'Comment cops' help manage websites

Morning folks, I heard this on the way home yesterday and thought I might post it since it involved both Huffington Post, which is often used as a source here, and because it touches on a halmark of this site -- member moderation.

Companies and media outlets are starting to outsource comment monitoring responsibilities to companies that specifically watch out for inappropriate comments.

Time was when all that websites wanted was traffic. Eyeballs and attention. One way to do that, one way to get some buzz going and make readers feel involved was having a comments section. News stories, sports teams, even big consumer brands invited people to chime in and speak up. That helped build vibrant online communities that are sometimes liabilities. The muck that flies around in your typical online comment stream can devalue a brand, and can scare off advertisers and, eventually readers. With so many companies soliciting your comments, the work of policing those comments then has become big business.

Pluck moderators review thousands of so-called "user abuse events" every day -- applying a heavier or a lighter hand depending on the customer. The NFL, for example, might be fine with comments that wouldn't fly on NPR.

With 3.2 million comments in June, the Huffington Post didn't hire a company to moderate. It bought one. This summer, the politics and news site acquired Adaptive Semantics, and its proprietary software called "JuLiA."

The transcript of the bit from market place is at Marketplace.org and can be listened to there as well.

I myself found it interesting, though not all that surprising, that there is software that can do the moderation sort of thing.

no news really it has been happening here on ats for years now?
second line.

Originally posted by allprowolfy
no news really it has been happening here on ats for years now?
second line.

Correct, which is why I put it here and not in the breaking news section.

Actually, the thing that caught me ears here was that Huffington Post is using software to try to automatically locate situations that need moderation rather than *just* relying on user moderation. Of course, they still do have users moderate -- giving them "digital badges" of deputization.. kind of like member mods, but not quite as cool. *smirk*

reply to post by rogerstigers


Awe, and the plot thickens! i am going to go out on a limb here and say possibly ATS -other forum moderator control web sites have been testing grounds for years?

That may be why i have seen some clowns on this sight get away with any thing and everything and some well written people banned the first or second time they post?

Thus the reason i have kept absurd comments by posters to myself in quit sometime!!!

P.S somehow i knew this though!

Originally posted by allprowolfy
reply to post by rogerstigers

 

Awe, and the plot thickens! i am going to go out on a limb here and say possibly ATS -other forum moderator control web sites have been testing grounds for years?

That may be why i have seen some clowns on this sight get away with any thing and everything and some well written people banned the first or second time they post?

Thus the reason i have kept absurd comments by posters to myself in quit sometime!!!

P.S somehow i knew this though!

LOL, hard to say. I imagine if SO is using ModBots, it's kept under wraps. I can't see them doing it, though, the mod activity is just screwed up enough to feel all human. A computer would be a bit more cut and dry and not really subject for debate much.

I also noticed in the article that Mrs. Huffington admits that they are tracking user interest for advertisement reasons:

The HuffPost requires commenters to register -- and it encourages them to use their real names. That makes things more civil. It also creates a data trail of individual passions and preferences. Huffington says that data might be useful down the road.

Huffington: Making sure that they get more of the content that particularly interests them, and then selling advertising around that content.

I don't really know where I stand on this. I guess if they don't let it taint their journalism, it is probably ok, but it seems a bit too intrusive if they are doing it on a personal level.

On another interesting note in the interview, they mention how the concept of anonymous posting is going away because of Facebook, which I find hilarious mainly because my dogs and cats have facebook pages and their own email addresses. I am pretty certain, if it was that easy to create accounts for animals, I can pretty easily create and account for some random pseudonym.

BTW, thanks for replying. I was iffy on posting this article in the first place. I thought it might just sit and age like many of my threads do.

[edit on 8-3-2010 by rogerstigers]

reply to post by rogerstigers


S&F Missed this one.

...This sounds like the tip of the iceberg of social marketing (scroll down a bit).