Sure. It’ll also be more people, too! Hopefully you grognards will help keep them in line.
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But they’re all right here.
Indeed. The key word being here. Not on BoingBoing proper any more. You just have nonsensical ‘best of’ ones on there, published without context, which don’t often make any sense when plucked out of a discussion. Earlier today on the Cancer Patient article one of the featured comments was this, from IronEdithKidd: “For the eleventybillionth time, this is a blog, not a news site.”. Unless I then jump to the forum thread that doesn’t mean anything.
There’s not really much reason to even bother going to boingboing.net any more. The home page is now bbs.boingboing.net, effectively; unfortunately, since the posts move around as they are commented on and we only have the titles to go by it’s a lot harder to follow than it was.
The content is still there, so this is still BoingBoing, it’s just obfuscated, and I don’t understand the reasoning behind it. It’s nice to have a forum and this seems to be a good one, I just wish you’d mirrored the threads onto the bottom of the article pages and I still don’t understand why you didn’t (beyond it being the preference of some unnamed editors, because comments made them in some way uncomfortable).
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Funny thing is that comment did not have any context within the thread either. It was meaningless. The question then is how did it get promoted? A piddling detail that will require some adjustment along the way.
What’s the over/under on this thing’s lifespan?
Burying the commenting system does not a robust community make. You just end up with a bunch of Morlocks.
If that’s the goal, then…well, enjoy that.
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A couple of days ago the following story was published:
Alan Myers, DEVO drummer, RIP (I can’t get a link to work)
By far the best comment on the short thread is this:
. . . for the following reasons:
- It corrects an implicit error in the story
- It contains interesting ‘expert’ information
Instead, for some time the only ‘Notable Reply’ was this:
Now, all due respect to stefanjones, but Stexe’s comment is, by any measure, more ‘notable’.
Further, it was presented in a gracious way (he kindly says that “[i]t’s a minor point”, when in fact it somewhat invalidates the whole post).
So why was Stexe’s comment not deemed ‘notable’?
Absent any explanation (which is always the case with NRs) one can only conclude that it is because it made the author “uncomfortable”, by drawing attention to his mistake. The ‘Notable Replies’ should have included Stexe’s comment and the reply to it:
To compound the error, stefanjones’ comment has now been re-designated “not notable” (and no others deemed ‘notable’), presumably to avoid perception of the conflict noted above.
On day one, I posited that the perverse incentives of the ‘Notable Replies’ system would lead to perverse outcomes, and it seems to me that this is an example.
Small mistakes like this happen all the time, and there’s no shame in it if you own up transparently. I’d have easily made the same mistake because, while I like DEVO, my obsessions lie elsewhere.
Embrace these sorts of contributions and we all win. As it currently stands, all this tells me that ‘Notable Replies’ is not to be trusted.
Note: This comment is an honest appraisal of the situation as I see it. If I’ve got something wrong, or if I’m somehow on the wrong track, I’ll be most happy to entertain relevant criticism (see how it works?).
Thank you for reading.
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You know, I was thinking.
it’s only a small jump from saying that there is no point in going to the main BB site since the comments and the links to the stories are right here – which I completely agree with – to saying that if we don’t like the way this forum works, we could just move somewhere else; start a subreddit, maybe, or host something ourselves.
I don’t mean that as a viable option, especially – although, there’s nothing wrong with it – just a demonstration of the fact that there is a big disconnect between the comments and the BB site. They used to be part of the same thing. Now they are not.
Yes. Or, alternatively, the bbs user interface should make it very clear that they are not going to. One of those.
“Grognard” - thank you. New word.
I get what you’re saying, but with this specific example, personally I’d post a comment without referring to the error, and discreetly message the poster to draw attention to the err.
It can then be quickly remedied.
I’ve always found it a little tiresome when commenters leap onto mistakes of spelling, grammar, etc, and in some apparent triumph declare it to the world. They wouldn’t make better editors of this blog than the BB team, they couldn’t, as their (and my) personal focus is so much narrower.
There are enough of us detail-geeks out here that frankly, virtually no article could survive fully unscathed were we to assault it with vigour, en masse, on any site whatsoever.
The content of that post that didn’t relate to the error was more interesting, and to me notable, but I would cringe to think BB edited it before allowing posting.
Yup. In my days of wearing the black armband for my old moniker, which I still can’t access (I think), and the multi thousand likes validating my points of view, I did eventually run into the ‘could I do this’ discussion with myself. The answer was a kind of “maybe not”, at least, ego given due massage, not in terms of audience.
BB is what - 25 years old? It just happens to bring so much together that interests me and teaches me (I learned about washing my hands properly here), sometimes in a hapless jumbled assemblage, sometimes in a crescendo of convergent points covering a massive area of culture and life, that I appreciate the content immensely, so long as it keeps coming.
The comments of old were fantastic, some real fiery stuff in there where motivated enemies of my mindset and personality type focused their rage on me, and that might still happen, but if it doesn’t, and I want it, I may well set up a fiery pedestal of my own and draw them in somehow. In my spare time. Of which I have zero.
I think one casualty might be the lack of PR flacks and astroturfing - given that passers-by aren’t evident in the comments (yet), PR people may gauge BB as less damaging when funny, memorable negative commentary plays against their cause. So they may not focus their resource on the idiotic tactics we’ve seen previously.
That said, the winners of change are those that are the most flexible in any given system. Perhaps BB would be kind enough to headline commentary that could bait the hook for those battles. Because they weren’t internecine grognard (heh) battles - they were with passing patrols that weren’t prepared. Heh.
Anyways, let’s see.
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I’d love to get more info on that too-- If some comment I made about someone’s article made them uncomfortable on the internet I don’t think I could sleep at night!
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Rob says that 95% of people don’t look at the comments.
I didn’t see that 95% quote. I wonder if that measurement is per post or based on overall visitors (ie, the average article only gets a 5% click-through to comments vs 95% of boing boing visitors never, ever go to comments?)
Hey there,
First of all, you are entirely mistaken to think that Stexe’s comment was somehow hidden because it made me “uncomfortable.” If you’ve read BB for very long, you’d know that we are always happy to admit to and correct any errors. That’s why I responded to his comment in the forum that he is correct and I replaced the video.
More importantly though, please know that the forums are very much in Beta. There are many factors that determine whether a forum comment makes it to the post page. Most of these are automatic, based on such things as number of likes, who likes it, the number of comments made by the commenter, etc. And our friends at Discourse are still tuning that algorithm and identifying how the automation interacts with manual actions by the post’s author. So yes, we’re still working on it. Nothing nefarious going on here.
Thanks!
dp
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The rule at the moment is that comments by new users – you can tell they are new because the username is grey – are not selected for promotion to the article as a rule. This is because they could be questionable images that need to be moderated, etc.
We are looking at some scoring changes that let new users “punch through” provided their posts are liked and responded to by the community.
So the correct thing to do here is like the post – be the change you wish to see, and all that. 
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I still am waiting for some one of the BB’ers (or anyone) to shed some light on this (as it was conveniently skipped over, above).
(Rob? Pesco?)
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re aiming your question at the wrong editors.
He’s just being diplomatic about the plain fact that BB comments have always been very strictly moderated, that we’ve always canned hostile, whiny, creepy commenters and not just spammers.
With discussion is on a separate URL, the distinction between “published by us” and “published by you” is rather more explicit. So there might be a little more latitude, perhaps?
I’m trying to respect the claim this isn’t about entitlement … but you know, it’s hard not to think it… 
Entitlement about being to read able comments in a way that provides the best context for them, enhancing the content provided by the editors that provokes said discussion, driving repeated pageviews?
I’d happily swap my ability to post anywhere on BB in return for the comments going back inline.
As far as moderation goes, I’m actually pretty happy for it to be on the more aggressive side. Shit-canning the trolls improves the conversation. Admittedly, I didn’t much care for Theresa’s disemvowelling, that just seemed a little childish. I don’t particularly want there to be more latitude.
