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!
By merlinmurph
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:13am
Sorry, it was begging to be said.......someday I'll grow up
Anyways, thanks for your efforts.
Don't give me that, you
By Dave
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:58am
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
By jdrinboston
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:14am
Look, I came in here for an argument!!
No you didn't.
By Ari O
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:32am
No you didn't.
An argument
By Sarcastic Sam
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 7:21pm
...is not just Contradictions.
wrong room
By Scott M
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 2:33pm
Oh, sorry, this is Abuse!
I came here to show you...
By dmcboston
Thu, 12/12/2013 - 12:18pm
...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!
By MC Slim JB
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:25pm
It's "toffee-nosed", meaning "snobby". Otherwise, well done.
Actually I knew that, but
By Dave
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:11pm
Actually I knew that, but didn't notice when I C+Ped from elsewhere. GAHH!!
nerds.
By John-W
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:39pm
.
John you ignorant slut!
By SwirlyGrrl
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:59pm
:-)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs
You will never find a more
By Stating the obvious
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:17am
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
By tape
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:54pm
Sure you will: Herald comments.
(Actually the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's comments are the worst I've ever seen.)
Try 'The Herald'
By Elmer
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:03pm
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.
By Sally
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:00pm
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
By Hyde_Parker
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:28pm
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
By CraigInDaVille
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:19am
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
By anon
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:27am
Logged in commenters have to shoulder some of the blame as well.
Some, but not really
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:31pm
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?
By tachometer
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:13pm
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/...
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
By tape
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:55pm
At least they can be positively identified and called out by name.
Bingo
By CraigInDaVille
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:31pm
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...??
By John-W
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:45pm
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
By Hyde_Parker
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:34pm
Not me. Hyde Parker is a code name.
agreed
By cybah
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:11pm
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...
By DebGeisler
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:32pm
...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
By Michael
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:53pm
...is intended to support your comment. If I had time, I'd have made it witty, too.
maybe if people stopped
By anon
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 10:28am
maybe if people stopped blaming murder victims then there will be no posts with people firing back.
I've come here for an argument!
By moxie
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:10am
No, you haven't....
Better ways.
By kevin
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:16am
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
By APB
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:07pm
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
By kevin
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 2:58pm
An editor doesn't scale very well.
That's true
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:27pm
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?
By FlyingToaster
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:11pm
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
By Kaz
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:15pm
He already has. It's called logging in.
What does a non-required
By kevin
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:00pm
What does a non-required login feature solve?
The one you mentioned as being a problem
By Kaz
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:31pm
Solved by logging in. He doesn't manually curate logged-in comments.
I trust Adam's judgement.
By Felicity
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:13pm
I trust Adam's judgement.
You know...
By anon
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:17am
If you had approved my account I could be a nonymous bitch, rather than an anonymous one :P
Arrgh, my apologies
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:33pm
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
By Jessamyn
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:26am
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!
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:28pm
MetaFilter's what UHub wants to be when it grows up (just in a more convenient Boston size)!
I support this.
By erik g
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:41am
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
By anon
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:54am
cutting page views in half would be great for his bottom line.
Interesting question
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:38pm
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
By Hyde_Parker
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 5:07pm
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?
By Jeff F
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 11:47am
Or do you mean that you will be filtering posts to remove objectionable ones made by anons?
I'm already filtering anonymous comments
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:42pm
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
By cybah
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:54pm
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
By Dave
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:17pm
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,
By Scratchie
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:46pm
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
By Patricia
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:19pm
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
By cybah
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 5:13pm
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!
By Crankycoffey
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:06pm
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
By Hyde_Parker
Thu, 12/12/2013 - 4:12pm
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
By JohnAKeith
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 12:27pm
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.
By Dave
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:18pm
Bring back wickedgood.info.
People were always nice to each other there.
Say, now there's an idea
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 2:01pm
Snort.
Heckuva job!
By Kaz
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:18pm
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
By gotdatwmd
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:24pm
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 ...
By adamg
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 2:49pm
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!
By Sally
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:03pm
Yep--that's our Boston. Oh--and shouldn't Southie get its own category?
I value anons
By Markk02474
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:36pm
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 [s]EBT[/s] Charlie Cards.
BTW, great work Adam on the site. Well run and interesting stories that keep visitors returning.
MBTA posts
By John-W
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 4:50pm
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,
By Hyde_Parker
Thu, 12/12/2013 - 4:13pm
I first read that as, "immigrants ON the T," and I was all, whaaaa?
how 'bout the redline?
By geep9
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 1:56pm
Are people allowed to be uncivil to the T :))
*not the drivers of course.
Complaints about the Red Line
By Nancy
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 3:53pm
Bring back BadTransit.com!
Now now let's not get all
By anon
Wed, 12/11/2013 - 8:12pm
Now now let's not get all uptight
Suggestion......
By Pete Nice
Thu, 12/12/2013 - 8:28am
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
By Alex_Toth
Thu, 12/12/2013 - 9:26am
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.
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