Moderator Appreciation Day

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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby 82_28 » Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:39 am

Finito, comments: Goodbye to the loudest drunk in NPR’s online bar

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

Good riddance to NPR’s comment section, which shut down Tuesday after eight years. There has to be a better way for news organizations to engage with the public.

NPR is joining a growing list of media organizations that have said “finito” to comments including, “This American Life,” Reuters, Recode, Mic, the Chicago Sun-Times, Popular Science, CNN, the Toronto Star and The Week.

When comments sections were initiated on news sites, they were hailed as a means to democratize the media, allowing a two-way conversation between readers and the journalists who serve them.

But readers are often talking to each other because most journalists don’t engage. And there’s a reason. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza enthusiastically embraced his audience when he started his political blog, the Fix, in 2006.
I know firsthand how futile and frustrating comments sections are.

“I would regularly go into the comments to interact (or try to interact) with readers. I incentivized and deputized regular commenters to keep order,” he wrote in a column that extolled NPR’s decision. “Then I gave up. Because none of the tactics or strategies we tried ever had any real impact on the quality of the dialogue happening on The Fix. No matter what the original post was about, a handful of the loudest — or most committed — voices in the room hijacked the comments thread to push their own agendas.”

As NPR’s ombudsman from 2007 to 2011, I know firsthand how futile and frustrating comments sections are. Even though NPR had a sign-up system, and hired an outside moderator to check comments before posting, a listener could still create an alias and write whatever he (and it was usually men) liked. The comments were often mean-spirited and did little to foster civil conversation.

‘The goal is dialogue,” I wrote in a 2011 essay on comment sections for the Nieman Reports, “but it’s pretty clear that the debate between dialogue and diatribe is still being waged. From the view I’ve had for the last three years as NPR’s ombudsman I’d say diatribe is winning—hands down.” It’s still true today.

The trolls who rule the comment seas may actually have won because they often scare away people with their vicious attacks. An infinitesimal number of NPR’s 25 to 35 million unique monthly users bothered to join story-page conversations.

“Far less than one percent of that audience is commenting, and the number of regular comment participants is even smaller,” wrote Scott Montgomery, NPR’s managing editor for digital news announcing the shutdown. “Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months — 0.003 percent of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period.”
NPR’s current ombudsman, Elizabeth Jensen, notedthat caretaking NPR’s commenting system becomes more expensive as the number of comments increases — sometimes costing twice what was budgeted. So basically, NPR decided it’s not worth the money to engage only a sliver of its audience.

Cost is certainly a critical factor for any media company but the more valid question remains: What is the value of commenting unless it’s tightly moderated and journalists engage?

There are some sites that handle comments well, noted Alex Howard, a senior analyst at the Sunlight Foundation. “Building a healthy online community is hard, but outlets like TechDirt and forums like MetaFilter show that it’s not only possible but sustainable,” said Howard. “At their best, good comments are improvements upon the journalism they’re focused upon, but they require convening a community and investing in editorial moderation and tools.”

Howard, among others, is not happy with NPR’s decision.

“As a life-long consumer of NPR news and programs, I’m saddened that one of the world’s great public media organizations is backing away from investing in creating and maintaining a healthy forum for the public to discuss the news on a platform owned by the public, not private technology companies,” he said.

NPR’s Montgomery points out that the network hosts 30 Facebook pages and more than 50 Twitter accounts as well as having a “vibrant presence on Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr.” He said NPR is exploring other promising engagement tools.

Monica Guzman, a 2016 Nieman Fellow, who has written a guide for community engagement, believes news organizations that rely on social media platforms to talk to their audience are making a mistake.

“That’s problematic because you can’t control it, even though it’s nothing but beneficial in terms of growing an audience,” she told the Coral Project, an effort to respond to the problem, of which more below. “The more we [hand over to] other platforms, the less control we have period.”

While NPR may post 20 stories a day on Facebook and gets robust comments, the discussion stays on Facebook’s servers and NPR can’t mine it in any meaningful way. “The vast majority of newsrooms use third party tools that have their own data storage,” said Andrew Losowsky, who heads the Coral Project. “Connecting to your own database is very difficult.”
The New York Times handles comments by strategically opening up only 10 percent of its stories for comments and then heavily moderates the debate.

With all of journalism’s innovations, there has to be a better way for news sites to bring the audience closer to the journalists — and there might be if the Coral Project is successful.

In November 2013, The New York Times and Washington Post staffers met to discuss finding better ways to engage their communities. They teamed up with the Mozilla Foundation and began a unique collaboration in 2014 with the help of a $3.89 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last year, Coral Project team members began interviewing 300 people in 150 newsrooms in 30 countries.

The project is now working on creating free open-source tools and developing practices for any size media outlet to forge better, more productive communities around their journalism.

“The online space is a place for engaging,” said Losowsky. “But if there is no engagement between the biggest fans and journalists themselves, then we are getting a distancing of the newsroom away from the readers. I feel like that’s the wrong thing.” Right now, news outlets focus on getting rid of trolls rather than search for premium gold comments.

“We have the ability to find the worst people on our sites,” said Losowsky. “But there’s almost nothing that really helps find the best people. So what you have is the best commenters feeling like they are not getting attention from the newsroom. And they are not. You need to celebrate the best comments and find and encourage those people to do more.”

The project is developing four tools –one known as “Ask” should be out at the end of the month. “It’s like Google forms combined with Storify,” said Losowsky. “With Ask, you can quickly and easily build a form to ask specific questions of your audience. You can embed it on your website, connect contributions with those in your comments or on previous forms, and create a gallery of the best answers to display in a future story.”

Another tool, Trust, is being tested at The Washington Post. It’s designed to filter and find high quality commenters that an organization can trust. If there’s an expert who is a regular commenter, the news outlet would know about that person and could highlight their contribution.

“You can see how users are acting across your site, and then write simple formulas to find good and bad contributors across a range of different contexts,” according to the beta Coral Project website.

After over a decade of stagnation in comment sections, the Coral Project or, Hearken, which allows journalists to partner with the public, may be what’s needed to shift the debate from negative to positive, listen more to the audience and enhance the conversation for those who want to be involved.


http://www.salon.com/2016/08/24/finito- ... r_partner/
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Aug 24, 2016 12:15 pm

Contributors is an interesting appellation, innit? Commentators like to fancy themselves contributors, but most commentary is piffle. Single sentence assertions of opinion. Puns, jokes, references du jour.

In recent years, I've seen the term "drive by" used a lot at our little watering hole to complain about the lack of contributions from certain commentators here. I hesitate to even bring that up, since I'm sure any survey of my own posting history over the past five years represents a linear degeneration -- Christ, soon I'll just be posting pictures here. From Facebook. Because I think they're funny.

Yet. The psychology of it, you know? Of course that's what commentary will skew towards; our digital interfaces predispose us to "react" to content with nothing but fast twitch muscle fiber. (Here's an excellent discourse on Zuckerberg behavioralism I've linked to several times before: Reacting to Reactions) People are angry about the news, people have no recourse to the newsmakers, people take out that anger on each other. I don't see things playing out much differently on any online platform anywhere, shit, even the Wikipedia Talk pages are getting nasty in 2016.

Contributing to RI used to be something I loved to do, though. This lament ain't nothing new; I'd much rather be using RI as a research tool and sharing research with other researchers, rather than moderating commentary on the barrage of No Time to Think / Oh Dearism signal being projected at our shared brick wall. Maybe my detachment was a horrible mistake, maybe I should have gone Full Dictator years ago. I'm ambivalent.

Yet this is what happens - the online version of entropy. Communities degrade just like water finds a level. Most of our best members have been gone for years now.

"IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME." - ancient Chinese curse
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby brekin » Wed Aug 24, 2016 12:23 pm

News orgs seem to be completely naive when it comes to comment sections. I've only seen The Economist have a comment section that regularly supplements (and at times improves on) the original article by their worthy comments promotion. About 60% of comments should be deleted before publishing on national news sites and probably closer to 80% for local news sites. Many posters have an agenda (pro "natural selection"/rabid anti-political party or president or presidential candidate/misanthropy/racism/sexism/bullying, etc) which has nothing to do with the news in question. In fact, most comments, even non-hostile ones, should be hidden or shit canned just as "not adding to discussion in a meaningful way". The problem is the orgs haven't grasped that they have two newspapers going on now, the superego and the id, and the id one needs more of a dedicated editorial staff than the superego one. But people who look to newspapers for innovation are praying to the wrong old gods.

With all of journalism’s innovations, there has to be a better way for news sites to bring the audience closer to the journalists


Also, sadly/not so sadly, the desktop publishing revolution has now brought the journalist to the same level as anyone with a keyboard and dial up. Many posters, even benign ones, don't want to get closer to the journalist, many just want their audience and use the comments as a platform to do so. After cop, I'd say online journalist has to be the most thankless job right now.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby 82_28 » Wed Aug 24, 2016 1:07 pm

The Stranger's slog comments section can be good sometimes.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby 82_28 » Wed Aug 24, 2016 1:09 pm

The Planetary Society's comments are always good. :partyhat
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby NaturalMystik » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:19 pm

Special thanks for Moderators during these tough times...
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:30 pm

I know, it couldn't have happened, without you

Without youuuuuuuuu! Oooh Oooh Oooh!
:) :lovehearts:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBjMXTk4PMg


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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Jerky » Tue Nov 08, 2016 1:17 pm

Salut.
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Cordelia » Tue Nov 08, 2016 3:25 pm

tack så mycket!


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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Cordelia » Sat Nov 19, 2016 9:36 am

Thank you Mod-Wom for shutting down yesterday's nasty, passive-aggressive attack on a crucial infrastructure at RI. And thank you SLAD for your classy response!

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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Nov 19, 2016 7:46 pm

I just read that locked thread.

WTF? Bloody ridiculous.

SLAD is one of the people that makes this place worthwhile.
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Burnt Hill » Sun Nov 20, 2016 1:39 pm

Yes wombat, thanks for having a keen sense of fairness.
And cheers to SLaD.
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Nov 20, 2016 4:56 pm

win·some
ˈwinsəm/
adjective
adjective: winsome

attractive or appealing in appearance or character.
"a winsome smile cowboy"


I wonder whether the poor, tormented fellow at any time over the years reached out to slad to share his concerns with her personally, via PM. I doubt he had.

So who does he blame for his frustration? :shrug: Slad.

Happens all the time.

Not that slad's blamed all the time, but that people set themselves up for disappointment without having taken the effort to effect meaningful (to them) change they seek and when what they desire is unrealized, only then they find their voice and speak up, complaining another is the cause of their discontent. :microphone:

Faulting another for one's own faults. :roll:

Nice to see some support for slad, though.

From wombat's post above (worth rereading, btw):

"IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME." - ancient Chinese curse


Get it, Winsome?
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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Nov 20, 2016 6:26 pm

Cheers to Wombat too.

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Re: Moderator Appreciation Day

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Nov 20, 2016 6:32 pm

The beer came from here:

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And he can drink it in one of these:

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