times I&#x27;ve criticized liberals who respond &quot;But conservatives [...]!&quot;.<p>We&#x27;re supposed to be better than them. That&#x27;s the whole point.