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Ta-Nehisi Coates's commentary is explicitly political and ideological, and those ideological affinities defined the limits of acceptable discourse in his comments section. You may or may not be sympathetic to those politics (I am, to a degree), but here's another way to describe what made this 'the best comment section on the Internet': it intentionally excluded any viewpoint too far outside the mainstream of the community (and, contra the author's implication, those comments were not necessarily racist trolling).

A similar phenomenon happens on HN; the community centers itself around a particular set of values or opinions, and opinions which differ too radically from the center are very effectively marginalized - like a wave losing strength as it ripples outward. This allows for productive discourse, but explicitly describing the benefits of collective censorship as such makes some people uneasy.

(It's important, then, to ensure that you participate in communities with many different "opinion loci".)

HN does strike a good balance between civility and diversity of opinion. Or at least they get a lot of one controlling for the other. I tend to post from a right wing perspective but only had one comment flag killed (where I pointed out that it was hypocritical of French Americans to say that France needs to preserve its culture, while at the same time saying that the US has no culture, and anyone who says it does is a racist).

The one thing that bothers me is the flood of social justice themed articles, including one that was flag killed but revived by the mods. I guess the mods felt that they were reacting against over-zealous flaggers. But I think in practice they are overriding the opinion of the community who are sick of articles about issues like sexism in tech.

> the US has no culture

How anyone can believe this is beyond me. It is like saying a given atom has no protons, or that a given region of a country has no area. It's such a gross misunderstanding of basic concepts it should mark anyone who says it as someone who has no basis for continuing the discussion.

I've always understood the statement "The US has no culture" as meaning that the speaker thought the citizens of the US weren't "posh enough" in some manner or other.

I imagined it was probably something terribly elegant and refined like eating breadsticks with a knife and fork.

I would probably interpret it as saying that there isn't a single cohesive culture throughout the US? I'm not sure how true it is (I've never been) - but I have certainly observed anecdotally that some states are more keenly independant than others?
> I would probably interpret it as saying that there isn't a single cohesive culture throughout the US?

By that token, no country has a culture, because every country (except, maybe, postage stamps like Luxembourg or Liechtenstein) has regions with a distinctive cultural heritage which they don't entirely share with other regions.

So, put that way, it's trivially true that the US doesn't have one culture, but then neither does France, or the UK, or China, or Russia, or Italy.

Culture is everything which is passed down from generation to generation which isn't encoded in the genes. For example, my dark hair isn't in my culture, even though I got it from both of my parents; my language, however, most certainly is part of my culture. So's most of my taste in food and drink. Do I share all of my culture with the people I live close to? No, but I share a lot of things, some of necessity (language, clothing) and some because it was just how I was raised and what I see around me (hair style, meal times).

Here's an interesting website on the culture a large percentage of Americans more-or-less shares:

http://www.zompist.com/amercult.html

There's similar pages for Canadians, Russians, Chinese, etc all linked off that page.

You are abusing flagging by using it because you are "sick of articles about X". The flag is not a downvote button and the "opinion of the community" is measured with upvotes.

For someone who starts off lauding "diversity of opinion" I'm not sure how you reconcile that with a mentality where everyone flag kills what they don't like.

The Hacker News crowd and the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem in general has a deserved reputation for a bias toward trying to fix problems that are prominent in their own line of sight. In other words, a lot of startups trying to fix problems that vex prosperous, tech-savvy single people in San Francisco. But here's a geek-world problem that's staring us all right in the face.

Despite the enormous potential benefit of the internet as a place for open, respectful discourse among people from all walks of life, it seems that every forum must eventually devolve into ad-hominem rancor and trolling, unless it's aggressively and time-consumingly moderated by dedicated human beings.

I've been involved in trying to crack this particular nut since 1997 as publisher of OSNews, and I've been a participant in some relatively good forums such as HN over the years, but I can't help but think that there's an opportunity start with what Disqus has done and take it to the next level.

In the article, Coates bemoans the limited moderation toolset that he got from Disqus, and I can't help but think that there's a potential big data play to fingerprint the most obvious kinds of trolling and give human moderators a quiver of time-saving tools to keep their forums on the straight and narrow.

If anyone here has some ideas about how we might go about executing on this idea, let me know. I'd be interested in being involved.

I think the value proposition of Disqus is just comparatively low maintenance. You include a snippet of JS and you get a minimally functional commenting system that includes antispam and requires running no backend server software or security risks. In return Disqus gets analytics and a little bit of ad space. It's not imo going for discussion, it's meant to be flypaper for readers who get a good-feelings boost thinking they're being heard, so it's a monetization tool more than anything. The extreme end of this is Youtube comments, which accumulate so fast and so voluminously that actual discussion is near impossible, and the limited nesting actively fights replying. You can't follow anything. But millions of people pile their worthless comments into the void because it feels good to have your say. Old, crusty ugly forums are better for conversation than new, shiny JS comment systems because they were actually made for conversation, that was their raison d'etre.

Have you tried Discourse? It's almost as good as the hype.

So this is kind of related. I've been reading OSNews since the very beginning, and I really, really love it. It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is about the highest praise I could give a site. In large part it's because it covered stuff I couldn't see anywhere else and the commenters were positive and knowledgeable. But in the last few years there are so many articles about non-OS political stuff, which in turn causes fighting in the comments. Don't underestimate that the types of articles published determines the type of commenters :-(

> It used to beat out Slashdot for me, which is about the highest praise I could give a site.

Slashdot's meta-moderation contributed to discussion quality and high signal:noise.

I'm still skeptical of parent comment's fingerprinting as a sole solution -- it takes humInt and humInvolvement. Arm willing human mods with tools like fingerprinting, provide incentives for many to moderate and for some to moderate the mods, and good discussions can happen.

I can't help but see your comment as a symptom of the problem it's describing. Not trolling, but geek bias... specifically the blind spot of assuming everyone is as sincere as you.

The big problem with comment sections isn't "trolling", it's that most people aren't there to have a fair, rational discussion in the first place. They are there to be entertained or distracted, that will be the main motivation of people doing the browsing. They want to see their opinions and choices validated, while uncomfortable and inconvenient facts are hidden or mocked. At minimum they will avoid anything that reflects badly on themselves and where they can't shift the blame easily. See for example the latest wave of "criticism = harassment" in news sections and on Twitter, where being called out for saying stupid things in public is frantically derided as "sea lioning" which must be stopped.

So trying to fix comment sections behaviorally does not work because they stop being comments. At most you can do something like StackOverflow, which follows a strict Q&A format and bans repetition. It's not really a forum, it's a wiki of googleable questions, and like Wikipedia, is mostly unappealing and unwelcoming to outsiders with fresh ideas.

Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation. The only forums I know of where everyone gets along with everyone are echo chambers. In real discussions somebody's toes always get stepped on. Real names do not help there btw, people still make plenty of dumb comments with their face next to it, it only helps the offendees play the victim card.

I think your "inevitable descent into trolling" is a bad description of how intellectual forums grow their audience: they become more superficial, more emotionally driven and more focused on presentation than merit. Like TED talks. But if you don't grow, you stagnate and turn into an echo chamber. Neither is desirable, you can only try to grow responsibly. You have to allow disruptive voices no matter what.

Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation.

That is some of the ideas behind Marc Stiegler's "decision duel" idea in his book "David's Sling" [1]. He envisioned a system where two sides would lay out their arguments, and then the two duelists would link in arguments and counter-arguments to each point. This duel would occur with an audience watching, who would also contribute ideas and research to the duelists.

It is actually the right time to be able to implement something like this now, with the advent of WebGL and other browser technology for the presentation. I was just looking at another HN link about the 'wikigalaxy' visualization system which just hints at what is now possible.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3064877-david-s-sling

If you haven't seen it already, you should watch Matt Haughey's "Lessons from 11 years of community" (link below), in which he describes some of the moderation tools and techniques MetaFilter has developed over the years.

"Lessons from 11 years of community": https://vimeo.com/21043675

The problem with MetaFilter's moderation is that it is both heavy-handed and entirely opaque.

If they decide a comment is unacceptable, for whatever reason, it is simply erased from history. The poster is not informed this has happened, nor told why.

There are two enormous disadvantages to this model - it doesn't encourage commenters to improve the quality of what they post, and it ultimately creates an atmosphere of mistrust, from those who have been silently black-holed.

The Reddit model of public votes is better, even when layered with admin moderation, because at least users can see what is happening, and why.

In the past on Metafilter, if there were some unacceptable comments they were deleted but the moderator would add a comment that simply restated what was not allowed and asking people to stay civil. I think this can actually work really well, because it doesn't shame the people moderated and they can move forward without feeling personally slighted. This is in stark contrast to the person's name next to a big [DELETED] or Boingboing's mocking "disemvowelment".
I have to agree that one of the things that made Metafilter's moderation more successful was being able to moderate without alienating the users. Moderation often devolves into simply ejecting all but one "tribe" from a forum so that nobody's left to have a disagreement; MeFi avoided that trap far better than many places.
Unfortunately I had to qualify with "in the past." I think it's an echo chamber today. I have heard more and more people talk about unfair moderation, which I never saw years ago. So invisible moderation does still have a downside. To be fair, I think most of the people still posting there are like old friends now.
The difficulty is that the "trolling" folks like Coates want to eliminate is often simply a difference of opinion which is acceptable in one community but not in another.

One of the few times I read Coates' blog was discussing a black/white gap in dating site response rates. He immediately banned people pointing out statistics showing that black women are disproportionately fat. The HN discussion on the same topic was heavily upvoted and rationally concluded concluded that explanation was probably incorrect.

Building a system which will automatically detect that, e.g., statistics about race and obesity are trolling on Coates' site but useful contributions on HN is a difficult matter.

Collaborative filtering is the best way to create a bubble, but that generally requires a centralized communication medium like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit.

I wonder if rather than a pure software solution, there's an opportunity here for Disqus to provide a hybrid software-human moderation solution. It's clear that good moderation can revitalize a community (hi @dang), while bad comments are a vicious cycle that drive out the good ones. IOW, moderation is very valuable. But it's hard to hire for and do right if it's not already part of your org's thinking. Disqus could sell moderation-as-a-service, according to the customer's parameters, and take care of all those hard parts.
Mozilla OpenNews, NY Times and Wash Po are partnering to create a new solution. I'm not sure if its exactly what you mention here.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/06/19/mozilla-announces-a...

I have read and commented on his articles for years. I am opinionated on them. His were only moderately better than most other places.

>these days I tend to believe that comment sections are just tumors on otherwise good journalism, and that we’d all be better off without them.

Comments sections are great when the writer is lying or obfuscating, which happens with shocking regularity. It's great when someone in the comments section adds context to a story that the writer neglected to include, either though ignorance or malice. I would say for local news, you quite often have to go to the comments section to even find out what really happened.

> Those threads were where the regulars started to really get to know each other, and develop their own shorthand, nicknames, and inside jokes.

Online communities, like any communities, need to develop the right culture in order to thrive. People have to get to know each other; then they'll engage in shared defense of the culture against hostile outsiders (trolls, in this case).

If you're trying to create on online community, then you can short-cut the process a little bit by attempting to install your own culture via participation (modelling the values you want to see in your commenters) and moderation (excluding those who violate the culture).

But to do that effectively is very hard work. Hard work that most people and most publishers don't seem willing to do. So they end up with crappy pointless comment threads.

His blog is one of the most thought-provoking American political/social blogs. He writes from a unique perspective and really challenges you to think.