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A word on civility
By adamg on Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:06am
I'm seeing a growing number of comments along the lines of "you jerk, go die!" (actually, even worse, but you get the idea) If you're posting anonymously (i.e., you're not logged in, even if you do fill in the "name" field), sorry, I'm not going to mark that for public consumption. If you want to tear into somebody's position, by all means, go for it, but it's not closing time at a dive bar here and I'd like to try to keep things somewhat civil. As they say on MetaFilter:
Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the issues, topics, and facts at hand - not at other members of the site.
Thanks!
The Mgmt.
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Comments
What an a*hole!
Sorry, it was begging to be said.......someday I'll grow up
Anyways, thanks for your efforts.
Don't give me that, you
Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous pervert!
I came in here for an
Look, I came in here for an argument!!
No you didn't.
No you didn't.
An argument
...is not just Contradictions.
wrong room
Oh, sorry, this is Abuse!
I came here to show you...
...how YOU TOO can make $87.56 an hour using nothing but the computer in Mom's basement, like I do.
See? Isn't that better than calling someone an EBT card using Obama voter?
Adam, I wouldn't trade my job for your job...evah. Been here five years, love it, whatever you need to do, you do. There are other sites I visit where enough down votes gets the comment pulled but you can see it by clicking a link. Would something like that work? Registered users get to pull the plug on the insane bullshit/trolls/spammers/anonymous cowards etc.
Might lighten the load a bit. Disclaimer: I don't have a blog, don't know shit about how they work.
Get it right!
It's "toffee-nosed", meaning "snobby". Otherwise, well done.
Actually I knew that, but
Actually I knew that, but didn't notice when I C+Ped from elsewhere. GAHH!!
nerds.
.
John you ignorant slut!
:-)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs
You will never find a more
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the comment section here during a controversial post
Sure you will: Herald
Sure you will: Herald comments.
(Actually the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's comments are the worst I've ever seen.)
Try 'The Herald'
Oh yes you will. Over at 'The Herald', even the least controversial articles are accompanied by juvenile comments filled with personal attacks and insults. Adding to the experience are the Herald thummers who give an improbable number of "thumb ups" to the most ignorant comments, and "thumb downs" to any thoughtful comments. The phenomenon is particularly pronounced for stories that contain any reference to "EBT cards", "occupy", and especially "Elizabeth Warren".
I long ago concluded it's only a few people who do this, by posting under multiple usernames. Sometimes they get lazy and post exactly the same text under different names. Maybe it's all just one person. (H.C.?)
Any article is fair game though.
A piece on the Red Line being down for repairs or on a new restaurant opening is still usually fringed with the usual cut-and-paste litany of "it's all Obama's fault." It's like a bunch of deranged, right-wing parrots have been let loose.
I've been waiting for this
I've been waiting for this comment thread to be blamed in some way on Obama :-). We're all way to smart for that.
Love this
Thanks, Adam. The comments on UHub can be a real asset to the overall news story being discussed (or at least amusing), but they really had started getting over the top with some anons.
Logged in commenters have to
Logged in commenters have to shoulder some of the blame as well.
Some, but not really
There's something about getting an account, even if you remain totally anonymous, that seems to inspire folks to count to 10. For the most part, I am not seeing logged in users descending into the sort of disturbing death wishes that some anon folks are spending time trying to post (at the same time, yes, I recognize the value of allowing anonymous comments - not everybody with something valuable/interesting to say wants to be identified in any way - so I've managed to box myself into the sometimes uncomfortable position of comment gatekeeper for anonymous users).
gatekeeper?
I would think of it more as the doorman at a club who is in charge of the velvet rope...the velvet rope....
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3YEx0g_0kA0/Tao9ToE6C9I/AAAAAAAAASE/u97r3BesKu...
Yes the VIP card (registered account) might get you in you can still be tossed for boorish behavior. The anonymous person standing in line is going to get much more scrutiny before they are allowed in.
At least they can be
At least they can be positively identified and called out by name.
Bingo
Plus, since many of us seem to get to know each other, even remotely and somewhat anonymously, it's easier to tell when someone is being sarcastic versus being a troll. Or to just discount them completely because of past comments that they have made. Or expect great insight because of their offline lives. Or laugh because you know that person is telling a joke because their sense of humor comes through in consistent posts.
Either way, it's just a lot more civil when someone posts under a consistent name in the same community for years at a time.
Oh yeah...??
Well have you heard about the documentation of municipal meetings at Cambridge City Hall in ancient Abyssinian Sign Language?
Instant run-off voting.
My goat has hives.
Not me. Hyde Parker is a
Not me. Hyde Parker is a code name.
agreed
Same with a few other sites.. Sorry Adam. sometimes I wonder if the 'comments' feild under any articles on the web was the worst thing to ever happen. It just brings out the nastiness of people. (And I'm certainly not innocent at making snide comments)
I've decided...
...that if I can't be witty or informative or supportive or interesting...then it makes no sense to write a comment at all. (This is my informative mode.)
This comment
...is intended to support your comment. If I had time, I'd have made it witty, too.
maybe if people stopped
maybe if people stopped blaming murder victims then there will be no posts with people firing back.
I've come here for an argument!
No, you haven't....
Better ways.
Every website that allows users to input text has this problem, and there are many effective solutions. Manually curating every comment is one of the most difficult and least efficient methods. You should look into other solutions. Personally I prefer the democratic solutions where the community decides what is acceptable, instead of one dictator behind the scenes killing anything they don't approve.
I look forward to seeing this comment appear 20 minutes from now. Maybe.
I Prefer Adam
I'll take a seasoned editor over "democracy" every time when it comes to news and information. Eliminating crap is the job of an editor. Editors are not dictators, unless you think that anyone who runs a news site or paper and decides what's fit to print is a fascist.
In which case, you'll find friends at BDC and the Herald.
An editor doesn't scale very
An editor doesn't scale very well.
That's true
The Globe has (or had? I haven't kept up with this stuff) a whole team of editors out on the Canadian prairie somewhere scanning their comments and yet the typical discussion on a Globe story these days isn't all that much different from a Herald discussion. Fortunately, while UHub has grown over the past couple of years, it hasn't gotten to the point of moderation being impossible.
Canadian Prairie?
I was under the impression that the ones I interacted with (in the bad old days) were on the other side of the International Date line. I'd invariably get whatever "inquiry" about a comment they'd held sent to me between 12&6am, when I was either asleep or off doing load testing. And the quality of discussion, at least on the business pages, was no better than now.
Eventually they just shut off comments for business news posts. Maybe they hired the Canadians after that; it's not like there are that many stories on Boston.com now that have "Discuss" links anymore.
Except
He already has. It's called logging in.
What does a non-required
What does a non-required login feature solve?
The one you mentioned as being a problem
Solved by logging in. He doesn't manually curate logged-in comments.
I trust Adam's judgement.
I trust Adam's judgement.
You know...
If you had approved my account I could be a nonymous bitch, rather than an anonymous one :P
Arrgh, my apologies
Send me e-mail with the account name you tried and I'll get it set up. I'm gatekeeping these for spam reasons (it's amazing how many blatantly spammy user-account requests the system gets), I've slipped up sometimes with them.
One of our other unspoken
One of our other unspoken rules is that wishing death or dismemberment on anyone (political figures, other users, moderators) is grounds for deletion. It's tough to make a case that it adds anything to the discussion and we get that people are angry about things--we are too--but the difference between being angry and responding angrily is a big one.
Thanks!
MetaFilter's what UHub wants to be when it grows up (just in a more convenient Boston size)!
I support this.
I'd advocate strongly for getting rid of anonymous comments, but this is your show, Adam, and good on you for trying to up the level of discourse. I support all administrative policies that want to make this place more like MetaFilter.
Because everyone needs a hug,
Ya because
cutting page views in half would be great for his bottom line.
Interesting question
Fortunately, the majority of page views on the site are from repeat visitors (as much as I appreciate Google, I really want as little of my daily traffic as possible to come from it - I'm still scarred from an incident at my old job when Google decided we'd done something wrong and deleted every single one of our indexed pages and our traffic dropped like a rock). But I suspect most of that is not from people who post some anonymous rant, then come back and keeping hitting reload to see who responds. But (but, but, he sputters) I don't really know and don't want to spend the time to figure it out.
As I mentioned upthread, I still see a value in allowing anonymous comments - to the point where I'm still willing to put the time into curating them (comments from logged in users are different - they get posted automatically and instantly).
I regularly commented on a
I regularly commented on a site that disallowed anonymous comments. All it meant was that every few weeks the trolls had to register new accounts when their old one was deleted by the mods.
I wonder if moderating the insane-o comments is the way to limit/eliminate them. If people know their screed won't get (or stay) published, they won't be as eager to post it. Maybe?
Do you mean no unregistered comments at all?
Or do you mean that you will be filtering posts to remove objectionable ones made by anons?
I'm already filtering anonymous comments
As anybody who's ever posted anonymously here knows, those comments don't go up automatically - they go into a queue where I review them. I originally did that just for spam reasons - you can hire people in Mumbai pretty cheaply to answer captchas and post spam - but as the site's gotten more popular, I've been doing it more for content reasons. Kind of an uncomfortable position to be in, but I'm not going to deliberately allow death threats and the like to show up, nor am I going to allow what I consider to be stupid attempts to derail discussions here into cesspools of Herald-like rantings about EBT (yes, UHub now has people trying to post stuff about EBT in a wide range of discussions that have nothing to do with it - you people really need to either stick to the Herald or stop reading it so much; yeah, I'm a liberal from back in the day that way).
At least
We haven't been taken over by the typical BDC posters.. ObamaPhone, EBT, ObamaCare, Barry, Liberal/Obama voter or whatever Obama-slamming posts (regardless of what the article is about). The BDC forums have been over taken by these folks, and the comments section are almost unreadable now. I'm almost convinced these folks are being paid for these comments now.. there's just so many of them.
I do see that BDC now has been taken over by spammer like USA Today and CNN.com have.. the, i.e., "My brother has been unemployed for xx years and with a personal computer made xxx dollars a month". Sigh..
Re: At least
Unemployed for 20 years and with a computer made $30 /mo? Wow.
Almost as bad as the aforementioned anonymous incivility are all these named pedantic wise-asses ;-)
ObamaPhone, EBT, ObamaCare,
You forgot Sen. Warren and Bill Ayers. Do try to be more thorough in the future, won't you?
I don't read those comment
I don't read those comment sections; Globe or Herald because they are all the same arguments. But, I've a feeling that disagreeable opinions could be the source of your problem? Opposing arguments can be made (without name calling, etc..), no?
What you may call troublesome, could just be someone offering an opposing opinion is what I'm getting at.
Personally I don't like Warren - at all. Now I don't go around calling her fauxahontis, or the like, but have I a right to my opinion? Can I call her out when I see she is wrong?
I guess I am a bit concerned over selective outrage.
Agreed
However, there's a fine line on Globe and Herald sites between airing your views and just being a general troll. If you have a good point to make, by all means make it, but just saying stuff like..
"Typical Obama Voter"
"EBT Card User"
and the like is just simply trolling and being an ass.
thank you!
for taking the time. Also, I assume it's an emotional drain to see a ton of dreadful comments.
Yeah, if I knew that a
Yeah, if I knew that a registered account meant that I didn't have to wait for my comment to be moderated, I would have registered years ago!
Agreed
Certainly needs to be said every once in awhile and I've wanted to go that route often over the years but held back every time.
Just last week I wanted to write, "Could you shut your goddamn pie hole for one second?"
But, I didn't, not even anonymously.
Non-anonymous comments aren't logical only because just about everyone on this board has a "handle" and can just use that to be uncivil. I can count on one hand the people who (seem to) use their "real" names.
Adam says he keeps ugly comments from posting, so it doesn't matter who writes them, anonymous or attributed.
Bring back wickedgood.info.
Bring back wickedgood.info.
People were always nice to each other there.
Say, now there's an idea
Snort.
Heckuva job!
I know you are exasperated enough to post this request, Adam, but I'll say this:
You've been doing so well at maintaining these comments through your queuing system that I hadn't even realized it had become something you needed to comment on.
Curious what stories in
Curious what stories in particular this is a response to, because other than the anonymous friends of the kid who shot the cop who obviously only found about uhub via a facebook post, I haven't really noticed much uncivilized debate.
Well ...
I've kept a lot of stuff from showing up. It's across the board in your basic hot-button UHub stories: Murders, bicycles, immigrants and the T.
Cackle!
Yep--that's our Boston. Oh--and shouldn't Southie get its own category?
I value anons
even if the source of many ad hominem attacks when rational arguments fail. Allowing anons lets people more confidently post inside information the public would not ordinarily read. The T is a staple here, so are complaints about it, likely by people with multiple
EBTCharlie Cards.BTW, great work Adam on the site. Well run and interesting stories that keep visitors returning.
MBTA posts
Actually I find the most informative, inside-baseball comments on the T are coming from people with accounts, not anons.
I first read that as,
I first read that as, "immigrants ON the T," and I was all, whaaaa?
how 'bout the redline?
Are people allowed to be uncivil to the T :))
*not the drivers of course.
Complaints about the Red Line
Bring back BadTransit.com!
Now now let's not get all
Now now let's not get all uptight
Suggestion......
I've seen other comment sites that allow anon comments, but instead of the name of the commenter being "anon on wed", it gives the city/town IP address location. This makes it hard to pinpoint the actual location, and often times gives random intraweb locations where connections are routed through.
It is at least a way to see which anons are making which comments without giving away an exact location, which Adam possibly has with the numbered IP address.
Good in theory, but not always accurate
I get geo-coded to "Weymouth" whenever an advertiser decides they want to show me customized ads based on my IP. No idea why but it must be related to Comcast's IP block.
But at least we know the "Weymouth" anon
is going to be the same "Weymouth" troll for all their posts. It doesn't matter where they live, but they are assigned a random name at least. After a while posters can figure out the sock puppet trolls and start to include/exclude them from discussions.
IP addresses from Boston only?
I'm more interested in hearing comments about Boston from people who actually live in Boston. There are certain registered users who don't even live in Boston yet never fail to post daily nasty and judgmental comments about this city and the people who live here. Might be nice if only registered users with Boston IP addresses could post. I'd probably register if that were the case. Just my personal opinion.
People who don't live in Boston and opinions about Boston
Errr ... what?
Just because I have lived in Cambridge, Brookline and Quincy for my post-college life (20+) years and have worked in the City of Boston for my entire career, I'm not informed enough to have an opinion about it? Should I stop going to restaurants and other businesses in Boston too? Maybe I should stop volunteering at shelters in Boston.
Oh sage anon, please elaborate on what I can and cannot do as a non-resident of Boston.
That's why I said it's just
That's why I said it's just my personal opinion. No need to be so offended.
I disagree
While I technically live in a separate municipality (Somerville), I live closer to downtown Boston than a large percentage of official Boston residents do (no, I don't have a citation, just a map and common sense). While I agree that people who live in Chicago/LA/NYC and have never set foot in MA probably aren't the most useful commenters, just remember that this is an overall region and most of the topics discussed have regional implications.
I see your point. It's really
I see your point. It's really the comments from a few registered users who have identified themselves as suburbanites who take nearly every opportunity to slam pretty much anything and everything about the city of Boston as well as making unfounded bigoted remarks about the people who live here that made me think of the Boston IP address only suggestion. Again, just my personal opinion.
I didn't know
I didn't know that Howie Carr had his own login here.
I would hope you would know
I would hope you would know where you live and the proximity to downtown Boston! Is someone challenging you on that? I wouldn't ask for a citation... that would be other users.
Take a deep breath....
Take a deep breath, take a step back, and think about what you just said.
Think about all the things that are wrong with that statement, both from a technical point of view and a philosophical point of view.
In the interest of civility, I'm done with this comment.
Just wouldn't work
why? because the way ARIN assigns and tracks IP addresses could change at any given day and are assigned in large blocks not really based on locality.
For example, my cable modem at home (in Chelsea) has an IP address of 24.61.63.144 . If you look on Arin, this is what it says for that class.,.
NetRange 24.60.0.0 - 24.61.255.255
CIDR 24.60.0.0/15
Name NEW-ENGLAND-4
Handle NET-24-60-0-0-2
Parent RW2-NORTHEAST-1 (NET-24-60-0-0-1)
Net Type Reassigned
Origin AS
Customer Comcast Cable Communications Holdings, Inc (C02610694)
Registration Date 2010-10-18
Last Updated 2010-10-18
That's it. No City. No nothing. Would be hard to do it from town.
And that's two class B ranges. Over 2,097,152 IP addresses for Comcast New England.
And just to overcome it, especially with home routers is to just create a new Mac Address, and poof Comcast gives you another IP address.
Also keep in mind many IP addresses are not assigned to a region. For example, I often post/read from my cell phone, which is TMobile. When I look up the IP in Arin, it says the IP is assigned to Seattle, WA, no where close to new england. Same can be said about my work's IP address. it's assigned to New Jersey, even though I am in Boston)
Nice idea, but GeoIP doesn't always work as designed.
PS
PS - That's NOT my home IP (its pretty close, in the same class B tho..) but just used it to make a point..
It doesn't have to always work though cybah....
And I understand that it might not work for everyone, but if people can choose a name, and then have the location also show up, it might at least be consistent at some level.
Correct
However keep in mind firewalls and multiple users from the same IP address.
For example, T-Mobile's APN gateway's address is 208.54.36.190 and 208.54.36.191 . These are the ONLY addresses that show up for any T-Mobile subscriber no matter where they are in the United States. So all.. whatever it is.. 1.2 Million T-Mobile subscribers all come from those two single IP addresses (yes it's one hellva firewall over there).
Sure a name + that IP might help.. but might not.
(Sorry I do computer stuff for a living and my forte is building networks and firewalls. GeoIP just has a lot to be desired)
Anyhow not trying to jab ya Pete, just trying to educate folks on how/why this usually won't work.
topix.com is one of those sites.....
Test it out and see if your IP location comes out the same each time.