There has been a lot of discussion about this. After some consideration, here are my current thoughts about it.
What hasn't changed:
I continue to think that there is a class of low-quality, contentless comment that adds no value to the site, where the poster is basically commenting for their own entertainment only, rather than to say something that others might be interested in reading. A hallmark of these sorts of comments is that they are indistinguishable from having been written by a bot, in the sense that I could replace certain commenters on the site with a simple ~10 line script and no one could ever tell the difference. I still want to eliminate these comments as much as possible.
Where I went wrong:
Most low-quality comments are posted by a small subset of users, but instead of dealing with those users directly, I came out with an imprecise tool (the filter) that affected everyone.
When I was designing the filter, I had in mind a few consistently low-quality commenters whose comments I modeled it off of, in the sense that I wanted the filter to target those sorts of comments specifically. This worked in the sense that these people were definitely hit by the filter more often than others, but the filter's false positive and false negative rate were both high enough that quite often at the individual comment level, its behavior made no sense. Often you would have two very similar comments side by side, where one had gotten filtered, but the other had not. Understandably, this led to confusion and frustration, especially by innocent commenters who got hit by a false positive, and had their comment filtered.
What is changing:
I will target the serial low-quality commenters directly, rather than making this everyone else's problem. I will do this by looking at comment trends in aggregate, rather than one comment at a time.
There is no more filtering/hiding of image comments. You do not need to worry about making a one-off low-quality comment, and having it get filtered.
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As you may be aware, a while ago I put in place a filter for image comments that tried to automatically block or hide low quality comments.
There has been a lot of discussion about this. After some consideration, here are my current thoughts about it.
What hasn't changed:
I continue to think that there is a class of low-quality, contentless comment that adds no value to the site, where the poster is basically commenting for their own entertainment only, rather than to say something that others might be interested in reading. A hallmark of these sorts of comments is that they are indistinguishable from having been written by a bot, in the sense that I could replace certain commenters on the site with a simple ~10 line script and no one could ever tell the difference. I still want to eliminate these comments as much as possible.
Where I went wrong:
Most low-quality comments are posted by a small subset of users, but instead of dealing with those users directly, I came out with an imprecise tool (the filter) that affected everyone.
When I was designing the filter, I had in mind a few consistently low-quality commenters whose comments I modeled it off of, in the sense that I wanted the filter to target those sorts of comments specifically. This worked in the sense that these people were definitely hit by the filter more often than others, but the filter's false positive and false negative rate were both high enough that quite often at the individual comment level, its behavior made no sense. Often you would have two very similar comments side by side, where one had gotten filtered, but the other had not. Understandably, this led to confusion and frustration, especially by innocent commenters who got hit by a false positive, and had their comment filtered.
What is changing:
I will target the serial low-quality commenters directly, rather than making this everyone else's problem. I will do this by looking at comment trends in aggregate, rather than one comment at a time.
There is no more filtering/hiding of image comments. You do not need to worry about making a one-off low-quality comment, and having it get filtered.