Comment Censorship Echo Chamber

a reply to: Edumakated

This is something that I know for a fact they've discussed at some of these large media companies.

The issue is that no one really knows how to make an open comment system that's always going to be constructive. Trolls, shills, and jerks are simply the cost of doing business in an open platform. I know for a fact that the idea has been thrown around from time to time of pushing all comments to social media managed platforms and then regulating social media so that they would have to somehow keep the trolls off.

In theory that sounds like a solution, but in practice it's near impossible. The closest anyone has really gotten here is China's citizen rating system, but such a system goes against many of our ideals as a nation as anonymous speech is a requirement to keep it free. When speech is free from consequences though, it becomes very hard to force it to be constructive... and perhaps it shouldn't always be constructive because a good rant every now and then can be quite healthy.

And to be fair, I don't think 100% of the blame here lies in the comments... sure many comments can be written in bad faith, but we can look to authors too. I'll use ATS as an example. If you remember when we used to get a bunch of celebrity AMA's, some would truly engage with the posters. Others wrote their opening post then avoided all criticisms of their work and only promoted the comments that benefited them. A lot of media is the same way, and the authors don't write their content in good faith. They simply want a platform to write where they can censor the challenges to their work.

a reply to: Aazadan

To a point sure, but trump casting himself as the “hero of the trolls” has gained him the “support” of trolls everywhere..

So I would bet dollars to donuts most are not especially racist or hatefilled, more anarcists..

They are “skankhunt42” from south park.. aka kyles dad..

People who think his trolling is funny..


B) yep

originally posted by: pavil
a reply to: Aazadan

Just look at redit to see how people manipulate things to push things up or even worse, how they down vote things into Oblivion there. It's pretty obvious manipulation.

Reddit has shown why a comment voting system doesn't work. It's rare that a comment is down voted for being bad. More often, a comment is down voted for being disagreeable. I use Reddit a lot, just a couple weeks ago actually I had a comment down voted to over -100 score in one subreddit, and an exact copy/paste of that comment gain over 1000 score as well as a gold in another subreddit merely based on how receptive each community was to the comment rather than the quality of the content.

originally posted by: Edumakated
*snip*

What prompted me to post this thread is that Crains, a well known business newspaper in Chicago shut down their comments section now. They editors tend to lean left, so comments were often pointing this out.

Anyway, just a rant on something I've noticed lately.

I think you're wrong to blame just leftist sites. Maybe a lot of news organizations or website owners lean left? By and large, I haven't seen any more or less difference. What I have noticed is vile sickening poisonous comments exist on all sides because people are animals when the gloves come off. We work mighty hard as a species to conceal this. What's bad isn't we're animals, but we're so quick to shame and repress it. We're fast to blame past people because they're a remote helpless victim to our cross-examination. Truth is, the harsher our attacks on history, the less we know ourselves. Because if history teaches anything, it's that we don't learn anything from history.

a reply to: Aazadan

Yeah and the speed at which things get down voted or up voted to Front page, points to coordinated manipulation by groups of people.