Overview: Social Media Strategy

A "perverse downstream consequence for debunking... being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content".Looks like evidence for the backfire effect: "Direct correction ... backfires by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on so…

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

Communities for Newsroom - Guides on: Manage ModerationUse Smart MetricsBuild Newsroom Skills

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

readers could only remember where they saw a piece of news from, 56 percent of the time... how can you make your content stand out?... an actively engaged community is key. Content that disrupts a user scrolling through the newsfeed, and compels that person to comment, is a far more memorable experience.

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

what more than 12,000 people[i] told us about comment sections on 20 different news sites.... 81% ... would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in the comment section... 73% ... would like it if experts on the topic of the article responded... 58%, would like it if journalists actively contributed to comment sections...

Most people in the news industry hate comments.... yet audience engagement ... is so worth the investment ... trust in media and journalists has sunk to a new low. Talking to each other can help build relationships and therefore trust. What business leader out there doesn’t want to earn more per user? And what journalist doesn’t want to have the b…

at The Information, the subscription-based tech news publisher, comments and community aren’t just intact — they’re a selling point... The Information puts its members front and center. Subscribers get their own bio pages... its subscription call to action entreats visitors not to get access to great information or level up their tech and media k…

‘Ask’ enables editors to create embeddable forms to invite contributions from readers. These could come in several formats, including text, photo, video, audio. The contributions can be (optionally) linked to existing user profiles. Editors can filter, sort, share, and manage the contributions, and then display the best ones in a gallery.

Gawker built a tool that pulls in the top 10 comment threads from its network of sites and displays them at the end of its Facebook Instant Articles... [and] Accelerated Mobile Pages... It’s not possible to comment straight on the Instant Article; people who want to add to the discussion have to log in on Gawker’s own sites. Disqus supports Googl…

Study shows political discussions are ruining Facebook and friendships... users who try to talk about politics on Facebook are often surprised by the political opinions of their acquaintances... a diverse set of opinions among a user's friends makes everyone want to speak up less...Facebook has a low threshold for “friending” ... can bridge togeth…

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

redefine the opinion poll, comments sections, and metrics around social conversations, all at once... the site presents various issues across the categories of culture, politics, entertainment, and sports that have been generating online debate and offers visitors two opposing hashtags to vote for on the site or share on Twitter for a 48-hour peri…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

People who advocate for comments on social media ... often argue that Twitter and Facebook engender higher-quality discussion in part because commenters are (usually) attached to real names ... [but] Twitter trolls are rampant, too. And a retweet or quick comment isn’t exactly the same as a thoughtful response. So recently we’ve seen a couple o…

Here’s what we’re doing so far on Makerbase to discourage abuse before it starts and address it right away when it does happen. - 8 Steps for Preventing Abuse in a Web Community — Making Makerbase — Medium

… because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text… Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a total mess