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Letters to the Editor: Killing Comments, Clock Speed, Paying for Privacy

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Hey Motherboard readers! Managing editor Adrianne Jeffries here. As you may have seen, last week we eliminated our comments section.

I want to be clear: the problem with the comment section was us. In my view, a good comment section is carefully moderated. The creators of the site hang out in the comment section, answering questions and talking to readers. Ideally, there are technical features of the commenting system that encourage smart commenters and discourage spam, jerks, and people who don't read past the headline.

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We didn't have a community manager or moderator system for our comment section. We also didn't regularly pay attention to it. The comment section, which was run on Disqus, was overrun with spam. It was easy for us to overlook good comments, especially on old articles. Our comment section was neglected.

We also noticed that we tended to get some pretty thoughtful responses to our stories through email. Some turned into corrections; others turned into articles. Motherboard Editor in Chief Derek Mead has fond memories of reading letters to the editor in BMX magazines as a kid; I always read them in the magazines I subscribe to. After a year of deliberation, we opted to funnel reader responses in through email. That way, spammers and schmucks can't simply pour their words onto our website, and smart readers who actually read the story can get the time and attention from us they deserve.

Since launching the letters to the editor inbox, we received dozens of reader responses. The announcement about killing comments also spread to the wider web, so we looked at comments on Hacker News and Twitter. (We also opened our Hipchat to talk to readers, and answered questions on our subreddit.)

We picked out some reader letters to republish here.

Comments on killing comments:

Dear Motherboard,

I think what you are doing re: comments is commendable. Even tho I like to express myself in the comments and will continue to do so on other websites with comment sections, especially for writing that resonates with me, I think your decision is a step forward in fostering worthwhile discussion.

However, I do read comments sometimes to see when journalism is full of shit. For example, a misleading story may have a comment (with citations, hopefully) that gives a different perspective.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that comment sections can give your audience the ability to hold you accountable.

I still think your decision is a good decision, but I think the letters to the editor thing should be more frequent than once a week.

-Troy Farah

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***

Just wanted to let you know I've removed Motherboard from my RSS feed. The quality lately has really dropped off but the comments being turned off was enough of a final straw to just bid Motherboard a final farewell.

The content lately hasn't had any depth, most of it bordering on whining. And the comments lately have pointed out some real issues, or obvious logical problems with the articles. If your solution to very real, legitimate criticism is to silence it, then I'm not interested in reading Motherboard anymore. If it had devolved into bickering between commenters, maybe I could understand. But this was legitimate public discussion and criticism.

I'd encourage you to reconsider your decision. But either way, best of luck.

-Lord Cheeseburger

***

First, I want to say that I am an avid reader and I am thankful for a lot of the reporting that Vice does, so please view my discordant feelings concerning this policy change as "The Loyal Opposition."
Honestly, moving back to the old "letters to the editor" system sounds like the wrong direction for a fresh, cutting-edge media upstart.

I don't know all the internal details of the company, but considering users are always willing to volunteer to do moderation work for free (see:most of reddit) and don't do too bad of a job overall in practice, the "lack of resources" argument used seems like a non-sequitur.

Even for paid moderation, a company with forthcoming revenues of $1 billion+ and a 34%-50% profit margin lacks enough resources for a task that other websites bringing in a fraction of Vice's revenue can already do? It's just unusual to me.

The other reason mentioned in the announcement, the "not providing value to our readers" argument, doesn't seem accurate at face value as well. For many readers of this article, for example, free comments would give context not provided by the article in order to better evaluate its claims. The numerous "likes" I see in the comments throughout the Vice sites also mean that many other readers clearly find this commentary valuable.

The other thing I worry about is that since Vice often puts such a premium on snark (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), I worry that the basically "hand-curated letters to the editor" will have a strong publication bias towards submissions confirming the author's views as well as feature the worst-argued of the letters sent in disagreement to the author so they can be gleefully snarked at without any actual illumination going on.

What would be the effective check on that bias, which, for better or worse, wasn't an editorial issue for free comments on-site?

To answer your above question, I posted this article in the technology subreddit because I feel it is technological culture issue in media. Other "Old Money" media companies have done a similar thing to Vice, like Reuters and Bloomberg, but it seems out of character for a "rebel" media company like Vice to do the same.

I wish the same invitation to engage with readers in your comment above was extended to readers in a comment section on the announcement page. If people disagree with your assessment—especially about the "value to readers" part—you have made it pretty hard for yourself to hear them by disabling comments on that page. It's not like I saw a recent Vice reader survey about the issue, so I don't know how else you have a representative view of what your readers find valuable or not. In light of this, I guess I could only submit this post as a "letter to the editor" about the policy change?
That's my 2 cents, and I apologize for the frequent editing of my stream-of-conscience post. I hope the best days of Vice are still ahead of it. Thanks for hearing me out.

-Sybles on Reddit

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Editor's note: To clarify, the change only affects Motherboard, Vice's tech and science site. Vice.com and other properties are run separately and are not affected.

***

I have consistently read your website on a day-to-day basis for what feels like a few years now and I have to tell you all, you're doing a great job. The stories are original, the prose is engaging, and well Motherboard is just all around high-quality, entertaining, reading.

But I've never once had the slightest inclination to use your comment section.

Anyways, I just wanted to tell all of you at Motherboard to keep up the good work and that I think dropping the comments section was a good move.

-Jason H

***

You're ditching the comments sections on your site because you don't like people calling you out on your bullshit. Admit it to yourselves, at the very least.

-John Randolph

***

> In the end, we just want to hear from you.

I think what you meant to write there is: "we want to hear from those whose comments we approve of."

I mean, you said so yourself a few paragraphs up:

> What percentage of comments on any site are valuable enough to be published on their own? One percent? Less?

Will you report what percentage of "letters to the editor" get published (and what percentage get any response at all)?

> Once a week or thereabouts we'll publish a digest of the most insightful letters we get.

"The most insightful letters" as decided by whom?

What mechanisms will Motherboard implement to minimize the amount of bias in this selection process?

-Greg

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Editor's note: We're picking the comments so this will be inherently biased. The commenter notes that it sounds like we only "want to hear from those whose comments we approve of." That is true. We don't approve of comments that attack or insult the writer. We don't approve of comments that use the N-word. We don't approve of comments about making $8,000 a week working from home. We don't approve of comments from people who don't read the article. We don't approve of comments that are purely PR pitches.

Not all readers agree with those guidelines, but we don't agree with the premise that we're obligated to publish every comment.

This week, we chose letters that we thought were representative of the letters we got, as well as those that we felt were interesting and articulate or that we learned something from.

We don't plan to track percentages of letters that get published, but this week we're publishing about half of what came in through the letters box.

***

I read with interest your recent decision to remove commenting from your news stories. I would agree that the medium of news site comments seems almost designed to produce uninsightful garbage, but it seems to me that the fix is not to remove them entirely but rather learn from the internet's more successful commenting forums.

If you look at the quality of comments available on a highly trafficked story on sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News and other tech forums then the difference between that and a typical newspaper is remarkable. These sites are first and foremost sites for discussion and they focus on that with intensity, with sophisticated moderation systems and high or non-existent word count limits on comments. They allow people's insights to roam across the page, taking up in many cases the entire screen … instead of being confined to a tiny box no wider than a newspaper column. And whilst comment sections on news sites frequently let people +1 comments, they typically fail to use this feedback to surface the best content or encourage the best contributors.

Motherboard may experience more success with its comments if instead of removing them, you doubled down on the topic and created a dedicated subsite in which quality discussion was the primary goal.

-Mike Hearn

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***

One of the benefits of the comment system was how easily you could comment without disrupting your flow. By raising the cost (time, effort) of writing to the editor, you're filtering out anyone who isn't super inspired to write. In some cases, this will reduce thoughtless comments as you intend, but in others, it will filter out the people who have moderate stances. Extremists and strongly opinionated people will be over-represented in your inbox. So to solve this, just add a contact form where the comment section used to be.

-Ray Harris

***

Just wanted to weigh in on the issue of removing the comments section. I read articles on the net with comments only because no article is perfect and the aggregate effect of comments is to expose some of the rough edges and to generate lively debate. Removing them has ensured that I will look on other news and interest sites for articles to read.

It was very disingenuous to ask what percentage of comments could be independently published and to use that low number to justify classing them as low quality/value words. The whole point is that they are a "comment" on the main article. If there are comments which contain fully fledged and fleshed out points that can be understood outside of context, then that is a ridiculous overwrought comment. Additionally, writers are well trained and educated whereas the general populace will have poor spelling and phrasing but that should not mean that their comments are marginalized or dismissed as being unworthy of notice.

In addition, I feel that comments are not aimed at the author, normally, but instead at communicating with the other people who are reading and thinking about the article. In a word, it's community. Removing comments will ruin cohesion amongst the readership and remove a large part of the emotional and intellectual interaction which the readers (or at least myself) like.

Hope you feel that the benefit gained by removing criticism and trolls is worth the loss of readership and interaction.

-Steven Howles

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***

This is a topic which I have been thinking about for a number of years. And I'm happy that you are seriously trying to address the issue of comments.

The proposed system still falls somewhat short of meeting the needs of live-in-the-moment crowd, who tend to interact instantly, like the dog in the movie /Up/ (squirrel!), and then just as quickly forget what they had read or how they had responded to it. It's sad that such people are now in the majority. What is needed is to give a hook for them to grab hold of, that will allow them to revisit a comment at a later date and flesh it out, do some research, contemplate and think about the ramifications and then compose something more thoughtful and substantial that can then become part of the larger context of what they are responding to.

Perhaps this could be done by allowing people create a stub in which they can jot down and outline their initial impression. The stubs will be displayed as a nested comment thread, but will only have a limited shelf-life. Depending on the forum, a moderator could then choose which stubs would be included more than a set number of hours, at which point they could be accepted by the moderator, or sent back to the author of the comment for more work. If there is no moderator, a system of up and down voting, based on the reputation of those who vote, might achieve similar results. A web app could then provide people a queue of what they have commented on, and what they should revisit and expand on at a later time.

In this way, over time, comments could evolve into a real conversation as a collection of documents which explore and expand on different aspects of a work, as well as provide rich references and annotations that preserves the context of that work.

-Brad Collins

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Editor's note: This letter has been condensed for length and clarity. Collins says he will post a full version of the letter on his blog.


Data transfer rate, not clock speed:

I read one of your recent articles entitled, "Intel's New Skylake Chip Is Good, And That's the Problem" dated August 6 2015 by your intern Alix Jean-Pharuns.

In this article, there's a few inconsistencies that should be noted for an intern:

"Skylake comes with support for DDR4, the latest version of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), that uses less power while upping clock speed and keeping latency about the same."

"While DDR4 should also make your memory less susceptible to hacks like the (admittedly very cool) Rowhammer exploit you may have heard about, in desktop PCs, tests have suggested users will only see up to a whiplash-inducing 5 percent increase in performance speed."

Does this writer actually know how "speed" is defined? Any Physics class can define this, including mathematically.

A couple references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/speed

Do you see ANY reference to computing dynamics in these definitions including the accompanying mathematics? No..

The point being that "speed," as defined, has NOTHING to do with CLOCK RATE or data rate commonly referred to as bandwidth. There ARE specific metrics defined that most obviously differentiates the folks in the fields that design these computing peripherals and those that merely report them. Put another way, relative to the above quotes, does this mean I tune my radio to a different "speed?" While that makes little sense, essentially, that's what is being said - a frequency is a " clock speed."

Here's a clue and something to contemplate that the other non-science background writers and columnist don't realize. When a sinusoidal waveform gets translated in to a corresponding square-wave signal for the digital domain (computing devices) - that's referred to as a CLOCK RATE. It relates to the corresponding base frequency but has merely been translated to a square-wave signal since computers run on rise and decay times of those signals. What does all that have to do with physical movement - nothing. Consider that as you drive home this evening and look at your speedometer in your vehicle.

So, what started all this misuse of the word "speed" in this context? More than likely either some non-science background marketing folks or columnist that desired to re-define something that they didn't fully understand and was too "technical" for them. Unfortunately, the columnist, writers and sadly some companies now use this term completely out of context.

Regards,
Gary

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We sent this letter to Alix Jean-Pharuns, who explains:

That phrase he takes issue with, "clock speed," is absolutely a misnomer. The "speed" I'm comparing here is the transfer rates of the two chips, measured in MT/s (Mega Transfers per second) or GT/s (Giga-transfers per second.) To oversimplify, transfer rates are a calculated measurement that has to do with how fast a certain amount of data is transferred over a channel over a certain measurement of time. Transfer rates are a really disputed measure of processor performance, and lots of people argue its effectiveness. (Like arguing which measurement is more important for comparing cars' performances, horsepower or top speed?) Transfer rate is just one, very specific, measure of processor performance, but it's an easy and accessible number to point to when comparing DDR4 to its predecessor DDR3.

I'm not confusing clock rate and transfer speed at all. One issue is, I think the hyperlink got messed up when I linked to the review of the chip. It was supposed to link directly to this page, which compared the transfer rates of the two, but instead links to this page , which details a test to transcode video between the two. It's a multi-page review, and I must have linked the wrong page of it in my piece, so I really apologize for adding that level of confusion. The proper page really makes it clear that I'm comparing transfer rates here. Now whether you want to argue whether or not transfer rates are a good indicator of memory performance, that's a another issue. But I think Gary's issue is with the word choice of "clock speed", which is definitely confusing and should not have been in the final draft. I apologize for that.

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That word choice aside, his issue has nothing to do with the thesis of the piece, which is that Skylake's performance leap over its predecessors is not as wide as previous upgrades' leaps over theirs.

Editor's note: We ended up changing the link, removing mention of "clock speed," and updating with a correction.


The problem with paying for privacy is it's not worth it:

This reader letter, from "Edward Nixon," is in response to the story "Encryption Pioneer Phil Zimmerman: People Want Their Privacy for Free."

The problem with encryption and paying is not that it costs. It's that it's not money well-spent when the vast majority, in my experience at least, ALL of the people with whom one corresponds do not have encryption keys. Why should I pay for the privilege of signing an unencrypted email?

I was on PGP very near the beginning and with all due respect to Mr Zimmerman, it was not an easy learning curve. You know, there are ways of explaining things such that every day people can understand and then there are modes of explanation that come out of the mouths of geniuses — I include Mr Zimmerman in the later category.

Implementing encryption in a controlled environment such as a company makes all sorts of sense, particularly from the stand point of feasibility. The company wants things encrypted, the company gets things encrypted. And the company can think up and talk about all sorts of good and sense making reasons why encryption is necessary. Particularly in relation to a person's employment longevity.

That said, it is sadly true that people expect stuff for free. But for my money — small change I assure you -- the Internet is a better place for its free-dom loving roots than the commercial, mega-, multi-national, corporate horror show that the rest of human existence is becoming. There have got to be places on this earth where the almighty dollar does not reign supreme; if it has to be a poor beleaguered place like the Internet, so be it. Or so say I.
…edN


Stop trying to treat the Bible like a science textbook:

This letter is from Hayyim Rothman, in response to "God Didn't Say What's Kosher on Mars."

Hello,

I thought it would be worth responding briefly to Margulies' article entitled "God Didn't Say What's Kosher on Mars." First, she supposes that religious authorities were faced with a crisis of faith by the Copernican revolution and its aftermath because it refuted the geocentric position of Medieval Aristotelian theology. While I cannot speak for Christian tradition, Aristotelian physics generally and, with it, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy were already under attack among Jewish theologians a generation before Copernicus. Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410), for instance, entertains -- in his magnum opus, Ohr Adonai -- not only the possibility of worlds beyond the so-called "seven spheres" of ancient astronomy, but of their being inhabited by extraterrestrial life. He saw, even then, no theological objection objection to this idea.

Second, unfortunately for Margulies' husband, Jewish law determines the kosher-status of most animals by their physical characteristics, not their species. E.g. a lobster is forbidden because it lacks fins and scales, which aquatic creatures must have to be considered kosher -- not because it is a lobster. In this way, the legal structure is not, in principle, limited to the earth. If there is a martian ocean (of water) and if there are living creatures in it, those creature will be kosher if they have fins and scales, and not-kosher if they lack these characteristics. More broadly, I think the whole premise of the article is silly. Why shouldn't the Bible be, on the whole, geocentric? It is a text employed to regulate the life of human communities and the earth is where such communities have lived and still live.

The issue is that people try to make the Bible something it evidently isn't: a science textbook. Margulies' article would be much stronger if she used the findings she discusses to critique biblical fundamentalism in particular rather than making broad statements about their significance for religious sentiment as such.