1019: First Post

|< < Prev Comic #1019 (February 20, 2012) Next > >|

First Post

Title text: 'Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.'

Explanation

Many news websites allow users to post comments on an article. The intention is that users can debate the stance(s) or implication(s) made by the article. On most sites, comments are displayed in chronological order. This puts the oldest comments at the top and newest at the bottom.

There are many pitfalls to allowing comments, but this comic refers to one in particular: most users are too busy to read more than just the top few comments. Therefore, if you were able to control the content of those comments, your opinions would be the ones that the majority of users read. If you pay people to do nothing but read the site, you ensure that they will be the first ones to see the article and that their comments (that you pay them to write) will be at the top of the page. In this scenario, the comments being posted appear to convey a particular political belief. The advantage of this is, according to Randall, that it would be much cheaper to employ a college student to perform that task than pay a website for an advertisement. Also, the fact that it is a comment posted by another reader would make it seem as though the opinion was coming from the general population and not a politician or company, as an advertisement would imply. And $20/hour was (and as of this writing still is) significantly higher than the minimum wage, so you'd have no trouble finding willing participants among college students (who are often broke).

This comic is a continuation of 937: TornadoGuard which stated "the problem with star ratings". Apparently, every possible comment ordering policy has its own problems.

The title text refers to systems like Reddit's conversation threading which allow users to vote comments up or down and to sort them by the resulting "karma score" (total up-votes minus total down-votes). The hired students could easily be assigned to also upvote each other’s posts. Even without collusion, the same problem persists to some extent: after a few comments are posted and some votes are cast, the handful of comments having received the highest scores among the first dozen of so will receive far better chances at being seen and voted on than comments posted later, and will solidify their places in a positive feedback loop. In this way, a few persistent voices can still dominate the discussion, contrary to the claim in the title text, thus creating irony.

The comic's title refers to a once-common form of online posturing where the first user to see the article will comment "First post" or even just "First". The intent is that everyone else see that they were there first and, therefore, must be somehow better than you. This is referred to in both 269: TCMP and 1258: First.

Since this comic's publication several news sites have elected to remove all comments, in part to prevent a few voices dominating the conversation.

In 2159: Comments, this strip is mentioned, along with the text "This dynamic is so easily manipulated and it freaks me out."

Transcript

[Single panel showing a bar graph with two gray vertical bars, a dollar amount above each bar, the vertical axis on the left side with tick marks every $250,000, and the horizontal axis at the bottom with a descriptive label below each bar under the axis. The first bar is much taller than the second.]

[First bar:]

Amount: $1,500,000

Label: Cost to buy an ad on every story on a major news site every day until the election

[Second bar:]

Amount: $200,000

Label: Cost to pay five college students $20/hour to camp the site 24/7 and post the first few comments the moment a story goes up, giving you the last word in every article and creating an impression of peer consensus

[Caption below the panel:]

The problem with posting comments in the order they're submitted

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

Consistent posting order . . . .

You know, I think you're right, Blaisepascal. That's a good point. SilverMagpie (talk) 00:29, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

With a Wiki, you can edit the posting order any way you want, there's no reason you have to add your comments to the bottom Blaisepascal (talk) 20:15, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

First!! (ok, bad joke...)--B. P. (talk) 19:36, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I personally prefer seeing comments in chronological order, especially if the respondents reply to each other. I find it very annoying to see the reply before I've had a chance to read the original. The current comment system on Slate (where not only do new comments appear first, the page defaults to auto-updating, so the comments move down the page as you are trying to read them) is especially horrible. Blaisepascal (talk) 20:15, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I prefer threaded discussions. Chronological is close enough for short discussions, but threaded makes it so much easier to find read all the replies a comment got. (Yes, I know I'm replying to a year-old post.) gijobarts (talk) 07:06, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes it is. Just some random derp 23:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

. . . . is overrated. 74.213.186.41 17:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I have the same interpretation as the current explanation, yet the "Incomplete" text says there are other interpretations. What are they? Smperron (talk) 15:52, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

This is precisely why Digg failed and now Reddit will fail. The moment the owners think they can manipulate discussions is the moment any discussion has any real value. 173.245.50.161 02:53, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

I wonder if this cartoon was the inspiration for the Russian trolling operations targeted at the US 2016 Presidential elections and the subsequent European elections. 172.68.58.5 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

He definitely foretold Bloomberg's run for Dem nominee in 2019. (Maybe Bloomberg needed more college students.)162.158.107.167 01:52, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

What?? This is definitely a prediction about "democracy" in Serbia few years after this comic. By the way, who's Bloomberg? BytEfLUSh (talk) 03:26, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone have any examples of parties actually doing this/anyone know how to contact them? Sure could use the extra cash. 😂 Heleatunda (talk) 17:09, 19 August 2023 (UTC)