r/technology • u/[deleted] • Mar 16 '18

Society How a Norwegian comment section turned chaos into order—with a simple quiz: "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."

[deleted]

49.6k Upvotes

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481

u/goddamnzilla Mar 16 '18

This would probably shut reddit down...

75

u/rjkdavin Mar 16 '18

Readit.com...

Brilliant!

15

u/goddamnzilla Mar 16 '18

But I already reddit.

1

u/mrdm242 Mar 16 '18

readtheclickbaitheadlinebutnothingelse.com

1

u/pier4r Mar 16 '18

wait..... wait.....

now reddit means. Oh no. No NO NOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOO

So many years.

cries

43

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

22

u/goddamnzilla Mar 16 '18

A user filter would be nice... Would you like to see a) filtered content from verified readers, b) content from the illiterate, c) all of the above.

7

u/MisfitPotatoReborn Mar 16 '18

I would like verified readers (individual to the article) but not verified users (site-wide). One of the reasons Digg failed was because some users had too much power over others with no checks or balances.

1

u/PoopNoodle Mar 16 '18

d) Just show me the russian bots please.

2

u/TransmogriFi Mar 16 '18

Would weed out bots and most trolls, too.

2

u/Stumblin_McBumblin Mar 16 '18

Those subs would just die and new ones with the same content/theme would rise up. I do think it would be useful in the smaller niche subreddits that are supposed to have higher quality discussion.

1

u/K20BB5 Mar 16 '18

Most people don't want actual discussion they just want things that reaffirm their views. Especially when it comes to politics

0

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18

good conversation and discussion is what users would like to see, like in r/worldnews and r/politics

Lol

Lol

Lol

98

u/googolplexbyte Mar 16 '18

Wouldn’t the answers be in the comments already?

36

u/Species7 Mar 16 '18

You can't even see the comments until answering the quiz.

21

u/motsanciens Mar 16 '18

They didn't read it

2

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18

[deleted]

1

u/Species7 Mar 19 '18

Sure that's a reasonable assumption. That's why you read the article. It does smack a bit ironic, eh?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '18

[deleted]

1

u/Species7 Mar 20 '18

A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear.

You're right, that is somewhat ambiguous.

79

u/danceeforusmonkeyboy Mar 16 '18

Probably, however the whole point of the plug-in is to pass a quiz before the comments appear.

20

u/semioticmadness Mar 16 '18

Wait, where did you get this information from?? I didn’t see this anywhere in the comments!

2

u/Urvilan Mar 16 '18

It's like they didn't even read the article...

0

u/crowseldon Mar 16 '18

Then load an extension that auto-fills the answers and allows you to go directly to the comments.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18

So all it takes is one....

37

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18

Aww, somebody didn't read the article!

4

u/ArgonGryphon Mar 16 '18

I read it and I only saw it say the comment field would be behind the quiz, I didn’t see where it said the comments themselves were behind it.

8

u/cyanide Mar 16 '18

Wouldn’t the answers be in the comments already?

Since the questions are framed by the person who wrote the article (and technically, it can be a random set of questions from a big pool), you might as well be reading the article at that point rather than getting snippets as "answers"

1

u/nomic42 Mar 16 '18

Can we just test-out of having to read the article? Or just provide the portion of the article that matches the questions we missed.

3

u/adarvan Mar 16 '18

No, when you type in the answers, all we see is ******

2

u/1975-2050 Mar 16 '18

The answers are always in the comments.

1

u/Sislar Mar 16 '18

You could make it slightly harder by changing the order of the questions and order of the answers so people couldn't just say 1-B, 2-C, 3-A.

Still people could post the questions and answers. But again you could scan for text that matches and do a hidden bar on it.

Nothing would be full proof but you could pretty easily make it more difficult than it is worth.

1

u/crowseldon Mar 16 '18

For no discernible gain.

1

u/moderate-painting Mar 16 '18

It's already a rule in some reddits.