Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

If it's not already obvious to everyone, the entry/image/video comments sections here are pretty awful. The rules that exist are almost invariably ignored; shitposts and spam get loads of upvotes, people get buried for politely disagreeing with the majority opinion, and most blatantly, all this is extremely widespread. The mods want to fix this, but so far, no one's been able to find a solution that everyone agrees will work.

So, what do you think needs to be done? Is it possible for this to be resolved without creating another set of problems, and if so, how?

I've come up with a couple of ideas myself:

• A comment report button. This would allow users to report span and shitposts directly to the mods so they can be deleted. It cvould potentially even replace the downvote button, as the whole purpose of downvoting is burying spam and shitposts, not burying opinions you disagree with.

• More control over comments for the mod team. As it is now, the mods don't have the time to search through the comments to hunt down the bad eggs, especially with people abusing downvotes. On top of that, they've all got other jobs to do; entry moderators have to edit entries, media moderators have to monitor images/videos, etc. Thus, ways for the mods to more easily regulate the comments must be implemented. Certainly, they should be given increased powers – the ability for any mod to delete shitposts, the report button, etc. One idea I had was to create an entirely new group of mods who would only moderate the comments sections, but I have no idea how feasible that would be.

Just throwing in my two cents:

There is no such thing as a Comment Moderator. Comment Moderation is only granted once somebody has reached Sr. Entry Moderator status.

The only actual comment moderator is this guy who isn't even marked and… sorry for an off topic question but who the hell is this guy anyways!?

Also, there is no way to police Upvoting/Downvoting and nobody can agree on if it should even be done or not.

There is no such thing as a Comment Moderator.

Comment Moderation is only granted once somebody has reached Sr. Entry Moderator status.

So if there are mods that have comment moderation powers, then there are comment moderators

Personally (and you can thank Random21 for this suggestion a while back) I feel a good first step in eliminating comment frustration is removing their karma system. I know, I rooted for the karma system in the forums, but on the forums, even though there is still abuse and a good deal of people don't like the system, I feel the system ultimately works in encouraging thoughtful/witty/generally good posts. In the comments section, as you mentioned, it's mostly the spam and shitposts and generally things we don't want that get all the upvotes. Removing karma won't make the problem disappear, but I think it would help users feel less encouraged to shitpost for karma. Setting the foundation, you know?

It would be nice if mods had more power to delete awful comments, but then the mods would end up looking like the bad guys (as if we don't already) and we would be accused of censorship even if we only get rid of comments that blatantly break site rules.

You already end up painted as the bad guys whenever you have to lock a gallery or even ban a particularly popular shitposter. You'd be even more unpopular if you removed comment karma. I don't see how deleting rulebreaking comments would be much of a stretch. Heck, most of the time people wouldn't even notice it was gone; if it was spammy enough to warrant deletion I doubt it would be very memorable.

At this point I don't give less of a shit what the comment section thinks of us, so I say go ahead and remove karma.

I don't know if I'm the only one who feels this or not, but as someone who uses the comments just as much as the forums (and didn't even discover the forums until about six months after I joined), I'd say that what we have on this site is about as good a comment section can possibly get. Does everyone- or even most people- act like perfect angels? Of course not. But when has that ever happened in the history of the internet, save for very small websites with very small userbases? (And even then, that's typically only when they're both intellectually bent, like a theoretical physics page or something.) Where is everyone getting this absurdly high standard from? It really just baffles me.

It's not that we have high standards it's that we have standards in the first place

Reposting from another thread:

"I think a temporary (and I mean temporarily, because people would probably throw huge shitfits if you disabled the system forever) disabling of comment karma would be a good idea while you guys figure out what the Hell to do with it. I think it should be a stasis kind of thing, which is to say that existing posts can still have their ratings, but nobody can contribute to raising/lowering said ratings until the stasis is lifted. Or maybe we can take the FaceBook route and disable/negate downvotes altogether, only allowing for upvotes on comments.

I’d recommend a “report/mark as spam” option to take its place for any comment that’s functionally bad, because, quite frankly, this site doesn’t need to keep a whole bunch of adbots and assholes from receiving the negative recognition that they deserve. This would still protect users that have dissenting opinions that are posted respectfully."

Again, I'm not really sure how well something like this would work in the short run or the long run, but I'm just throwing it out there.

It's really hard to have high standards when you don't expect the commenters to do anything except hate your guts

I've stopped commenting some time ago, and I do recall the system very flawed. 0.9999…=1 is right, not everyone will be angels, but still, there are shitposters and ignorant users. Not so much it ruins every comment thread, but you see them here and there occasionally.

Now I feel this is really threatening to the KYM community as a whole, and more to the users that only lurk and aren't frequent posters. In the case of the "devouted" members and staff, enforcing rules is both a hassle and a necessity. In a broad sense, we are the ones that want this site to be what it does, document and discuss internet phenomena, without people ruining it. Now on the case of the less frequent users, this is a meme site. They come and log on seeking a chill and relatively easy site to see what's going on in the internet. They expect fun and a few laughs. If we cause to create more rules, then that hinders these people.

Not to say we don't need rules, especially for commenting. Because the thing is people don't always read the rules.

When I first came to the site, I admit it, I wasn't expecting much and didn't read all the rules. I learned from the mistakes I made, and did what I found best in the site. I learned what to say and what not to say, who to talk to and who to avoid.

Maybe if these were easier to access then it'd be more helpful. Not everyone is responsible enough to seek out the rules themselves.

I'm only stating this to express my concern with the possibilty of what's to come. Just be cautious, we don't want users turning on us when we only want to help the site. Hope that makes sense?

Now I have an idea, more or less, on commenting. It's obvious that it needs fixing, one way or another. I hear a lot of "report" buttons, karma suppressing, and comment moderators. These are okay ideas, but I'm not going to say if I agree or disagree with them, still haven't decided. But I do like the idea of comment moderators, sort of. It'd be very tedious for the current moderators to deal with reports if we implemented report buttons. They'd have to go to the specific thread, inspect what's the problem, deal with the situation, then the user. That's a lot, and perhaps too much.

Now this may be a little crazy, and feel free to object, but hear me out. Say we created small teams of "comment monitors." These would be the users that comment frequently and have been a part of the community and are worth noting. The users that know the rules and systems, and what to fix and how to deal with them. (If we even have enough of these users). If report buttons were implemented, then these would be the "first response" users. They would act as moderators, but solely for the purpose of watching the comment systems and making sure nothing awful breaks loose. The power they have is up to debate, but I think enough to warn the users and maybe even delete the posts. Their purpose is to, from the title, moniter the comment section, since they are already part of it.

It's a stretch, but think of them as "mini moderators".

Reading back it sounds a little authoritarian. Odd I even came up with Comment Gestapo.

Personally, I think the comment sections are fine. Is there shitposting? Sure, but it's a comment section. Name me one comment section on the internet that doesn't have some level of shitposting in it. I think we're still quite a way away from Youtube levels.

I also think any of the purposed "fixes" (karma disabling, strict moderation, etc) would only aggravate the situation and turn the comments into a clusterfuck. Just look at Youtube when they tried to "clean up" the comments. I still see Bob copypastas eight months later. And that's a comment section that doesn't have image and video embedding capabilities and a userbase already inclined to dislike the moderation team.

One thing I think would help is if the rules were actually posted somewhere easily accessible instead of buried in the forums. The NSFW rules have their own thread. The Forum rules have their own thread. The comment section rules now have their own thread. You have to spend ten minutes reading through several threads just to figure out what the rules to the site actually are.

This is further complicated by the wide schism that exists between the comment section and the forum. Very few commentators post in the forums and that means very few have any idea what the rules actually are.

One thing I think would help is if the rules were actually posted somewhere easily accessible instead of buried in the forums.

This is the problem

The comment section think the rules are too harsh. We've tried arguing against this. It didn't work

The Mods think the comments section is a mess. The comment section get angry at us. We don't change our opinions.

Both sides are too set in their ways, so we're at a stalemate. I have zero intention of dropping my line of thinking, and I doubt the comment section will either. Nothing will change, more galleries will get locked, users will get stressed, mods will get stressed. Nobody wins. The admins are long overdue on stepping in on this and sorting things out. Since they are the guys who run the site, they should have the final say of what goes. I just wish they'd get involved already.

I honestly believe a clusterfuck is what we need. An unmoderated clusterfuck. I think that if this happens, then people may start to catch onto what we're saying

How's about instead of three messages begging the user to activate their account, you have one activation message and one message linking to the rules?

I don't think anything will get resolved if the "us vs. them" mentality keeps getting reinforced. In addition, I really don't understand the logic behind your last point. So you want to somehow make the comments worse… so everyone will agree that they need to be better in comparison to back before they… worsened?

If the only time the majority of the users think things are out of hand are when the mods close something, isn't it possible that the mods, though having authority over decision making and the power to enact their decisions, might be wrong? Obviously sometimes da rules da rule, like straight up porn has gotta go. But despite some of the mods generously patting each other on the back over the childhood threads, their reasoning all really seemed like rationalizing them closing the boards for not liking how a meme was interpreted by the internet (similar childhood topics on other sites evolved into the same thing as on here, the "filth" flowing into them is indicative of what childhood ruined and childhood enhanced are now), and then getting mad that they got called out on it.

That said, maybe anarchy would either prove your point on get the admins to do SOMETHING, since they apparently aren't.

But I'm just a new user, so I guess that's none of my business.

@0.9999…=1
It's as Hulk says, the anarchy may help people realize how we feel, and more importantly, wake the admins up. And I'm not conciously trying to promote this mentality, we reach stalemates like this is the mod forum, both sides believe in their cause too much to drop it, and we can't get anywhere if the argument is a 50/50 stalemate. I don't see this going away.

@hulk

Currently, we have image gallery guidelines in which we enforce the rules by, which were agreed upon by the admins. All the galleries which have so far been locked braked the rules on too many occasions, after warning the users.

We're getting mad because of shit like this and this and this. We aren't paragons that people follow the example of, we're just normal users too, who want to have fun as well. It's not like we get paid for this. If 'acting responsible so other follow in our footsteps' worked, it would've did loooooong ago. But, what seems like a million well constructed but still buried comments later, this shit's still going, so it's obvious it's not going to work. I humbly refuse to be the verbal punching bag of the site's users

Please note that whenever we tried to enforce rules through reminders via comments, we usually get down votes no matter how justified the comment is. The comment section thinks we're a place like memebase, or Reddit, or 9Gag where they just post stuff where ever, and refuse to listen when we clearly outline the rules. Of course we keep offering them to join us in the forums, were more legitimate discussion occurs, but that parley happens.

I think we actually give out comment powers along with entry powers. So you don't necessarily have to be Sr. Entry, but can also be a regular Entry mod. I can't really remember.

Crimson Locks wrote:

Personally (and you can thank Random21 for this suggestion a while back) I feel a good first step in eliminating comment frustration is removing their karma system.

I liked a different idea that was brought up in a previous discussion more. Instead of removing it, change the up- and downvotes to "helpful" and "unhelpful". Instead of making people handing out votes through liking the comment or not, make the vote system in comments based on if it's helpful or not.

Don't remove the system, but change how votes should be handed out.

Random 21 wrote:

braked the rules

How about drifting the rules? Perhaps we should drag race the rules?

RandomMan wrote:

Instead of removing it, change the up- and downvotes to “helpful” and “unhelpful”. Instead of making people handing out votes through liking the comment or not, make the vote system in comments based on if it’s helpful or not.

Nobody would act differently if this was implemented. Users use the "green button" when they support a comment or find it funny, and use the "red button" when they disagree with a comment, consider the comment spam, or don't like the comment/user.

Changing what the green button and red button are called won't do anything. People will still give "+1 helpful" to funny comments "-1 helpful" to comments they don't like. Adding "helpful" buttons next to the up/downvote buttons could change things, but having a "not helpful" button brings into question even having a downvote button.

Look, not everyone will read the rules, and that's why horrible entires are written and users shitpost. It's way past a friendly reminder now. I'm sorry about my really long post earlier, but I had already stated these problems.

Maybe it's just me, but helpful and unhelpful at least seem a little better than thumbs up and thumbs down.

I'm 100% for Particle Mare's idea. Stopping the problem before it increases. This way it'd be easier for new members to get to the rules.

I don't want the rules to pop out straight into everyone's face, but that tiny sliver to get to the rules is being overseen.

That's why I came up with the idea of comment monitors. They're the commentators and users that know the comment system and the rules best, and are willing to fix it, at least in theory.

@RM
I meant broke goddammit

We should go in steps i believe. I mean see if modding the comments and changing the name of the upvotes/downvotes help and then if it doesnt work remove the upvotes/downvotes. We shouldnt remove something people really like unless we know its absolutely necesary. especially right now that mods and commenters are in a fight. It could lead to alot of people leaving the site and that would be bad.

Alright alright. Listen, since the mods and users are constantly fighting and can't get to a solid agreement, how about this.

Polls.

Anyone can vote, and all the listed solutions can be put up. We can do section by section, so for instance one week it might be a poll on images, another on karma, and then one comments. This would be the fairest solution, since everyone gets to choose what they see is best. Thoughts?

Polls sound good.

This isn't an issue that can be solved democratically, because it's the majority that is causing the problem. The ones who downvote the comments they disagree with, put images in the wrong gallery, and upvote shitposts or rule-breaking comments will be the same ones that elect to keep things the way they are, unknowingly contributing to the further degradation of the site.They're either too young or too stupid to understand the consequences of their actions, and that's why they can't be trusted to decide how things go.

I guess you're right, but in this situation, it won't be easy to appease the commentors. Not saying it's all about letting the commentors be happy. Just if the mods forced restrictions, it'd be too much of a "dictatorship", and users would again backlash at them. Polls seemed like the fairest solution, at least for the majority of the people.

Also, is the majority of the people at fault here? There are users that follow the fules. That's why I also thought of comment monitors, you know, users that are well known and friendly that help encourage following the rules, like Gaben, expect this time for comments rather than entries,

I would agree with the "report spam button" ideas, unless the the report system is like Cheezburger. Well, you will only accidentally banned a lot of user.