Al Jazeera Gives A 'Voice To The Voiceless' By Killing News Comments

from the enjoy-your-new-muzzle dept

We've noted time and time again how numerous websites have been killing news comments because they're too lazy and too cheap to cultivate an on-site community, and/or don't like having story errors pointed out in quite such a transparent, conspicuous location. Of course editors and publishers can never admit this is their real motivation, instead offering a rotating crop of disingenuous prattle about how they're muzzling their readers and shoving them over to Facebook because they're just so very into building relationships and are breathlessly-dedicated to improving conversation.

This week Al Jazeera joined the hottest trend in media, penning a missive over at Medium about how they're banning public news comments as part of their quest to... wait for it... give a voice to the voiceless:

The mission of Al Jazeera is to give a voice to the voiceless, and healthy discussion is an active part of this. When we first opened up comments on our website, we hoped that it would serve as a forum for thoughtful and intelligent debate that would allow our global audience to engage with each other. However, the comments section was hijacked by users hiding behind pseudonyms spewing vitriol, bigotry, racism and sectarianism. The possibility of having any form of debate was virtually non-existent.

Except that's simply not true. Numerous websites, including this one, have shown repeatedly it's possible to discuss complicated, divisive subjects without the metaphorical house burning down. Yes, it's true that when you don't moderate, show up, or give much of a damn about your comment system, it's quick to devolve into a cesspool of trolls and nincompoops. But the reality is that websites can't monetize quality discourse during budget meetings, so it's easier to just outsource all conversation to the homogeneous blather zone of Facebook, where listening to what your own customers are saying becomes somebody else's problem:

`Over time, we found social media to be the preferred platform for our audience to debate the issues that matter the most to them. We encourage our audience to continue to interact with us this way. We realise that this move will come as a disappointment to the members of our audience who did try and engage in thoughtful debate on our site. However, we will be working hard over the coming months to figure out how best to bring back debate to aljazeera.com. To continue the debate on social media, please share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page and get in touch via Twitter.

Again, does anything really give a "voice to the voiceless," foster quality conversation, or cultivate relationships quite like muzzling your customers, then shoving them toward a massive social media site where their thoughts, insights and contributions will get lost in a tsunami of prattle? It's clear that countless publishers really love the idea of reverting back to the era of "letters to the editor," when public feedback to your reporting could be carefully censored and repackaged as a genuine dialogue with your readership. But this line of thinking is a disservice to the quickly-evolving conversation the news has become.

I keep waiting for a news website to ban comments then candidly admit it was because they just didn't give much of a damn. Until then, the best we'll get are missives about how the best way to bring a voice to the voiceless is apparently with a good, swift kick in the ass.

Filed Under: comments, community, voice
Companies: al jazeera

NPR Gives Up On News Comments; After All, Who Cares What Your Customers Have To Say?

from the this-muzzle-represents-my-love-for-you dept

We've noted time after time how the trend du jour in online media is to kill your news comment section, muzzle your valuable on-site community, then couch the decision under all manner of disingenuous prattle. Reuters and Recode, for example, killed visitor news comments several years ago because, they claimed, the companies really value conversation. The Verge also tinkered with killing comments, purportedly because it just really valued relationships. As we all know, nothing quite "builds relationships" and gets the conversation going like a muzzle, a wave, and a swift digital kick in the ass.

Other websites couch their decision to mute their users under the pretense that it's just an "experiment," and the website will return with something more interactive and wonderful down the line. More often than not, this never happens. Case in point is NPR, which announced last summer that it too would be banning all public community feedback out of a deep rooted love for building community and audience engagement:

"After much experimentation and discussion, we've concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users. In order to prioritize and strengthen other ways of building community and engagement with our audience, we will discontinue story-page comments on NPR.org on August 23."

Ironically, public comments on NPR's post at the time were hugely negative, with numerous loyal readers saying the act of pushing them over to Facebook was, in effect, a giant middle finger to the readership. But because interesting discourse and community can't always be directly monetized by bean counters, this blowback was largely ignored. While NPR hinted that it might bring back comments eventually after some experimentation, a new blog post points out that won't be happening. Why? NPR traffic went up anyway despite the decision:

"At the time commenting was ended, there was speculation that the number of users coming to NPR.org would drop. In fact, the number of users for the May-to-July period grew 18 percent in 2017 compared with the year-earlier period, according to Google Analytics numbers Goo provided. (Year-over-year monthly growth has been as high as 37 percent.)"

Except the spike in NPR traffic many have had nothing to do with comments one way or the other, and could be easily attributable to the fact that the current U.S. political environment has obtained historical levels of batshit. It's also myopic to weigh the benefits of news comments by just traffic. Comments, when managed to minimize idiocy, provide an easy, public way to hold writers and publishers accountable for misleading claims or story errors in a highly visible location. Though few publishers can admit it, eliminating this public forum and returning to era of non-transparent letters to the editor is a major incentive for this shift.

At the end of the day, this fashionable assault on ye olde comment section has little to do with valuing community and conversation, and everything to do with illusory control and trying to save money. NPR admitted as much to the latter last year when asked about the decision on Twitter:

Except this narrative that giving a damn about your online community has to be time consuming and expensive is also not really supported by the facts. Studies have shown it's not really that hard to cultivate a healthier on-site comment section by simply having site employees and writers show up and treat the readership like human beings. Again, though, because the act of actually caring about quality discourse can't be directly monitored and displayed on a pie chart, it's being ignored. And that's a mistake in an era where news as a community conversation is more important than ever.

Will the world end with the loss of online news comments? No. But they do provide users with an easy and transparent way to debate, discuss and treat news as exactly what it is in the modern era: a conversation. Removing this public forum is a disservice to the news industry at large, and pretending it's being done out of some noble regard for higher human interaction only adds insult to injury.

Filed Under: comments, community, npr
Companies: npr

New Study Essentially Suggests That Publishers Should Do CwF + RtB Instead Of Going Legal To Combat Piracy

from the yup dept

We have talked about the power of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, along with using public shaming, as tools for combating piracy in its various forms. Tools far better, in fact, than twisting in litigious winds hoping that the construct of law will be sufficient to curb natural human behavior... and finding out that it isn't. What these routes offer content producers is a way to ingratiate themselves with their fans, building a community that not only wants to buy content themselves, but also will decry any attempt to pirate that content by others. Morality is shaped by the herd, in other words, so having the herd on your side finds content producers a powerful ally.

But philosophy like that doesn't penetrate industry in and of itself. Perhaps, then, data and academic studies may. The International Journal of Business Environment recently released just such a study suggesting that content providers are far better off reaching out and connecting with fans, including those pirating their works, rather than trying to fight piracy legally.

According to Eva Hofmann of the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK and Elfriede Penz of the Institute for International Marketing Management, at Vienna University of Economics and Business, in Austria, the unauthorised sharing of digital content is well-entrenched in popular culture. However, they have discerned a difference in the way those downloading pirated content and the legal downloaders decide on how to obtain the content they desire from the Internet.

The researchers note that inherent in the problem for copyright holders is that digital goods can be duplicated endlessly without loss of fidelity, making piracy easy but also suggesting that the value of such goods as being less than traditional, physical items in the realm of content, such as CDs and DVDs.

This nicely outlines why piracy exists at the levels it does: there is something natural in deciding that something that can be reproduced infinitely in a digital manner at no cost differs from a physical good that cannot. It's the reason why piracy and theft simply aren't the same thing. This doesn't make copyright infringement or piracy morally acceptable, of course, but it explains why the moral equation for those doing the piracy is inherently different. Everyone knows this intrinsically, even if some major content industry players want to pretend otherwise.

The study's abstract itself suggests that the best method for combating this is to engage with the public to change that moral equation.

Respondent groups differ in the effect of social consensus on the decision-making process. Additionally, the entire issue-contingent model is important in internet piracy research. From a practical view and based on social consensus results, it is essential for companies to establish sentiments that unauthorised downloading is an unacceptable behaviour within a specific social group that is highly relevant to downloaders.

In other words, creating a real connection with fans that are also given a real reason to buy content alters the moral equation for those that seek out that content. If enough minds are changed in that manner, it will have an exponential moral effect as those fans of the producer both promote the buying of the content and speak out or subvert attempts to pirate it. It works on both levels: convincing more people to buy the product and creating a fan-base hungry for the content provider to succeed so as to get more content.

CwF + RtB, in other words, along with a fan-based army willing to publicly shame pirates.

Filed Under: artists, community, connect with fans, copyright, fans, piracy, reason to buy

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

from the actually-giving-a-damn dept

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.

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

NPR The Latest Website To Prevent You From Commenting Because It Simply Adores 'Relationships' And 'Conversation'

from the this-muzzle-represents-my-love-for-you dept

For several years now we've documented the rise in websites that shutter their comment sections, effectively muzzling their own on-site communities. Usually this is because websites are too lazy and cheap to moderate or cultivate real conversation, or they're not particularly keen on having readers point out their inevitable errors in such a conspicuous location. But you can't just come out and admit this -- so what we get is all manner of disingenuous prattle from website editors about how the comments section is being closed because they just really value conversation, or are simply trying to build better relationships.

NPR appears to be the latest in this trend du jour, with Managing Editor of digital news Scott Montgomery penning a new missive over at the website saying the comments are closing as of August 23:

"After much experimentation and discussion, we've concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users. In order to prioritize and strengthen other ways of building community and engagement with our audience, we will discontinue story-page comments on NPR.org on August 23."

Again, nothing says we "love and are engaged with" our community quite like preventing them from being able to speak to you on site (this muzzle represents my love for you, darling). The logic is, as Montgomery proceeds to proclaim, that social media is just so wonderful, on-site dialogue is no longer important:

Social media is now one of our most powerful sources for audience interaction. Our desks and programs run more than 30 Facebook pages and more than 50 Twitter accounts. We maintain vibrant presences on Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr. Our main Facebook page reaches more than 5 million people and recently has been the springboard for hundreds of hours of live video interaction and audience-first projects such as our 18,000-member "Your Money and Your Life" group.

And while those are all excellent additional avenues of interaction and traffic generation, it's still not quite the same as building brand loyalty through cultivating community and conversation on site. By outsourcing all conversation to Facebook, you're not really engaging with your readers, you're herding them to a homogonized, noisy pasture where they're no longer your problem. In short, we want you to comment -- we just want you to comment privately or someplace else so our errors aren't quite so painfully highlighted and we no longer have to try to engage you publicly. All for the sake of building deeper relationships, of course.

Montgomery talked a little more about NPR's decision on Twitter, where Mathew Ingram (one of roughly three writers I've found who gives two flying damns about the negative impact of this trend) politely pondered if NPR really tried all that hard before giving up: Except, as we've noted time and time again, studies show that it's not really that hard to cultivate a healthier on-site comment section simply by showing up. Just having a writer or editor show up and treat readers like human beings dramatically improves the overall tone of the conversation. This isn't something that requires all that much time and effort. But because editors can't clearly quantify the benefits of giving a damn in this fashion, they've decided it's easier and cheaper to just give up.

Elsewhere on NPR's website user reaction to the news has been overwhelmingly negative, with many users saying they don't have social media accounts and appreciated the on-site ability to have vaguely intelligent conversation. Says one user:

They're getting rid of a great community of discussion. It's the best forum I've known, with people from all walks of life discussing the news with a moderate amount of intelligence, and a healthy dose of wit. I'm pretty upset. After the comments go, I won't visit NPR much anymore. There's not much content compared to other sites. It was the discussion that kept me coming back.

Another reader offers a more blunt take:

And the "public" in public radio goes away, except for the pleas for money. There's no interaction any more, emails are ignored, Twitter is useless, and Facebook is a gross invasion of privacy. Sad NPR. And worse that the supposed advocate for the listener backs the decision. Perhaps if NPR had actually involved itself with the commenting instead of isolating and offshoring it, you would have found that things would have worked better for you.

Sadly, like Bloomberg, Recode, Reuters, Popular Science, and other sites, NPR and Montgomery round out the announcement by claiming that muzzling your community somehow illustrates a love of "deeper relationships" and "conversation":

In the eight years since NPR first launched its online comment section, the world of social media has changed dramatically, as has NPR's digital presence. We're constantly asking ourselves where we can create the best dialogue with you and how we can deepen that relationship. It's a question we will keep asking because the way we communicate online will keep changing. We're looking forward to continuing the conversation.

That sounds so much lovelier than "nobody in our writing or editorial staff wants to take the time to cultivate local on-site community," "we're lazily cutting corners" or "we don't like having our mistakes highlighted publicly right below our articles," don't you think?

Filed Under: comments, community, relationships
Companies: npr

Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don't Work

from the shocking,-there dept

For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is "the answer" for the declining news business, we've been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really been "the news business" (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's always been the community and attention business. And in the past they were able to command such attention and build a community around news because they didn't have much competition. But the competitive landscape for community and attention has changed (massively) thanks to the internet. And putting up a paywall makes it worse. In most cases, it's limiting the ability of these newspapers to build communities or get attention, and actively pushing people away.

And, yes, sure, people will point to the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as proof that "paywalls work." But earth to basically every other publication: you're not one of those publications. The paywalls there only work because of the unique content they have, and even then they don't work as well as most people think.

Not surprisingly, more and more newspapers that bet on paywalls are discovering that they don't really work that well and were a waste of time and effort -- and may have driven away even more readers.

Of the paywalls erected in the past few years, many have delivered lackluster results, said Ken Doctor, a media consultant who writes the blog Newsonomics.

"The ones that were launched in 2012 to 2014 had good early results and they all largely stalled," he said.

"They are no longer gaining much in the way of new digital subscriptions, and their print is in rapid decline."

The article also quotes Alan Mutter who has been pointing out the fallacies around newspaper paywalls for probably longer than I have:

Paywalls can backfire also "because they put a barrier between the newspaper and the casual reader," he added.

"They are truncating the size of the digital market, when the most important factor for digital is scale."

Meanwhile, as newspapers are realizing this, even the "successful" paywall folks at the Wall Street Journal appear to be changing up its paywall to make it easier for non-paying users to read the articles.

This doesn't mean that you can't get money from readers -- but paywalls are a stupid way to do it. You're asking them to pay for the same kind of value that they can often get elsewhere. That's dumb. If you're charging, you should be charging for unique value and something different that only your publication can provide. General interest news is not that.

Filed Under: business models, community, journalism, news, newspapers, paywalls

What Should We Do About Linking To Sites That Block People Using Ad Blockers?

from the weigh-in dept

Earlier this week, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) -- the same organization whose boss Randall Rothenberg recently suggested that if you use an ad blocker you hate free speech and are, possibly, a racist -- put out some guidelines for publishers looking to "combat" ad blockers. The basic crux of it: the IAB suggests that sites block people who use ad blockers from reading their content. They even created a puke-inducing acronym "DEAL" and some code for "detecting" ad blockers. Detecting being the D:

1. Detect ad blocking, in order to initiate a conversation
2. Explain the value exchange that advertising enables
3. Ask for changed behavior in order to maintain an equitable exchange
4. Lift restrictions or Limit access in response to consumer choice

Of course, it should be no surprise that this is happening at the same time a ton of online publishers seem to be following this plan exactly. It really kicked off late last year when Forbes and GQ started telling users that they couldn't read their content unless they whitelisted them on their ad blockers. In the last few weeks, Wired joined in with the same basic plan. And just this week, the NY Times announced plans to do something similar.

Publications had tried this in the past. You may recall, actually, that back in 2010, Ars Technica (owned by Conde Nast, which also owns Wired and GQ) implemented a very similar plan, blocking anyone using ad blockers -- but the outcry was so vocal and loud that it dropped the plan later that very same day. At the time, we pointed out how it seemed like a really bad idea to blame your own community, and that still holds true today. Blocking people using ad blockers seems pretty stupid for a variety of reasons.

And a big one is this: as far as I can tell, all of these sites block me. And I don't use an ad blocker. Admittedly, I do use "NoScript" to block untrusted javascript, but I happily whitelist it for many sites that I generally trust. In fact, I'm beginning to think that that's why I'm blocked on most of these sites. Others on Twitter have told me that they don't run into the ad blocker wall with NoScript. But I've noticed that on all of these sites, I had previously whitelisted the sites in question in NoScript, and potentially that's why they're now blocking me, claiming (falsely) that I'm using an ad blocker.

So here's my big question: should we at Techdirt still link to these sites if we see worthwhile stories on them (and if we realize they're blocking people using ad blockers)? As we've said plenty of times in the past, we not only don't get upset if you're using an ad blocker, we allow you to turn off ads if you don't like them on our site -- though we do politely request (not require or demand) that you support us in other ways, such as through our Insider Shop, our Deal Store or our ongoing crowdfunding campaign. But should we link to sites -- even if the content is good -- if they might annoy our community?

To be honest, this is part of the reason why I think this war on ad blockers is idiotic. Even if I was using an ad blocker, if I linked to an article on Wired or Forbes, I'd be sending them a lot more traffic, and even if some of those users were using ad blockers, many would not be. Thus, they're actually losing out on significant ad impressions by making it more difficult for me to read their stuff and link others to it. And, obviously, that's one reason to not link to such sites (not that they'd understand this -- they'd likely chalk up the decline in inbound traffic to some other factor, potentially blaming readers even more).

My general thought -- as of right now -- is that whenever possible, I will try to avoid linking to such sites, and will look around for alternative sources that are actually more welcoming. However, in some cases, I may still link to such sites, if the particular content really is unique and worthwhile to discuss here. But I did want to share my thinking with everyone here, and get your take on this as well. What do you think we should do when coming across potential stories to write about from those sites?

Filed Under: ad blocker blockers, ad blocking, community, linking

Ian Murdock In His Own Words: What Made Debian Such A Community Project

from the looking-into-the-details dept

As you may have heard, there was some tragic news a few weeks back, when the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, passed away under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Without more details, we didn't have much to report on concerning his passing, but Gabriella Coleman put together this wonderful look at how Murdock shaped the Debian community, and why it became such a strong and lasting group and product.

Ian Murdock in his Own Words: "The package system was not designed to manage software. It was designed to facilitate collaboration" Ian Murdock (1973-2015).

Peering in from the outside, the Debian operating system -- founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock, then a twenty-two-year-old college student -- might appear to have been created with hardcore, technologically-capable power users in mind. After all, it is one of the most respected distributions of Linux: as of this writing, the current Debian stable distribution, Jessie, has 56,865 individual open source projects packaged (in native Debian parlance software is referred to as packages), and Debian itself has functioned as the basis for over 350 derivative distributions. Debian developers are so dedicated to the pursuit of technical excellence that the project is simultaneously revered and criticized for its infrequent release cycle -- the project only releases a new version roughly every two years or so, when its Release Team deems it fit for public use. As its developers are fond of saying, "it will be released when it's ready."

But if you take a closer look, what is even more striking about Debian is that its vibrant community of developers are as committed to an array of ethical and legal principles as they are to technical excellence. These principles are enshrined in a bevy of documents -- a manifesto, a constitution, a social contract, and a set of legal principles -- which guide what can (and cannot) be done in the project. Its Social Contract, for instance, stipulates a set of crystal clear promises to the broader free software public, including a commitment to their users and transparency.

In 2001, I began anthropological fieldwork on free software in pursuit of my Ph.D. Debian's institutional model of software development and rich ethical density attracted me to it immediately. The ethical life of Debian is not only inscribed in its discursive charters, but manifests also in the lively spirit of deliberation and debate found in its mailing lists. Ian Murdock, who passed away tragically last week, had already left the endeavor when my research began, but his influence was clear. He had carefully nursed the project from inception to maturity during its first three years. As my research wrapped up in 2004, I was fortunate enough to meet Ian at that year's Debconf. Held annually, that year's conference was hosted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and it was the first year he had ever attended. Given his fortuitous presence, I took the opportunity to organize a roundtable. Alongside a couple of long-time Debian developers, Ian reflected on the project's early history and significance.  

By this time, many developers had already spoken to me in great (and fond) detail about Ian's early contributions to Debian: they were essential, many insisted, in creating the fertile soil that allowed the project to grow its deepest roots and sprout into the stalwart community that it is today. In the fast-paced world of the Internet, where a corporate giant like AOL can spectacularly rise and fall in a decade, Debian is strikingly unique for its staying power: it has thrived for a remarkable twenty-three years (and though I am not fond of predictions, I expect it will be around throughout the next twenty as well).

It was well-known that Ian established the project's moral compass, and also provided an early vision and guidance that underwrote many of the processes responsible for Debian's longevity. But witnessing Ian, and other early contributors, such as Bdale Garbee, articulate and reflect on that early period was a lot more potent and powerful than hearing it second hand. In honor of his life and legacy, I am publishing the interview here (it has been slightly edited for readability). Below, I want to make two points about Ian's contributions and do so by highlighting a selection of his most insightful remarks drawn from the roundtable discussion and his blog -- comments that demonstrate how he helped sculpt Debian into the dynamic project it is today.

1. Ian Murdock instilled a culture of reciprocity in Debian

Technologists and hackers contribute to free and open source software (F/OSS) development for a variety of reasons, many of which have little to do with altruism. But when Ian first cut his teeth on free software he was moved by the fact that other developers gave their code away freely.

What really grabbed me off the bat was the community. That was what really grabbed me and you have to understand at the time, it was a completely foreign notion that I had somehow stumbled upon this group of people that were interested in the same things that I was interested in, [and] who had basically for no particular reason built this thing, this operating system, and it had actually worked, and I could do my work on it, and I had not paid a dime for it; they did not ask anything of me when I download it or used it. And whenever you are in a situation like that, when people have given so much to you, one of the first instincts is like: "What can I do for you, what can I give back?"

Compelled to return the gift, he created Debian and fostered within its community a generalized culture of sharing and responsibility -- a culture even more remarkable when one considers the fierce commitments to individualism held by many of the technologists involved. When the news of Ian's passing circulated online, Branden Robinson, a long time Debian developer who had worked closely with Ian, paid tribute to his friend by praising Debian on these very terms:

Debian is about individual empowerment in a cooperative social environment -- about taking responsibility while sharing responsibility. If that sounds like a tension or a dialectic, you're on the right track. One can learn a great deal from working out such demanding principles; I have, and continue to do so.

So how did Ian establish a project whose participants, already so busy with technical labor, were willing to expend even more time to work through such "demanding principles"? Obviously, his leadership style played a vital role. But equally important was his decision to articulate a vision for Debian and publish it as a manifesto. Released shortly after the founding of Debian in early January 1994, Murdock stated in no uncertain terms that Debian would be a "non-commercial" distribution, developed by the community of developers for the community of developers. What is especially notable about this document is its prescient ending:

The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.

Let's pause for a moment to contemplate the forward thinking nature of his statement. This was 1994: a good six years before Silicon Valley entrepreneurs began to swoop in and avidly embrace free software, rebranding it as open source in the doing. While the F/OSS development community largely benefited from this attention both with increased monetary resources and media visibility, projects ranging from Ubuntu to Tails undoubtedly benefited in equal step from Ian Murdock's perceptive decision to charter Debian as an autonomous community of developers and a commons.

There was a visionary substance behind his manifesto. There is perhaps no greater testament to this substance than the Debian developer community's continued commitment to his early vision year after year. In 1997 they hammered out a set of legal principles for admissible licenses -- what came to be known as the Debian Free Software Guidelines -- and made a series of promises to the broader F/OSS community in their Social Contract. The following year they articulated the project's goals and governance structure in their Constitution. During the Debconf roundtable, Bdale Garbee emphasized how important it is to Debian that the project's commitments be voiced explicitly -- a tradition that began with Ian's Manifesto.

So the creation of the social contract and the DFSG [Debian Free Software Guidelines]: that was one of the points where the group had grown enough that it was important to articulate what the group's fundamental values were, because in order to build a community you have to have some way of articulating and connecting some shared values..."

2. Quality work requires a concrete and often institutional framework for collaboration.

One of the most frustrating misconceptions I routinely encounter regarding F/OSS development is that it occurs in some ad-hoc, laissez faire fashion. The wrong-headed perception goes something like this: a bunch of developers have a good idea about a piece of software they want to write, so the coders get together on Internet Relay Chat and mailing lists and start madly coding away, hosting their code on some super awesome versioning software like Git, and then bam!, like magic, they release a piece of functioning software a few months later. Sure, a loosey goosey style of development sometimes works. With smaller projects it is probably even the norm; most run -- and run well -- on loose consensus and the energy of excitement alone. Nevertheless, any online project that scales and grows -- or at least any project that wants to create quality material as it scales and grows -- usually has to formally organize itself, or else face the threat of extinction (or, at the very least, face the threat that the developers will have to live with themselves after releasing shitty software).

Like a wise master craftsman who knows norms and policies matter to the crafting of excellence as much as individual skill and capacity, Ian Murdock decided early on to implement frameworks for quality collaboration. One of his most famous contributions to F/OSS development techniques is Debian's packaging system. Prior to this system, it used to be a long and complicated process to install any software. You would need to find the source code, figure out how to compile it, resolve all the dependencies it had by hand, and then install it. Every piece of source code did it differently, and once it was installed, you couldn't easily remove it. It could take hours to get something installed. The package management system changed that completely, everything was bundled together enabling you to simply type one command, or click a button, to have it installed or removed. As described on Ian's blog in the post titled, "What's the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry?"

It's an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management -- or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion -- along with the distributed development model package management enabled.

And yet, crucially, in the words of Ian himself: "The package system was not designed to manage software. It was designed to facilitate collaboration." Eventually, this managerial approach was expanded to encompass more than just the packaging system, enshrined into the policy system still alive in Debian today:

It was not until late 94 when we had a working package system. We started to realize that just having packages was not enough. We had to have policies. Here is the mechanism, what is the policy?  If you want something, if you want a service to start at boot time, what do you do? And at that point we had a bunch of really horrible things, like, you know, we had post installation scripts and so people were editing/etcrc and you could imagine what happens after awhile....

Over the years, developers followed in his footsteps: they continued to implement techniques and protocols -- at times through technical means and in other instances by devising distinctly social mechanisms -- to ensure the persistence of quality even as Debian ballooned in size (Debian is today one of the largest free software projects, with nearly 1000 official developers and thousands of other contributors). It would be no exaggeration to describe some of the technical engineers within the Debian project as shrewd social and political architects. Ample justification for such an appraisal can be found in Debian's impressive "New Maintainer Process" -- an entrance exam designed to test new developers' knowledge of technical, legal, and ethical matters prior to their enrollment in the project. In the panel, Bdale emphasizes the manifesto's importance in attracting a cadre of geeks and in connection to the subsequent documents and procedures.

[The Manifesto] acted like a geek magnet. It was the attractor that caused people to come here and say: "yes I want to participate in it." … So the manifesto acted as an initial attractor, and when the group got big enough it was important to make sure that they understood what the expectations were, and the Social Contract, and the keysigning process, and the NM [New Maintainer] process: We sort of require that you have said that you have read this, and you agree and abide by it. And there are of course people who have been around longer than those documents, and most of them would not have stayed if they did not agree with it.

I would argue that with these social and ethical protocols Debian transcends a mere technical project that produces an excellent product, and instead also qualifies as a sort of miniature society, and given its social contract and constitution, it also has a very 19th century, Enlightenment feel to it.

Ian Murdock left the project after a rather short period of just three years. But this was by no means an abandonment. The fact that he could step away represents just how important he was to the early project: He built an institution, an organization, that could function without its founder. He said as much himself during the roundtable:

Yea and I was in school and basically at that point we had a thriving community. We had infrastructure, we had lots of users. And my final test as to whether or not Debian succeeded was: could the founder step away from the project and could the project keep going because that is the only point at which you know that the project has basically taken a life of its own.

This league of technologists and programmers who proudly call themselves Debian developers are mourning the loss of one of their own. Ian's life was cut way, way too short. But he will be fondly remembered for building a project that teems with life. Which, to use his own words, "took a life of its own" thanks to what he did as a bright-eyed, clear-sighted twenty-two-year-old. He will be dearly missed.

Filed Under: community, debian, ian murdock, open source

Reddit's New 'Upvoted' Clickbait Website Will Ignore Everything That's Great About Reddit

from the the-future-of-democracy-is-solitary-confinement dept

Reddit of course has been trying to balance advertising with the website's uncontrollable, valuable, but occasionally ugly democratic side for some time with decidedly mixed results. The company's recent new content moderation policy raised all manner of eyebrows for its attempt to keep what makes Reddit great in place, while applying often arbitrary and inconsistent restrictions on subjectively-defined objectionable content. It's a debate that of course will likely continue long through the point where Reddit is ultimately supplanted by some other, better method of organic Internet interaction.

If Reddit's latest venture is any indication, the company wants that time to come sooner rather than later. The company is cooking up a new website dubbed Upvoted that will take existing popular content on Reddit and write it up as Upworthy-esque clickbait fare. Unlike Reddit however, there will be no reader interaction or commenting on the new property. Execs see this as a way to harness potential ad money lost to other websites who often simply write up stories that unfold first on Reddit:

"Upvoted is a way for Reddit to recapture some of the attention (and, ahem, traffic) that the site loses when other news organizations take stories from the site; it serves as a kind of introduction to the world of Reddit for non-users; and it acts as a testing ground for advertisers who may be hesitant to dive straight into advertising in a world moderated by unaffiliated, unpaid volunteers. Upvoted may be our first look at what the future of Reddit might hold."

But wait: is the "future of Reddit" really about taking Reddit content, stripping away all of the best democratic aspects of the Reddit community, then shoving the entire construct into an entirely un-interactive, more traditional media mold? Like the relentless push to kill ye olde news comment section, there seems to be a bizarre shift toward taking the wonderful, bidirectional power of the Internet -- and demanding it once again become a one-way medium of expression and publication without any of this nasty democratic thought stuff.

To hear Reddit tell it, it's not gutting interactivity for the sake of obtaining more ad cash, it's doing this out of a love of the Reddit community:

"The stuff our community creates on a daily basis blows our mind. Unfortunately, rather than telling that story, some news outlets take our users’ content and repackage it as their own. They don’t tell the backstory of our communities. We think our users’ stories need to be told, but with them at the center of it."

On one hand, you can understand exec logic here; they see the laundry list of websites mindlessly regurgitating Reddit AMAs into news stories and see that as easy money they should be cashing in on. But operating a massive democratic community and operating a news organization are not somehow magically synonymous, and there's obviously no guarantee that the stories Upvoted posts will be heard under the din of countless other, click-bait oriented like-minded efforts. It's also worth noting that Upvoted's going to be heavily focused on native advertising:

"Rather it will post sponsored content paid for and approved by advertising partners—and written by the same editorial team that writes editorial posts. “They’re going to be just as interesting as actual content,” Chang says. “It could be a piece on Tesla, a piece on how WiFi works, no matter what it’ll be good content—and it’ll just happened to be sponsored."

So again, your ingenious master plan is to take Reddit content, try to write it up, strip away everything that's great about Reddit (interactivity, democracy), pepper that content with heavy advertorial content, and hope for the best? If people really think that's the "future of Reddit," the future of Reddit is going to be some other, better, more-interactive and open platform not-named Reddit.

Filed Under: advertising, clickbait, community, journalism, upvoted
Companies: reddit

Motherboard's Version Of 'Valuing Discussion' Involves No Longer Letting You Comment

from the we-like-you-better-wearing-this-muzzle,-ok? dept

Add Motherboard to the quickly growing list of news websites killing their comment section because they're so breathlessly in love with reader interaction and visitor conversation. Like The Verge, Recode, Popular Science, The Daily Beast and numerous other websites before it, Motherboard has decided that there's simply no value whatsoever to having a healthy, on-site local community. As such the website is shoving any and all reader interaction over to less transparent and noisier discourse avenues like Facebook, Twitter and e-mail because comments as a "medium" are inherently somehow unhealthy:

"We at Motherboard have decided to turn off our comments section, a decision we've debated for a year or more. What finally turned the tide was our belief that killing comments and focusing on other avenues of communication will foster smarter, more valuable discussion and criticism of our work. What percentage of comments on any site are valuable enough to be published on their own? One percent? Less? Based on the disparity in quality between emails we get and the average state of comments here and all over the web, I think the problem is a matter of the medium."

One, just because only some readers can be bothered to comment doesn't magically devalue the entire comment section, as many reader simply lurk. I'm a lurking reader quick to head to the comment section to see if there's anything a reporter may have overlooked, misunderstood, or missed entirely. Did that tech blogger screw up the Wi-Fi specs on device Y or battery size of gadget Z? Does anybody else think this story makes light of X or misinterprets Y? Does anybody else in here feel the way I do? As a writer I find comments similarly valuable, even if you sometimes have to dig through detritus.

And that's just it: news comments foster community, but they also provide transparency, accountability, and crowdsourced fact checking right below the article, and that's what many sites like least of all. They just won't admit it.

In contrast, Motherboard pretends that their reporting will become just that much better if it doesn't have to worry about pesky public reader interaction:

"Good comment sections exist, and social media can be just as abrasive an alternative. But for a growing site like ours, I think that our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more reporting than attempting to police a comments section in the hopes of marginally increasing the number of useful comments. That doesn't offer any real value to other readers of the site, and we'd all wager that the scorched Earth nature of comments section just stifles real conversation."

Unlike other news websites, Motherboard at least admits that it doesn't want to spend the time and money to cultivate a thriving local community. Still, it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that weeding the troll comment garden comes at the cost of better reporting. In fact, some studies have shown that simply having a writer show up in the comment section and briefly treat site visitors like human beings raises the discourse bar dramatically. And as several websites have noted, having a healthy comment section pays dividends in the form of loyal visitors. By blocking comments, you're sending that community elsewhere (not that Techdirt minds -- Motherboard readers are welcome to comment here).

Motherboard seems to miss absolutely all of the benefits of on-site community, consistently coming back to this strange idea that as a "medium" comments are inherently flawed:

"Comment sections inspire quick, potent remarks, which too easily veer into being useless or worse. Sending an email knowing that a human will actually see it tends to foster thought, which is what we want.

Because nitwits never send barely coherent single-sentence idiot bile via e-mail, right? Comments are simply a blank slate input field. How is that a flawed "medium"? The flaw is it forces outlets to work just a little bit harder, and doesn't allow them to filter what gets said and heard. As such, Motherboard yearns to head back to the era of "letters to the editor," which it may or may not respond to or publish:

"So in addition to encouraging that you reach out to our reporters via email or social media, you can now also share your thoughts with editors via letters@motherboard.tv. Once a week or thereabouts we'll publish a digest of the most insightful letters we get."

Or hey, we might not. And that's the problem: when only outlet-approved voices are made public you've muted an entire avenue of news dialogue correction and thrown the baby out with the bathwater, all in a misguided belief that we should try and force the open Internet back into the Walter Cronkite era of audience interaction. Of course all of these news editors and authors are just so dumbstruck and dizzy with the idea of not having to interact with snotty critics anymore, they can't see the forest (news as a healthy, fluid public conversation) for the trees (bile-lobbing blowhards).

Filed Under: comments, community, conversation, discussion, journalism, motherboard
Companies: vice