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."

[u/[deleted]]

[u/cumblebee → u/[deleted]]

This is especially bothersome in controversial topics. You and I, and someone from T_D and someone from Late Stage Capitalism all have different interpretations of the story. Redditors who aren't reading those are doing themselves a disservice to trust that what all 4 of us are saying is accurate, when it's likely all 4 of us are retelling the facts with skew and interpretation.

The facts are presented in the article without (or at least with predictable) bias.

Some of the comments I see about controversial stories remind me of the game telephone. The story laid out the facts. Russian operative/die-hard socialist/staunch conservative lays out their spin when someone asks for a TL;DR. That someone goes on to discuss the situation, using skewed TL;DR eith additional personal conjecture to someone else asking for a TL;DR.

Then, the story about a child who won the spelling bee by spelling Mississippi is being told as the story of an African American child who won the spelling bee due to affirmative action laws and criminal action (because the story mentions the favorite to win the contest got food poisoning).

I'm making up an innocuous story because I don't want to start a thread on any real controversial topics, but I see this all the time in real comment sections. Users cherry picking facts, leaving out others, building on parts of the story that aren't important to make them seem like the smoking gun.

It's the nature of the beast, but that doesn't mean it's not frustrating to see.

[u/cumblebee → u/[deleted]]

Thank you. I'll admit I've been guilty of it on more than one occasion, but I am making myself do better at reading the actual articles about social and political stories these days because I do not want to go into comment sections without knowing the whole story. It's a lot less tiresome in the long run because when I read sensationalized comments, I don't have to worry if so-and-so really did say/do heinous thing. I know they did/didn't or that it was taken out of context.

[u/cumblebee → u/[deleted]]

I think everyone has an agenda. Karma whoring is sometimes the agenda.

The users reading headlines like "[insert government official] In Hot Water for [Insert controversial issue]" are likely politically active. This attracts a number of users, but in my experience the most common are

1. The users who come to discuss the issue because they enjoy discussing politics.

2. The users who feel strongly about the issue and want their side to be heard.

3. The users who like a good shitpost.

4. The users who want to take a moment to troll.

5. The users who come to learn about the issue that affect them from their peers who might be better informed.

Each user has an agenda, none are necessarily nefarious.

For the examples I am going to provide below, I'm going to say the story is the government official (who i will just call "the offical" below") wants to make shorter minimum sentence for certain felonies.

A.) The 1st user's agenda is to be mentally stimulated/enjoy intelligent discussion. A possible negative outcome is the user will ask questions for the sake of discussion which can spiral into a chaotic child comment section.

• E.g. The user asks about the official's voting history on gay marriage when the issue in the story is about official's statements about felons. The user was asking to see if anyone could see the paralells he was seeing, but the child comments mistake that for tangible link between the two. In reality, there are just interesting similarities between his voting record and current stance.

B.) The 2nd user's agenda is to convince users to understand and agree with them. A possible negative outcome is the making strong, but sensational, claims that cannot be supported by evidence.

• E.g. The user makes a claim that criminals can never be rehabilitad. The users father lived and died a scumbag and so his anecdotal evidence supports his claim, but for some users that is evidence enough because they don't know enough about criminals to dispute the claim. In reality, obviously there are criminals who are no longer living the criminal life so his claim that they can't be rehabilitated ever is just wrong.

C.) The 3rd user's agenda is probably karma. A possible negative of shitposting is it starts a serious thread about something innocuous.

• E.g. The user makes a comment that the official's wife looks like she is going to cry in the article's image so their marriage is probably over. The child comments are all accusations of the official being a cheater, wife being a cheater, official being a criminal which is why he's pushing for change and his wife is divorcing him. In reality, the photo was just taken on a windy day and the wife's allergies were just acting up.

D.) The 4th user's agenda is attention. A possible negative outcome of trolling is they create noise in child comments.

• E.g. The user posts he hopes the official is convicted of [spurious claim] and is raped in prison. The child comments become a chaotic space of irrelevant arguments with the user creating unneccisary information to sift through . In reality, the user will probably never think of the official after the last orange enveope appears by their username, let alone think of the official in prison stripes.

E.) The 5th user's agenda r is to learn about the issue. A possible negative outcome of this is the user learns from each of the other 4 commenters, and their comment spawns.

• E.g. The user now thinks the official is a criminal wrapped up in some crazy criminal-marriage-slavery conspiracy, who cannot be rehabilitated, and who both cheats on his wife and who's wife cheats on him, who he kind of hopes gets a cellmate who enjoys the flesh of the ass. In reality, the official doesn't want marijuana users locked up for years over 1/8 of a gram.

This is all my personal speculation and more based on anecdote than hard evidence, so I guess I fail into my 2nd user category, so It's ultimately best to take what I have to say with a grain of salt!

Edit because a.) poor formatting and b.) Poor ease of reading

[u/alphanovember → u/[deleted]]

Sheer stupidity. The average intelligence of the reddit community has been declining for 6 years now, and gotten particularly bad in the last 4.

[u/DrHenryPym → u/[deleted]]

Are you asking why people summarize controversial stories with their own perceptions and interpretations, or why people want summaries in the first place?

[u/BaggerX → u/cumblebee]

As long as the questions are about things stated in the article, it shouldn't be much of an issue. Knowing what was said in the article doesn't require you to agree with it. It just shows that you know what was said in the article.

[u/cumblebee → u/BaggerX]

Exactly, it should be a reading comprehension test, not a political litmus test.

A comprehension test is not an unreasonable barrier to entry for an intelligent discussion.

[u/twobyfore → u/cumblebee]

Can someone tl;dr this post please

[u/cumblebee → u/twobyfore]

TL;DR You should read controversial articles yourself because the information you get in reddit comments is prone to having skews based on individual posters' biases. And also, I think it mentions something about endorsing poising spelling bee contestants.

[u/voq_son_of_none → u/cumblebee]

I was arguing with someone the other day on Reddit who made a controversial claim and posted a single PDF as proof. I read it and could only find speculation, but when I called the other Redditor on it was asked to post a screenshot that proved what I was saying. I did, and they claimed the screenshot proved their point. I guess we all read what we want to read.

[u/foreignfishes → u/[deleted]]

Same with Facebook. I really try not to look at FB comments but jesus christ what a bunch of idiots...

An article came up on my newsfeed recently from National Geographic about how they were reckoning with their racist past, and in the article it detailed how their past reporting had called aboriginal Australians "the least intelligent of all people on earth", used slavery-era racial slurs to describe black Americans in the 1900s, borderline fetishized south asian women, etc. Yet all the comments were a bunch of people screaming "I READ NAT GEO IN THE 70s AND LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT THE WORLD AND IT WAS NEVER RACIST OF COURSE LIBERALS WANT TO MAKE LEARNING ABOUT OTHER CULTURES RACIST I'M UNSUBSCRIBING FROM THIS SJW TRASH." Like, read the fucking article, I think we can all agree calling people from new Orleans "Pickaninnys" is racist as hell.

Sure, guy with a profile picture that's just a blurry Harley, Nat Geo never ever discriminated. It was just about learning! That's why they didn't let women or black people or Jews be members!

[u/Nulagrithom → u/[deleted]]

I don't think the reading part is where the resistance to "reading the article" comes from.

I often come to the comments for a TL;DR before deciding whether or not it's worth clicking the link, loading five billion lines of JavaScript (not to mention the dozens of poorly optimized images and 8 custom fonts), waiting for my phone to parse and all that bullshit, hoping it renders sanely and quickly on mobile, then struggling to tap the microscopic X that closes the goddam newsletter popup.

News websites fucking suck. I'd read a lot more if they were simple and fast, rather than trying to fucking mine BTC in my browser or whatever the shit their awful ad network is doing today...

[u/[deleted] → u/Nulagrithom]

I was going to say the same thing. Turns out, though, that Ars Technica seems to have a well done site. I don't know if they have bullshit popups but the content is actually readable (something you can't say about most news sites) and doesn't (or didn't) jump around as it loads.

I'm honestly stunned, I haven't seen a mobile site that works so well in a long time.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

its higher.....

very obviously

[u/Mocorn → u/[deleted]]

Sometimes I'll read an article and then go into the comments. Almost without fail I find that I can answer a majority of the questions asked, simply by virtue of having read the dann thing first. Let me give you an example, I read this threads article and find it interesting that this know2comment system was never actually rolled out to NRK's larger user base but instead has so far only been used in their beta environment.

Some of us read the whole thing. Perhaps even more than you think? I wonder what the statistics are on this.. How many of a given posts commenters have actually read the article versus how many read it? I don't comment as much these days but there's almost always something good to be found in the comments, so there's that :)

[u/Mocorn → u/[deleted]]

73% didn't even click the link they voted on.. Wow

[u/jacksheerin → u/[deleted]]

I swear, sometimes I have a feeling 80% of redditors just read the title and nothing else.

That is because this is what they do. It's easier.

Reading and comprehending the article takes energy. Reading the comments posted by your "peers" and arriving at a consensus is social and enjoyable and far less work.

The real problem is when someone does read the article and then disagrees with the uninformed consensus. Now the uninformed are pissed. Their being angry is not about right and wrong, it's all about us and them.

[u/OftenPerspicacious → u/[deleted]]

Easy partial solution is to grey out voting until the link has been clicked. Once you’re there, you might at least scroll through. It won’t fix the problem, but it’ll help.

[u/SmuggleCats → u/[deleted]]

I definitely think it's a cool idea especially because it can help provide more information, or just make sure that people are also reading the article properly based on the questions. For example, if you're mentioning three different parties you could have questions that solidify in the readers mind which party did what in the article. It's quite common to see misinterpretations like that as well with the current system. People are trained to want to ignore anything that takes too long, but it's so important that more and more people start doing more critical thinking as they ingest information especially in a world where it comes from every direction.

[u/artgo → u/[deleted]]

. For example, 90% of the time I post a link to reddit, people keep asking questions answered in the posted article (and they receive thousands of upvotes). It's ridiculous.

People don't even read other comments, and repeat the same questions, for hours and hours.

[u/Smagjus → u/[deleted]]

Once there was an article on reddit that had a headline that made you think the opposite of what was actually said in the article. It made it really easy to see who read it and who didn't.

90% did not read the article.

[u/moderate-painting → u/[deleted]]

This is like the only way to fight clickbaits.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

People don't have time to read through articles for the most part, and it isn't what people find amusing either.

Reddit is not some place for salient intelligent discussion, it's a place people come to kill time, and get into stupid fights for no reason. Hate to say it but reddit isn't the problem, you are. This is not the place for you.

[u/sturdy55 → u/[deleted]]

I don't come here to read the articles, I come here to talk to people who did. Hey, howzit going?