The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.
Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought. It all goes to show you can't be too careful.]]>
The changes will bring all your website activity and site preferences into one place, which we hope will make it easier for you to find and to manage them. Where "you" actually means "everyone else".]]>
No problem. Just try one of these random comments and you'll be sure to impress the self‑proclaimed who's who of the left‑wing internet intelligentsia. No comment.]]>
People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence. Jan 2013: TechCrunch abandons Facebook logins for comments, saying that engagement is too low *waves to non-Facebook commenters*.]]>
Facebook rejects Mr. Weigert's ruling, saying "We believe the orders are without merit, a waste of German taxpayers' money and we will fight it vigorously." But this dispute is more than simply another "European country angry at big US company" story. This cuts right to the heart of a long-standing Internet debate — do we have the right to be anonymous online?
This has serious consequences in the real world. The Irish parliament is investigating the role of social media in a public debate following the suicide of Irish politician Shane McEntee after a campaign of abuse, some of it on social media. Furthermore, a recent study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that vituperative comments on science articles affected how people perceived the validity of the science. The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research, a finding that has implications for the public understanding of science. There's a slight elision there: are people necessarily polite just because they use their real (Facebook) IDs? There are plenty of examples of Facebook comments that are far from polite. The particular point is surprising, though.]]>
At least 20% of the comments left on the Guardian website each month come from only 2,600 user accounts, who together make up just 0.0037% of the Guardian’s declared monthly audience. The other 80% come from a maximum (mathematically calculated) of 498,600 accounts, or 0.7% of the total monthly audience, broadly reaffirming the 90:9:1 rule.]]>
Part of the reason for this new platform is technical: we've re-architected it to separate it from our content management system, so that high comment traffic will never compromise our ability to serve up pages quickly. We'll have more details soon on our developer blog. Coming soon to a screen near you. (Thanks @angusthebull for the link.)]]>
But Marshall has the right to not like the movie, and people have the right to express their disagreement with him (although if you haven't seen the movie, your arguments may be on shaky ground). And we have the right to pull your comment down and ban you if we think you're acting inappropriately.
But if I could ask everyone for one thing, it's this: don't be a dick. Even if you think someone else is being a dick. Just take a deep breath, step away from the computer, and maybe go for a walk. Have a smoke if you need one. There are plenty of other things to get angry about, like war, famine, poverty and crime. But not movie reviews. Upshot: they're going to shift towards a Facebook-based commenting system.]]>
Clearly, the folks who do this for a living are shameless and awful. But this morning I learned they’re striving for even greater levels of shamelessness and actually achieving it. Today's helping of karma with a side order of belly laughs.]]>