Not really; it's ideal. Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire. Individual message boards, small, and well regulated can be a wonderful gift. Commenting away from the primary publication, but about the primary publication seems ideal.
>Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire
Except for substack. In an interesting twist the comment sections on substack are thoughtful and polite with the authors chiming in -- at least in my experience. Don't know how to explain that compared to most sites. Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
Just give it some time. Once the user base swells up I'm sure the site will witness a general decline in quality, unless the moderation tools catch up.
This is something I've seen with countless forums and message boards over the years, i.e. Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.
So true. I was thinking about Clubhouse recently and realized there are two basic forces that conspire against successful new platforms:
1) Going mainstream / mass appeal means the lowest common denominator drops, whether that's content or quality of conversation
2) Commercialization incentivizes the wrong things - see Twitter and how its been optimised for "engagement" above all else (not quality of content, or user happiness etc).
Interesting things are happening at Clubhouse but surely they know how this will go. I think successful new platforms that want to maintain their integrity should be looking at paid membership. Substack might be OK because of that.
Add The Athletic, a subscription service, to the pile. Early adopters were enthusiastic and polite in the comments section. Even just one year in, the tenor had changed significantly.
> Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
That's certainly not true for all substacks. Authors choose whether each post is paid-subscriber-only or not, and publicly visible posts can be commented on by unpaid accounts.
Maybe Substack comments are better because they represent a narrow audience (people interested in the output of a particular writer). Generally it is up to the author of the substack to moderate its comments.
There's no reason these are mutually exclusive. We can be happy that we have our own little forum for discussion while still feeling others should have the right to discuss content where it is. Alternative isn't better than mainstream, it's just different.
>Comment sections on news sources are mostly a dumpster fire.
Only because they are not moderated properly. Newspapers should simply have a staff member read and approve every post. It really doesn't take that long to read something and hit yes or no.
With comments, they could have become facebook. They still can become facebook by offering comments, letting their readers create profiles and expand from there.
Newspapers aren't swimming in money because they don't go all in on online content. Moderating comments, choosing information for their readers, that's their core competence. Writing articles or printing is secondary.
They’re not swimming in money because a thousand small independent newsrooms across the country, working independently, were no match for the massive VC-backed attention-stealing ad-revenue-sucking social networks coming out of Silicon Valley.
Yeah, it works at NYT scale. They have a massive paying subscriber base, and they can afford to operate both automatic and manual moderation systems. But it’s not scalable downwards.
I think part of it is the commenters belonging to a community that has some sort of shared understanding. Whether that be a political leaning, or a desire for respectful comments (HN to some degree), or a view that flame wars and insults aren't a problem (4chan).
