New look heralds big changes at RiotACT

TuggLife said :

I quite like the moderation – r/canberra on Reddit often links to RiotACT articles and is unmoderated, and the quality of the comments is rubbish, and often defamatory. I do agree that moderation could be a bit quicker, though – it would help to promote discussion if there was more frequent posting of comments.

+1. The frequency of moderation/posting has greatly increased of late. Previously, sometimes there were no new posts in a 24 hour period, despite there sometimes being 40+ contributions awaiting moderation. So thats a plus.

mapinact said :

…I had a different account…but cancelled it when one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators.

Surely it’s not the moderators job to argue the science of climate change? It sounds to me like you would like a return to the old days when the moderator would join or even lead the abuse of people who went against the tide. That did’t encourage intelligent debate either.
As far as I can see, the moderators here are pretty neutral, which reflects the middle ground of the general population. There are plenty of other boards which lean to the left or the right, depending on your fancy.

mapinact said :

I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks.

There certainly wasn’t a shortage of left-wing name calling nastiness here either, if I recall.
But if it comes from the left is that OK?

mapinact said :

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment.

Yes there is a double standard in your comment. It sounds like you’d like a board that largely replicates your own outlook.

But I see where you’re coming from. Like most, I’m a member of several other boards, some of which are moderated hard for interest, relevance and content. The heavily moderated boards are usually interesting, but slow moving and not anyone’s first choice when doing some middle of the day procrastinating.

I agree, unmoderated boards are a cesspool. Five minutes spent below most YouTube clips will destroy your faith in mankind.

This version of the RiotACT is relatively new. There are a lot of well educated, witty and intelligent people in Canberra, many of whom may have been reluctant to ‘join the fray’ back when the moderation was a bit more casual and abuse more likely. I hope that the moderation policy now in place will encourage more of them to post comments, and this may take more time than we’ve had so far.

Correction: my comments about the site traffic growing are not correct, they were based on me misinterpreting a global rankings stat as a traffic stat.

The traffic has actually declined slightly recently after growing slightly during the federal election period.

I won’t go into more detail here as I have submitted an opinion piece looking at wether unmoderated comments could work that discusses the site traffic stats in detail, so you can read it there when that hopefully gets approved in the next few days.

Having to pay to comment will reduce the conversations to an echo chamber of no more than the same 20-40 people at best, with no-one else ever commenting because they won’t pay to comment occasionally and don’t care enough to comment regularly.

Retaining moderation is one thing, but requiring paid accounts to comment will kill the site faster than anything else done here to date. How many of the current commentors you don’t like had $15 / month paid subs before anyway? Also, $10 for how long a period? Monthly? – Too expensive like before. Quarterly – reasonable, but would need to have no ads to go along with the sub then. Bi-annually – Even better I guess. Annually – a token amount at this point, but still enough to stop ppl signing up to post a comment once a month.

It depends how big you want the site to be I guess? After the last ownership change, there was a drop of about 150K daily readers over the subsequent 9 month period, and it has taken since then to slowly climb that number back to around what it used to be again now, with the site adding 75K daily readers in the last 6 months alone now.

Paid comments will result in a subsequent significant traffic drop again, which makes advertisers want to leave also, which makes it harder for the site to exist overall. Growth is the only way forward, and that means encouraging more comments, not less. I know you have the opposite view mapinact but I don’t see what you want as being financially viable overall, there won’t be enough paid commentors to make up for all that loss in ad impressions from the lost traffic.

Other sites automatically block a comment from showing after it receives X number of downvotes. One sure way to grow the site faster, is to go unmoderated for the comments, with the addition of up/down votes and hiding any comment that receives more than X downvotes, along with a priority reporting ability for outright spam/nasty stuff based around a trusted reader group internally that can notify admins right away to remove something if needed. Other sites do it this way and it works well, the time spent moderating every comment is instead spent by quickly reviewing any comment that gets reported by the trusted member group, and the downvote hiding takes care of the less egregious but still bad comments.

mapinact said :

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

An intelligent and well written article that challenges the moderation bias, the most prolific posters and the operating procedures of this site. Very nice work and I’m stunned that it was allowed to see the light of day.

I assume that now we will see a torrent of the very posts you were talking about in the mistaken belief that it is rebuttal.
Thanks for letting me know that one could cancel membership of the site. I shall investigate further

mapinact said :

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

Thanks for taking the time to consider all of this, @mapinact, and for sharing your ideas. We’re working on draft updated moderating guidelines to tie in with the relaunch and some back end updates to the site that are in the works. We’ll discuss your suggestions, and will consult widely again when the new draft guidelines are ready.

With regard to moderation I’d like to put a few ideas forward.

As a background, I had a different account and username on RiotACT for nearly a decade but cancelled it a few years back when the site was first sold and one regular commenter was allowed to post anti-climate-change crap unchallenged by moderators. I didn’t want to be associated with a site that allowed that and similar crap through as if it was intelligent public discussion. I still don’t, and depending on whether this gets through moderation and what happens with the site or not I may well cancel this account too.

I think allowing an unmoderated forum would be an absolute disaster. I have yet to find any site that doesn’t descend rapidly into an echo-chamber of racist, sexist, right-wing nastiness from a small but committed band of undereducated, underemployed rednecks. Think youtube comments, 4chan, parts of reddit, the comments on any political article in the SMH online. I note that NPR in the US has just decided to ditch comments on articles entirely – an approach I applaud.

For the RiotACT this can’t work, unfortunately – the whole point is to be a conversation. But read back through the comments on pretty much any article and you ‘ll find the same tired derogation and vituperation pads out a few gem comments worth reading. It is, for the most part, crap, and humourless at that. Metafilter this place ain’t.

So here’s my plan:

– Paid accounts to comment. Not much – say $10. Enough so it hurts to lose it if you deliberately fling shit around.

– A 3 strikes rule for disallowed comments submitted (racist, sexist, gratuitously insulting, comments that fly in the face of logic or common sense UNLESS they contain some sort of logical justification). After 3 strikes your account’s cancelled and you lose your $10.

– Moderate, and moderate HARD. For every article allow (say) only 20 comments, and the comments are at the moderator’s discretion, like a Letter to the Editor. To get a comment published, it must therefore be worth reading, and add value to the conversation or it just won’t be published at all. And if by chance more than 20 worthwhile comments are received, moderators could start a new thread.

– Comments must reply to the OP, not other commenters unless they add something useful to the thread.

– Comments cannot contain cliches like “rusted-on”, “lefties”, “luvvies”, or “witty” name tranformations like Tony Rabbit or Malcolm Turncoat – if you want to make an argument, use your own words. If nothing else it’ll reveal just how deeply (or shallowly) you think.

– Moderation happens when it happens – there won’t be any instantaneous satisfaction of seeing a comment go straight up. This is good – it might make people think before posting. If you want instantaneous low-content, low-value brain-farts instead of a conversation go to Twitter, that’s what it’s for.

Moderation brings its own bias I’m aware. So be it – this is a privately owned site, and the owners are free to promote whatever view(s) they like – there’s no obligation to allow any or all points of view. I’d hope it’s a bit more open and free-ranging than the ugly and depressingly grey conservatism of some commenters and articles, but we shall see.

As for the $10, if you really can’t afford it, appeal directly and privately to the moderators – they could create an account gratis if they think you’ll be a worthwhile addition to site.

I’m well aware of the double standards in this comment – I say bring on paid commenting and I’m using a free account. I’m saying be less gratuitously insulting and I’m swearing [we took your swearing out – Ed]. I’m saying most comments are crap, and you may not like this one. Don’t care – I’m playing by the rules in force here and now. But I’d be fascinated to know what you think of the ideas.

And to the regulars that will threaten to take their bat and ball and go home if ideas like these are put into place – to be honest I think it’d be a vast improvement to the quality of debate here if you did.

The left hand ads staying fixed are annoying if they’re rotating, distracting when you’re trying to read. If you’re going to fix a column the right hand one is much more useful. If not, I hope you’re charging your advertisers more for the privilege.

No_Nose said :

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

FYI if the new Show More button the Trending Comments is not working for you, you will have to disable AdBlock (plus) for this site or put up with it not working, I tested and all popular ad blockers are currently blocking this tab by accident.

Why are some ‘trending’ threads being shown with 3 or 4 comments and others with just 1?

If they all just had the title and just the last comment (one) there would be space to list more threads as trending.

As I said previously, comments seem to get moderated/released in blocks usually it is about 5-6 sites trending at the same time…then nothing for hours and hours (sometimes up to 48 hours).

Thanks for your feedback, @No_Nose (and everyone who has contributed over the past week or so).

On average comments are moderated at least hourly during business hours – most of the time every 30 minutes or so. Comments that require a second review can take longer to moderate. Please check our moderation guidelines if you want to give your comment the best chance of getting through without any issues.

We are in the process of updating the moderation guidelines and will be calling for community consultation during that process too.

The trending now section shows the last placed comments (up to 5 per article). Moderators will at times choose to mark a comment to appear at the article level only, because the comment is referring to an older article, for example.

Based on the latest feedback we are going to move to showing the last 15 comments. Then if you click more you will see the last 25.

Mordd – IndyMedia said :

FYI if the new Show More button the Trending Comments is not working for you, you will have to disable AdBlock (plus) for this site or put up with it not working, I tested and all popular ad blockers are currently blocking this tab by accident.

Why are some ‘trending’ threads being shown with 3 or 4 comments and others with just 1?

If they all just had the title and just the last comment (one) there would be space to list more threads as trending.

As I said previously, comments seem to get moderated/released in blocks usually it is about 5-6 sites trending at the same time…then nothing for hours and hours (sometimes up to 48 hours).