The Globe And Mail Tries Something Revolutionary: Actually Giving A Damn About User Comments & Conversation

from the actually-giving-a-damn dept

Wed, Nov 30th 2016 12:59pm — Karl Bode

For some time now the trend du jour among many media outlets has been to ban news comments -- then insult reader intelligence by proclaiming this is being done out of a deep-rooted love of "conversation" and "relationships." You see, these websites aren't banning comments because they're too lazy or cheap to weed out spam and trolls, but because they love you. These sites aren't outsourcing all human interactivity to Facebook because bean counters can't monetize quality on-site discourse in a pie chart, they're doing it because they care so very deeply about their community.

Why, oh, why can't you people understand that giving the middle finger and a shiny new muzzle to your entire readership is an act of love?

With this being the intellectually-stunted direction of the entire online media sector, it's kind of refreshing to see websites that actually try to solve problems and give a flying damn about quality on-site community. Case in point: albeit overshadowed by some notable downsizing at the outlet, Canada's The Globe and Mail this week announced that the website will be trying something new: acknowledging that ye olde, maligned news comment section is worth saving, while building a new system that leans on the community itself to keep discourse spam-free and relatively civil:

"Our new platform asks users to review other comments made on the site before posting their own. Each comment is reviewed by the community for quality and civility. This peer-to-peer moderation process incentivizes users to be more respectful to each other regardless of how different their opinions may be.

The decision to adopt Civil Comments was made after an eight-week trial that ran on the Politics section of our website. We noticed that the number of comments for that section remained stable during the test period while the percentage of comments that were either rejected or flagged dropped significantly, pointing to an overall uplift in the quality of conversations."

Shockingly, during the Globe and Mail's trial, they found that the very same communities most of these sites claim are utterly irredeemable and untameable, actually participated in working to make the comment section better:

"We understand how passionate our users are and we welcome different views and opinions. But we also recognize that sometimes things can get out of hand.

We also believe that the vast majority of our community knows how to play fair. In fact, our trial showed that, with a few exceptions, our readers were willing to adopt this new approach in order to elevate the tone of the debate within comments. We were thrilled to see that."

That shouldn't really be surprising. We've noted time and time again that it doesn't really take much effort to improve comment discourse, and that the real problem was that websites weren't even god-damned trying. In fact, one study showed that just having someone from the website occasionally show up and treat commenters like human beings had a profound impact on the quality of the comment section. Imagine what you could actually accomplish if you threw even a modest amount of time and money at the issue?

But then again, many websites aren't giving up on comments because it's really all that hard to save them, they're giving up because it's just easier and cheaper to ignore these users completely, even if on-site conversation increases impressions and time spent on-site. The reality is that many editors and websites just really like the idea of returning to the bygone era of letters to the editor where they get to control the direction of public discourse, even if that ignores the very bidirectional nature of the internet itself. They also can't admit they like having corrections to story errors in not quite such a conspicuous location.

In reality, the push to kill news comments is largely thanks to laziness and a desire for less public transparency. Editors can't admit this, so instead we get obnoxious missives claiming that entire user bases are being gagged out of a deep-rooted love of engagement. Hopefully more sites will follow The Globe and Mail's lead and try a little something called actually giving a damn.

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Filed Under: caring, comments, community
Companies: globe and mail

30 Comments

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Darkhog, 30 Nov 2016 @ 1:11pm

Fun Fact
EFF Deeplinks blog still doesn't have ANY comment section. But of course you won't write about THAT.

I guess EFF value community's responses and conversation pretty darn much.
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geddy2112 (profile), 30 Nov 2016 @ 1:16pm

civility?!?
...on the internet?!?!...someone, please hand me my smelling salts....I feel faint.
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I.T. Guy, 30 Nov 2016 @ 1:31pm

Re: Fun Fact
They now have meds for that ya know.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Nov 2016 @ 1:55pm

Re: civility?!?
Name one civil civilization.

Try me, I bet I could tell you a very damning fact about them.

The internet will never be civil because people can't be. We can have a society, but we will never be civil. If we could be civil, government would never have ever been invented.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:04pm

Re: Fun Fact
EFF Deeplinks blog still doesn't have ANY comment section. But of course you won't write about THAT.

Um. You want us to write about every random website that doesn't decide to turn on comments? Why?

Should EFF's blog have comments? Sure. Maybe.

But that wasn't the issue here that were talking about. This was about media companies who HAD comments and basically ignored them until shutting them down claiming they were doing it because they were so interested in listening to their community.

Do you not do nuance? Or were you just trying (and failing) to be snarky?
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Thad, 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:21pm

Re: Re: civility?!?
But that's kind of exactly what we're talking about it, isn't it? People can be influenced toward civility through a system of rules and social pressures.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:33pm

Why do you hate us so much?
If getting rid of and ignoring comments is an act of love, why do we put up with your foul hatred?
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:40pm

Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
emphasis on the social pressures. G&M appears to have got this, as their new system leverages social pressure much more than rules. Sites removing their comments section don't get this, as they're not just outsourcing their comment management, they are removing social pressure (the pressures on the third party site aren't going to align neatly with their readership's own social system).
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Darkhog, 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:46pm

Re: Re: Fun Fact
Not every random company. But EFF as a foundation championing free and open Internet should lead by example.

And while _cause_ may be different (disabling comments vs. not having them in the first place), the _effect_ (silencing people) is the all the same.

I have nothing (except that thing I'm writing about) against EFF and will donate to it once I have steady income that can support both me and my donation efforts (not to mention I often buy Humble Bundles to support EFF), but yeah, they should lead by example.

Frankly I'd like to see EFF's reasoning behind not having comments. Is that server space? Use external comment solution such as Disqus. Is that moderation? Do what hero of this article did.
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Daydream, 30 Nov 2016 @ 2:51pm

xkcd 810 mentioned an idea like this, I think.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive

Is it the same thing? Rate other comments as good/bad when making your own?
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geddy2112 (profile), 30 Nov 2016 @ 3:00pm

Re: civility?!?
I agree with you that there will always be a faction of society that gets off on not acting in ways that society would like them to and they will always exist. that puts the onus on the vast majority of the rest of us to extend that olive branch, much like the globe and mail are coming around to doing. acknowledge the trolls, manage them if you can, but don't let them stop the majority of us from acting civil and engaging in debate and discussions around any story or topic.
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Thad, 30 Nov 2016 @ 3:21pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
Right, user moderation, when properly deployed (as in not just a cow-clicker "like" button), is an excellent method of managing comments. Ars's system is good but not perfect (posts with many downvotes and few upvotes get hidden; unfortunately this can devolve, as community voting often does, into a popularity contest; I try to do the right thing and upvote comments that are well-thought-out and downvote ones that are a waste of time, regardless of whether I agree with them or not); Slashdot's is excellent but probably too complicated to roll out on most sites.
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Thad, 30 Nov 2016 @ 3:26pm

Re: Re: civility?!?

acknowledge the trolls, manage them if you can

Right, and that's important: for the past twenty years people have been saying "Don't feed the trolls," and for small communities that's a fine solution. But it doesn't scale. The bigger the community, the more trolls there are going to be. And while most trolls might go away if people ignore them, some just escalate until it becomes impossible to ignore them (like, say, filling up the comments section of every Gawker site with violent GIFs a couple of years ago). You can't handle that kind of troll without active moderation, both from the community and from the owners.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 30 Nov 2016 @ 4:29pm

Re: Re: Re: Fun Fact
Not every random company. But EFF as a foundation championing free and open Internet should lead by example.

Hmm. I'm not sure "having comments" = "a free and open internet" so I'm not sure what argument you're making here. You seem to equate the two for no clear reason.
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TechDescartes (profile), 30 Nov 2016 @ 8:49pm

Hold Your Horses
This is the "Civil Comments" section. Just wait till they get the "Criminal Comments" section up and running.
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PaulT (profile), 1 Dec 2016 @ 2:03am

Re: Fun Fact
"EFF Deeplinks blog still doesn't have ANY comment section. But of course you won't write about THAT."

Did they have comments previously, and then remove them under the guise of "serving their community" or "enabling conversation" when all they're doing is decreasing the level of discourse or (at best) reducing moderation overhead?

Yes? that's a good, relevant story and you should submit it using the available facilities. Techdirt can be quite good at covering a range of subject, but they won't be keeping an eye on every random story, especially if it's not being reported elsewhere (Techdirt's main remit is generating conversation about existing topics, not a primary source of investigative journalism).

No? then who cares? That has nothing to do with the story at hand, which is the hypocrisy and counter-productiveness of removing comments while pretending to have the conversation you just removed. There's millions of sites which don't have user comments, but nobody's saying that every site should have them. Only that removing them under these pretences is wrong. If they're not doing that, then all you're doing is saying "EFF don't act the way *I* think they should act", which isn't particularly constructive, nor does it reflect badly on this site for not randomly writing about that one example.

I suspect this is partly why some sites insist on having comments removed. Even if you don't mind the trolls and spam, there's always someone attacking you for not writing what *they* want you to to write...
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PaulT (profile), 1 Dec 2016 @ 2:18am

Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
My opinion has always been this - not feeding the trolls is fine to a point. Obnoxious, swearing children or people obviously just trying to pick a fight can usually be ignored safely.

The problem is, many trolls aren't like this. They lie more subtly, create fictions that seem almost plausible, make accusations that to the unknowing might seem true. You have to fight there. not because they will get rid of the troll, but because they will educate others to the truth. I know I've learned a lot about subjects over the years just from the links and explanations posted to refute the kind of pathetic human being who gets their kicks from reposting debunked lies to kill conversation.
Not feeding them means the lies might be believed instead.
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Page 539 - Google Books Result, 1 Dec 2016 @ 2:41am

Re: Re: Fun Fact
Well said.

The EFF Deeplinks blog is just that, a one-stop-shop that aggregates posts from around the internet that falls under their purview. A comments section there would not be appropriate. Also, I suspect that the EFF have limited resources, and managing a comments section would HAVE to be an overhead low down on their priorities.
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KIRK: I'm not sure, but I think we've been insulte, 1 Dec 2016 @ 2:48am

Re: civility?!?
SPOCK: Indeed, gentlemen. May I point out that I had an opportunity to observe your counterparts here quite closely. They were brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilised, treacherous, In every way, splendid examples of homo sapiens, the very flower of humanity. I found them quite refreshing.
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wereisjessicahyde (profile), 1 Dec 2016 @ 5:41am

Re: Re: Re: Fun Fact
The EFF doesn't provide 'one-click pizza delivery either, nor links to window cleaning services. Quite frankly, I'm done with them. They had their chance.
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Thad, 1 Dec 2016 @ 8:06am

Re: Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
True, that's a good point too. Trolls who show up and deliberately spread misinformation -- those comments might survive for years, be stumbled upon in search engine results by people who aren't part of the community and aren't familiar with the topic, and seem reasonable to those people in that context. Refuting those posts may be a thankless task, but sometimes it's worth the effort.
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Anonymous Coward, 1 Dec 2016 @ 9:08am

Users reviewing (or censoring) other users' comments. What could go wrong...
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Derek Kerton (profile), 1 Dec 2016 @ 11:40am

Chilling FX?
Karl, you wrote
"But then again, many websites aren't giving up on comments because it's really all that hard to save them, they're giving up because it's just easier and cheaper to ignore these users completely, "

Isn't it also true that many websites are killing comments sections because they don't want to bother or are afraid of legal actions, law enforcement inquiries, and brand damage of being viewed as "responsible" for all the content on their site, even if it was posted by third parties?

I know Techdirt often talks about Section 230 protection, but most people have never heard of it. It is not all-powerful, and it doesn't stop lawsuits and attacks, even if they can be won using Section 230. An easier solution for websites is just to kill the conversation.

It's chicken shit, and as you wrote, it sends all the community, and thus all the valuable business to Facebook. And then the news companies complain about how Facebook is making more money than them.

It won't happen, but Section 230 needs to be its own separate law. It needs to be publicized and well-known. It might even rise to the importance of meriting a slot in the constitution. Otherwise, conversations will be killed for expedience.
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Wyrm (profile), 1 Dec 2016 @ 8:44pm

community moderation? really?
You're advocating for crowd-sourced moderation as one possible solution when the US just elected one of the worst trolls in history as their President?
Any other brilliant idea? XD
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PaulT (profile), 2 Dec 2016 @ 1:00am

Re: community moderation? really?
Is this better or worse than having no commenting at all, though?

Depends on the community, I suppose. The community here on Techdirt, for example. I see plenty of spam and troll posts that are hidden because they're reported, along with a few people whining that their personal attacks on other users are being unfairly "censored". I regularly click through and read hidden posts, and I can't honestly remember the last time I saw a genuine post that hidden.

I dare say that's part of the idea. Warring factions removing each others' posts can only go on for so long, so it's expected that they'll learn to be civil. Whether that works or not depends on whether the community attracts intelligent mature adults or emotionally stunted children.
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Wendy Cockcroft, 2 Dec 2016 @ 2:31am

Re: community moderation? really?
Americans ultimately had a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Comments moderation is a different thing.
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Ped_EkSing, 2 Dec 2016 @ 5:13pm

Community Feedback
This kinda crap reminds me of the multiple defenses by spouse-abusers.
“I only hit you because I love you.”
“If you didn’t make me -blank- you…”
“It’s all YOUR fault I’m verbally-abusing you.”

And so on.

Give me a break.
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BernardoVerda (profile), 2 Dec 2016 @ 8:49pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
Have you ever noticed how, on Ars (a.k.a. Ars Technica) forums, the "hidden" posts can still garner even more downvotes *after* they've reached the threshold for becoming "hidden" comment -- often getting multiple times the number of downvotes needed to trigger the "hidden" status.

Which means that people like me generally click on the collapsed post in question anyhow (as "hidden" on Ars really just means "collapsed, because so many readers have rated it as a "poor" or otherwise deficient comment), then after reading, agreed that it was indeed substandard -- and added another downvote.

Hmmmm...
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BernardoVerda (profile), 2 Dec 2016 @ 9:06pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: civility?!?
Exactly why I broke down and registered to my first forum...

Someone on the internet was wrong.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 May 2017 @ 1:09am

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