from Hacker News

FT is losing control over comments

by bernardlunn on 12/9/23, 7:50 PM with 5 comments

I used to enjoy going to the Financial Times comments, but no longer. The FT has lost control over comments.

Letters to the Editor was ye olde print version of comments and it worked. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The letters added customer written content, but via a human editor.

Investigative journalism is what the FT is known for. It is an old fashioned idea, but it works. One cannot imagine an AI robot doing investigative journalism. Human journalists using AI might work and might leapfrog NYT - New York Times - who employ human editors as a gate to comments; this works but is expensive.

Or maybe the FT could moderate comments via an algorithm, similar to how Hacker News does it.

What do you think, human editors or an algorithm? Or is there another way?

  • by tatrajim on 12/18/23, 5:46 PM

    In the past I was a daily reader and frequent contributor of FT comments, but grew increasingly disaffected with the moderation and indeed whole tone of FT's US coverage after around 2017. Quirky, contrarian voices were increasingly unwelcome, so I ended my subscription.

  • by atticora on 12/9/23, 8:00 PM

    I prefer bottom up decentralized curation of comments. Let readers curate as they read via moderation, and let other readers filter or rank comments by selecting zero or more other reader-curators that they find agreeable.

    That would be quite useful here too. It could be a variaton on https://news.ycombinator.com/classic with user-definable and shareable sets of voters.

  • by poobear22 on 12/10/23, 12:37 AM

    I'm still finding value in the FT comments. There are a few strange ones, but they do not get much of my time. Ranking may have some value. FT is fairly expensive, it strange to see see the equivalent of flat earth comments in that type of publication.