Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.

Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.

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.

Meanwhile, I'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.

I'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.

Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE'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.

The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the intelligentsia, have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike us. What we haven't got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi's of the world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering them things you can't actually give them. I can't tell you how many times I've criticized liberals who respond "But conservatives [...]!".

We're supposed to be better than them. That's the whole point.

Comments with relatively unpopular political opinions on the site breeds discussion and views.

Comments that are literally "kill all ___" don't, scare advertisers and put your brand at risk.

Most of those comments fall in the latter camp. Look at any comments section. There's a thread on my local paper's site right now about a bicycle theft: "This n* needs to get special treatment in the big house. Confiscate the home and demo it eventually they'll turn ____town into one big lot and then can start a rebuilding in the area."

I think you're being extremely disingenuous here though. Have you actually hung around any of the poorly moderated comment sections on major news sites? Most of them are filled with flaming piles of word vomit, not the kind of enlightened right wing perspectives you claim are being censored.

Not if getting banned means they have to buy a new account to post again.

I don't know if things are still like this though -- I haven't had a subscription for several years.

But I'm pretty sure that was true of the internet before Reddit came along, too. And I don't see how combining all of those discussion groups under the same domain made the world any worse than back when they were three separate message boards.

I'm no longer looking for an alternative. Wishing for the good old days of dial-up BBS like Totse is useless as well. However, there's still hope this will all turn out to be a narcissism fad which will eventually give way.

The same is true of the Web as a whole, at least until we allow governments and other special interests to start nailing various doors shut.

It's simply not worth the effort. Forget about the political topics you mention for a second. Changing minds in that realm through conversation is know to be hard. Look at something easier like conveying factual information about non-controversial topics.

Even in that case, if a topic is complicated enough that an early 20's newbie can't pick it up from a 1000-word medium essay, forget it. People who engage in trying to inform are fighting a constant uphill battle with no upside if they succeed.

Now pile the baggage back on of trying to disagree the "conventional wisdom" of a social bubble. A few try, most give up, and the spiteful join the jokers in trolling.

If you care about your karma level, you have to be careful about it. There are some perfectly reasonable positions that attract downvotes from some quarters. At the end of the day, it's just internet points, though. Sometimes unpopular things need to be said, if for no other reason than to register the existence of dissenting opinions.

(To be clear, I think a lot of the delta here is a question of scale as much as anything. I'm well aware that there were always virulent racists and ideological misogynists present in the userbase.)

Anyway, we disagree and that is that. Thanks for a reasonable interaction.

Nope, you're not "in a bubble" for holding those positions. I see parent poster as listing some things that happen to be popular in the bubble, even if they're also generic american left. When discussing a "bubble", it doesn't matter what the positions happen to be, but how they're discussed, how uniform opinions are, how well they understand where their own positions fit into the contemporary political spectrum of people who share their government, how dissent is handled, etc...

Is that genuinely* what you think?*

Now, this remark is how I know you're in the bubble.

As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.

MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.

This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.

I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)

It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.

Demonstrate the cost/benefit advantage of having to police these garbage piles and maybe I'll buy it. But I don't believe that most people read the Times or CBC or WaPo for the comment section. More likely they read those outlets despite them.

I agree with Vice. Leave the discussion to dedicated services like Reddit, HN, Twitter, Facebook, etc, and focus on core competencies: producing top notch content.

(a comically high amount of resources, IMHO; a good part of what their human editors do could be triaged through automated systems)

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/usercontent/usercon...

I think that's the kind of point he's getting at. Dismissing people entirely as not relevant because their conversational norms differ from yours is the kind of things that leads to shocking events. This doesn't imply you should feel any more positively or negatively about these people, just that their comments may add explanatory power to your model of the world. When reality doesn't match your model, don't blame reality.

Actually, a few journalists who spent serious time hitting the streets outside London concluded that Brexit would win or at least was quite likely, just by talking to people. They were largely ignored because they weren't "experts", just people talking to other people. John Harris being an example of that.

Those were not shocking events. People wanted a prediction with more confidence than those sources of prediction were able to provide. Faced with the hard limitations of existing predictive tools, people that should damn well know better started listening when they found someone to tell them "Nate Silver has Trump at 25%" really meant "Hillary will win."

It would not have been irresponsible to account for the possibility of the less likely but still possible outcome. In fact it would be irresponsible to NOT be prepared for it.

>Either the tools we have to measure these things are inadequate, and must be improved.

We're never going to be able to predict the future with total accuracy. The question is how we want to face them limitations of that accuracy. People who don't take "no" for an answer will read too much into unreliable predictions and attempt to rebuild systems for more predictable results regardless of externalities. The question should be how we adapt to that reality.

No one addresses the obvious weaknesses, they just say "this is the best we have", but then act with confidence in the predictions, rather than admit we don't know.

> Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise... we had to ban countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and subjects, doxxing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against pretty much every group imaginable.

> We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving forward.

Things have changed, you should look at what kind of reporting they are actually doing these days, it might surprise you (in a good way).

Almost nobody thought that was seriously going to happen. To claim otherwise is edgy revisionism.

Can't comment on the others, as I was not following closely enough beforehand to get any reading on the public zeitgiest.

The New York Times has suffered hits to its credibility, fake photographers, plagiarism and such, but that doesn't necessarily negate all the work done by their talented staff. There's still good work being done there despite those setbacks. It's a fallacy to instantly discount everything as without merit, putting it on the same level as Breitbart.

Like always you need to regard things with a critical eye.

You, apparently, since you talked of "the same level as Breitbart", though don't apparently know what that is.

Also, if you have specific knowledge of a subject area, you might be inclined to a kind of reversal of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: judging a publication on you area of expertise alone, when publications may differ in their relative strengths.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/14/media/breitbart-incendiary-h...

If you want a private conversation, then HN comments are the wrong venue.