Podcasts about coral project

In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution, we hear from Siyu He, a postdoc at Stanford specializing in biomedical data science. Siyu discusses the implications and methods behind their recent AI-driven biological research papers, Squidiff and CORAL. The conversation explores the use of AI models to analyze complex cellular systems and disease mechanisms, focusing on transcriptome and tissue sample analyses. Squidiff aims to simulate cellular transcriptomes to predict outcomes of various conditions, significantly expediting traditionally lengthy and expensive biological experiments. CORAL Project extends this by integrating different levels of biological data, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of tissue structures and cellular interactions. The discussion also delves into the challenges of using synthetic data for validating AI models and the potential acceleration of scientific discoveries through AI in biomedical research. The episode encapsulates the interplay between AI and biology, highlighting the future possibilities and current limitations of this innovative research front. Squidiff: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.16.623974v1.full.pdf CORAL: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.01.636038v1.full.pdf SPONSORS: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Oracle's next-generation cloud platform delivers blazing-fast AI and ML performance with 50% less for compute and 80% less for outbound networking compared to other cloud providers. OCI powers industry leaders like Vodafone and Thomson Reuters with secure infrastructure and application development capabilities. New U.S. customers can get their cloud bill cut in half by switching to OCI before March 31, 2024 at https://oracle.com/cognitive Shopify: Shopify is revolutionizing online selling with its market-leading checkout system and robust API ecosystem. Its exclusive library of cutting-edge AI apps empowers e-commerce businesses to thrive in a competitive market. Cognitive Revolution listeners can try Shopify for just $1 per month at https://shopify.com/cognitive NetSuite: Over 41,000 businesses trust NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud ERP, to future-proof their operations. With a unified platform for accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR, NetSuite provides real-time insights and forecasting to help you make quick, informed decisions. Whether you're earning millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite empowers you to tackle challenges and seize opportunities. Download the free CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at https://netsuite.com/cognitive PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:37) Introduction and Guest Welcome (04:00) Setting the Big Picture Context (04:37) Exploring the Squidiff and CORAL Papers (08:31) Understanding Transcriptomes (11:17) Single Cell RNA Sequencing Technology (15:32) Motivation Behind Squidiff (Part 1) (17:14) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | Shopify (19:41) Motivation Behind Squidiff (Part 2) (25:56) Training Data and Model Architecture (Part 1) (31:38) Sponsors: NetSuite (33:11) Training Data and Model Architecture (Part 2) (37:18) Diffusion Models in Biology (46:07) In Silico Experiments and Applications (54:25) Clarifying the Validation Process (55:36) Validation Strategies and Real Data (58:26) Challenges in Modeling and Predictions (01:02:14) Accelerating Research with AI Models (01:07:31) Future Directions and Collaboration (01:10:46) Introduction to CORAL Paper (01:13:09) Spatial Transcriptomics and Proteomics (01:17:10) Challenges in Integrating Spatial Data (01:31:53) Synthetic Data and Model Validation (01:36:42) The Future of AI in Healthcare (01:43:31) Outro SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Sydette's Twitter Handle: @BlackAmazon Watch Sydette speak at Code for America: You Only Code As Well As You Listen Read her article on Wired: Listening to Black Women, The Innovation Tech Can't Figure Out Terms: localization, edge case, asynchronous, kyriarchy People and orgs: The Coral Project, The Mozilla Foundation, Lisa Factora, Sarah Khandakar, Michelle Ferrier, Monika Bielskyte, The Nap Ministry A transcript of this episode can be found here ---- Check out Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance by Moya Bailey, "all about how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media."

I'm excited for you to listen to a good friend of mine, David Norton.  He is the Founder of Lemon and Line and just like any small business, they are feeling the effects of COVID-19.  Please take a minute and visit his website where he has some amazing offers - • 30% off using code "stayhome"• Join our new Rewards Program: $10 for signing up and earn points for even more $ off• Join our new Referral Program: Give $10, get $10. Refer a friend, give them $10 and you get $10 too!In this episode, you'll learn Dave is a friend whom I met on a small island called Cuttyhunk which is a gem that only a few have discovered.   He was a rugby stud and sailing coach in college and had a twelve-year career as an Art Director for Cruising World and Sailing World Magazines before launching the amazing brand of Lemon & Line.   As you also will learn in this episode, Dave is the co-founder of The Coral Project (https://thecoralproject.com/) which is doing amazing things to bring back Coral to the ocean, which we so badly need!  You will learn how this project is helping him as a dad to show leadership to his daughter on the importance of caring.  Dave is married with two beautiful children and today you hear about great life tips as well as a great reminder of staying present.Thank you for listening and supporting David!

SAR Podcast Episode: 053 Show Notes In this session of the Saltwater Aquarium Radio podcast, I talk with High school teacher Anthony Wasley (aka Was) about how he took his love for reef tanks and [...] The post Saltwater Aquarium Radio Podcast 053: The Hall High Coral Project appeared first on Saltwater Aquarium Radio.

For communities that come with a membership fee, direct revenue might seem like the top benefit for your company. But the Daily Maverick’s membership program gives them direct access to their most engaged readers, which has created benefits beyond revenue. The Daily Maverick has hired employees through its community, grown new company verticals thanks to the support of its community, and has given readers and writers a way to interact directly with one another about the stories they’re most interested in. Styli Charalambous, the co-founder and publisher of Daily Maverick, also shares the unique perspective of a founder building a membership program from the ground up, who then hires a member of the community to run the show. This episode will leave you with great starting points for discussing the ROI of community programs and a lot of inspiration around how to keep community members engaged. Styli and Patrick also discuss: Why Daily Maverick doesn’t have a paywall on its website How Daily Maverick approaches comments and allowing access to its community Daily Maverick‘s robust events and publishing strategy Big Quotes The goals and value of Maverick Insider (4:05): “The primary focus on this effort is to build this community and to engage with the community. It’s not [about] making money. Making money is a byproduct of doing that job well and growing the community and having a healthy level of engagement and support and interaction with those community members. That’s the difference. [The community is not] just a transactional thing that is the gatekeeper access to content, it’s about relationships, and that’s the key differentiator in my mind between a membership program and a subscription program or even a donation program.” –@StyliChara Giving reporters a space to interact with their readers (13:50): “Some of our journalists still have PTSD from the previous comments platform. Some aren’t that keen on participating in comments. We’re not going to force them. … Some say they prefer to engage with members and readers in event format and so they’ll do it in the physical space. Obviously, the more politicized the contents, the easier it is for it to descend into toxicity. We find certain sections of the site, some journalists are more open to participating and engaging in the comments section than some trickier content areas.” –@StyliChara About Styli Charalambous Styli Charalambous is the co-founder and publisher of Daily Maverick, a 10-year-old startup, focusing on news, analysis, and investigative journalism, based in South Africa. He oversees all non-editorial functions of the business and is a reformed accountant. He is the architect of their membership plan, Maverick Insider, and has written for the publication on business, sport, media, and other topics. Related Links Styli Charalambous on Twitter The Daily Maverick Maverick Insider How the Daily Maverick developed its membership program via Nieman Lab Civil Comments Coral Andrew Losowsky, head of the Coral Project, on Community Signal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Andrew Losowsky is an award winning writer, editor and storyteller. After a long and successful career in journalism he became the head of the Coral Project at Vox Media - an open source project that seeks to help publishers build better communities around their journalism. We discuss the history of comments sections, where they lost their way, and the whys and hows of building positive communities around your publishing brand. Enjoy!

Vanessa Albury is the Founding Artist and Director of Coral Projects, an artist-run, site-specific art exhibition underwater. The motivation and urgency for the project is inspired by the rapidly deteriorating coral reef life along Jamaica's shoreline. Though this is a global issue, Coral Project's founders have chosen the Oracabessa Bay to launch this initiative because of the milestones and community-minded work at the Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary. The goals of Coral Projects are to support the growth of coral in the oceans where it is in decline, inspire local communities to engage with contemporary art and provide opportunities to artists to create work in a new context. All images courtesy of the artist 00:00 - Introduction 00:39 - Coral Projects 01:52 - Kiss The Stars - Hatchie 05:59 - Coral Projects 27:43 - Nature - Horse Jumper of Love 31:14 - Outro 31:36 - Finish

Andrew Losowsky, Head of Coral at Vox Media, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing about the state of Coral, an open-source project assisting publishers with building better communities around their journalism. Andrew discusses Coral’s premier tool called Talk, the various types of comments that moderators have to look out for, and how journalism and technology are merging together. Support the show.

Julia Krüger is deeply convinced that we need to create alternative moderation schemes to uphold liberal values. Together with HIIG-researcher Amélie Heldt, she discusses the different methods of moderation, the role of AI yet to come, and what she personally hopes for.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about about sounding alarms in various communities. Links Mentioned: The Four Essential Freedoms The Coral Project   Download ogg Format Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

In this episode of Tricky, Heather and Emily talk to Sarah L. Roberts, the woman who coined the term “commercial content moderation,” about how elements of online discourse are governed by outsourced and unseen low-paid workers, who sift through “the grossness of humanity.” And they ask Andrew Losowsky of the Coral Project whether newsrooms and journalists still have a part to play in fostering civil discourse, on and offline. Plus: the bubonic plague, dance mania, Karen Carpenter, and pointy shoes. Read the full transcript below. Reading list: https://journalismdesign.com/please-dont-read-comments/   Theme music: The Insider Theme by The Insider is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Have a love-hate relationship with social media? So do we. In Episode 7, we explore the joys and perils of visibility, and talk with Sydette Harry, an expert in online communities. Trolls, randos, and straight-up neo-Nazis: being a woman online can be tough. This week, we’re exploring how we make choices about what and whether to share online. Our guest this week is the inimitable writer, editor, and tech/media critic, Sydette Harry, also known as @blackamazon. She’s an editor at Mozilla and part of the Coral Project, which is working to create healthier communities and comments sections. She’s also smart as hell, exquisitely blunt, and committed to talking about what’s wrong online in the voice she grew up with. > Yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. That being said, I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education… So when you say that I am “diversity,” let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good. > > —Sydette Harry Here’s what we cover—and of course, we’ve got a full transcript, too. Show notes A year ago, Lindy West quit Twitter—and she’s not coming back. We miss her voice, but we’re also a little jealous. Plus: Jenn moves her sports talk to Facebook, Katel closes the tab and never looks back, and we all wonder whether Klout still exists. (Sara used to be influential in burritos. Just saying.) Interview: Sydette Harry Get comfortable, because you won’t want to miss a second of Sydette’s searing commentary on tech culture, Twitter, journalism, race, gender, and weight. We talk about: Sydette’s work with the Coral Project. Why she’s calling out media for telling amazing people that they don’t belong. How Twitter’s insistence it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party” left it vulnerable to abuse. The Prep for Prep program, the Bronx is Burning era, and the limitations of teaching kids from under-resourced areas how to fit into elite circles. Presentation voice, “home” voice, and the politics of code-switching (or not). Rebuilding life and family in the wake of her father’s deportation under IIRIRA. Managing polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), getting medical care in a fat-phobic society, and how dramatic weight loss changed the way Sydette was treated. Fuck Yeah of the Week: Ladies Get Paid We’ve talked a lot on the show about wages, being underpaid, and how hard it can be to negotiate at work. So this week, we give a fuck yeah to a group educating and empowering cis and trans women and non-binary or gender non-conforming folks to get paid fairly. Check out Ladies Get Paid for workshops, town hall conversations, and more. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs like me! And A Book Apart. Are you looking to join forces with a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team? Well Shopify has great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join them and they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL Today we’re talking about online personas, communities, and our love/hate relationship with social media. What do we want out of it? And how do we decide how visible to be in a world that’s full of trolls and randos constantly popping into your mentions to tell you that you’re wrong? We’re also joined by Sydette Harry, who works with Mozilla and the Coral Project on building healthier online communities and comments sections. We’ll talk about how race and gender play a role in what happens online. SWB Hey, do you all remember last year when Lindy West quit Twitter? JL No, what happened? SWB Ok, so Lindy is a writer and a comedian, and she had this book come out called Shrill, which is a memoir. And she’s awesome. And she was one of my favorite voices on Twitter, and then one day last January she just deactivated, and she ended up writing about it in The Guardian. She did it on the day that, at the time, our president-elect was taunting North Korea about nuclear weapons on Twitter. And she was just like, I’ve had enough. So she wrote in The Guardian that, you know, “For the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out.” She talks about how she’s used it to write jokes for free, post political commentary for free, answer questions for free, do feminism 101 for free, and she wrote that, you know, “Off Twitter these are all things by which I make my living, but on Twitter I do them pro bono. And in return I’m micromanaged in real time by strangers, neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit, and men enjoy unfettered direct access to my brain, so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.” So she’s been off Twitter for a year, and I’ve been wondering, is Lindy going to come back? Because she was also somebody who I really looked to for interesting insight and conversation. And as much as I really understand everything she’s saying and I agree with it, quitting Twitter also feels impossible to me because it’s something I’ve relied on for such a long time, sort of personally and professionally. Well, Lindy is not coming back. So earlier this month she wrote a new piece called “I Quit Twitter and it Feels Great.” And she wrote about what her life is like now. She’s like, “I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day… I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care… I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls.” And I think about this a lot because like I also am spending more time than I would like to on that kind of shit. But at the same time, I love so much about Twitter, and about social media in general, there’s a lot of stuff that it’s really connected me to. And so it made me really curious, like, how are you all negotiating this? How do you think about your visibility online? Do you feel like you’re making choices as a result of all of that crap? JL Well that sounds lovely, I have to say, to some extent. But I have not followed that same path. KL Yeah, I mean, well Sara and I, actually, we were really lucky: we just saw Lindy speak at an event and I actually really liked something that she said about Twitter and Facebook, those platforms, they want you to and they’re really banking on you to think that they’re the only way, the only way that you can connect with other people. And like while that’s bullshit, we know at the core, it’s really hard, like you were just saying, Sara. I mean this is a lot of how we have gotten to know each other, and a lot of people that we’re friends with, and have made really good connections to work. So I don’t know, I mean, I think it’s trying to find some kind of balance, but I don’t know. I look at both of you and I don’t participate that much on Twitter or Facebook, I guess, but I was thinking back on this. When I was really starting to feel like I had something, maybe, to say, or like I would feel comfortable saying something on Twitter, I was watching all these people that I really loved and cared about getting completely trashed just for like existing there. And I got really scared. So I think that’s why I haven’t really put myself out there at all. JL I think one of the things that I find hard to grasp about Twitter is Twitter now versus Twitter 10 years ago. KL Yeah. JL And I feel like I still have this … like love relationship with Twitter, for the Twitter that I loved 10 years ago, which I just felt was way more focused on specific technology news, which is what I was looking for at the time, and sort of what I was really more putting out was technology news. [5:00] And now it’s so much more. And, you know, it’s sort of — when people are like, “Oh, I long for the good ol’ days!” And part of me is like, “Oh! But Twitter used to be this!” And I’m like, “But just because it used to be something doesn’t mean it is that or ever will be again. And I think for me that’s sort of trying to find how much I still interact with it is definitely not how much I used to. SWB And I mean like of course it’s changed, right? It’s a big platform and it has so much power to get the news to everybody in the world really quickly and some of that stuff is amazing, but it is also overwhelming and can be a little difficult, I think, to handle the kind of like context-shifting of somebody wanting to tell me about some article they wrote that’s relevant to user experience that I might want to read about for work. But then also, here’s the latest absolutely batshit thing the president said,” and then also, “here’s somebody with a really funny joke and a dog picture,” which I like. Don’t get rid of those [KL chuckles]. And then all of a sudden we go to the latest tragedy. And I think that that mishmash of everything is hard. It’s almost like a context collapse, right? Like there is no context anymore. It’s all just in this one weird stream. And I recognize that I have control. I can unfollow. I can create channels that I want to use. I can put people into this or that list, I can follow those certain lists for certain things, but that’s not really how I like to use Twitter. That’s not — then I feel like it’s a job to manage it [uh huh! Yeah! Yes! Right][laughing], and I don’t really want that job. But the thing is, it’s also a really powerful place where I’ve met so many great people, and has been super important to my career, and I hear this a lot from women, especially, who feel like that’s where they were able to find networks and establish some professional footing, and yet … if I have to have one more conversation with some rando who wants to explain the topic of my book back to me, I’m going to lose it. JL I think, for me, I’ve had transition what I post on Twitter over the years. So first starting on Twitter I would post about any random thought that popped into my head, a lot of sports, and then also, because my focus is in engineering and technology, a lot of development news, and one of the things I found is I’d get a lot of feedback from people that would be like, “Oh. It’s baseball season. I should unfollow Jenn Lukas because she’s tweeting about sports again.” And I was like, “Hey!” But then part of me is like, well, you know what? What I go to Twitter for is to read technology news, and so I just sort of took that at that time and was like, you know what I’m going to do? My Twitter account is going to focus more on development, engineering, UX, UI, links, things I write, that sort of subject, and then I moved all my more personal thoughts, including sports, cuz that’s personal [laughter]. My love of the Eagles is very personal! KL Gets personal. SWB I’ve seen Jenn do a football dance, it’s extremely personal! [Laughter.] JL But I moved that all to Facebook where I found the audience sort of matched better what I was doing there. So more local friends, more of the people that wanted to hear more about that, and where with the comments on Facebook, I could have more conversations about those personal things. Whereas Twitter where it’s a megaphone versus a two-way conversation there mostly. So there I kept things that were more announcements and then moved things conversational to Facebook. And, like you said though, Sara, you get into this weird context switching. So that’s worked for me and I think it’s worked really well, but there are times where I’ll go to Twitter and I’ll be like, “Oh. I want to post about this thing I wrote.” But then there’s a school shooting and, for me, I can’t look at this stuff and be like, yeah, lemme tell you about a new variable font on the web when there was just a shooting in Florida, and that feels super weird for me. And those are the times where I don’t really even know how to handle social media. SWB How could anybody, right? Like we’re dealing with a world that communicates in such an always-on kind of way, and I don’t know that anybody has figured out what to do with that, and what is a healthy way to deal with that. I sometimes feel like I end up spending all of this time kind of hemming and hawing and debating about whether I should post anything at all. And in a way that I never used to do. And so like, for example, I will sit there and think through the various potential outcomes like, “If I’m going to say something that’s kind of funny, is this something where somebody is going to not get the joke and then they’re going to get mad, and then they’re going to snowball from there? Is this a thing that I’m going to have to be explaining the joke to people all day? Is this a thing where I’m going to have to be, like, defending my own credibility to talk about this subject? Like what kind of labor am I going to have to put in to manage this?” And then also I start thinking like, “Well how does this fit into the overall context of other things that I post?” [10:00] And where I used to be just like, “Here’s a funny, random thought that I had on my way to the bank!” And it was OK. I’ve stopped feeling like that, and I’ve actually found that it’s almost like I have, in some ways, less faith in myself over knowing what I want to be communicating, which is a little bit unsettling. KL Yeah. You’re second-guessing yourself. I mean that’s where my anxiety paralysis comes in really handy because I just don’t do it [laughing] and then I walk away, and then I’m like, “All right, wait till the next decision.” JL And I totally get those feelings. I have them too. I’ve actually been trying to force myself to tweet more, but, again, because I write and I make a podcast with two wonderful friends, and I have to get that out there somehow because I want to share that with people. So I still have that. Like, I would love to quit Twitter, but I also want to keep sharing, and I want to keep seeing what other people are doing, too [KL yeah], and, for me, I haven’t found the exact medium to replace that yet. SWB Well, and also, like, when you do things like have a podcast and write a book or whatever, a lot of the success of those things ends up coming down to your ability to promote yourself. And, even if you have, for example, for my book, I mean, I have publishers, they have PR people, they’ve done a lot of stuff, but if I weren’t doing the work too, it just doesn’t go anywhere. And part of that work is making it visible and so then, then you get into this space where you feel like, “Is all I’m doing posting about my own projects? My own like —” KL Building your own personal brand. SWB Yeah, like, “Hey! Subscribe to my podcast!” JL My Klout score! KL [Laughing] Oh my god! JL Does that still exist? KL I don’t know. SWB I remember opting out of that but, at one point, I was influential in burritos [laughter]. Thank you very much. JL What?! I would eat a burrito with you. KL That’s amazing! [Music fades in.] SWB [Music fades out.][Ad spot] If you’ve visited noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s the center of our online presence. Well, we built it on WordPress. We love WordPress because it’s super easy to customize, has great customer support, and comes with lots of features that make publishing our podcast, or pretty much anything else, really easy. It’s no surprise that nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress. Plans start at just four dollars a month. Start building your website today! Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website! [Music fades in and out.][End of ad spot.] SWB A few years ago, I realized that way too much of the media I was consuming was coming from white people. And something I started doing was really paying more attention to where I was getting news and where I was getting information, and I started seeking out a lot of different writers, people of color who were involved in the public in some way, journalists. And along the way I obviously started paying attention to lots of big names: Roxane Gay or Ta-Nehisi Coates. But after awhile I feel like a whole new world opened up for me, and one of the voices that stuck out to me almost immediately was Sydette Harry, who is probably better known as @blackamazon on Twitter. Sydette, I hope, does not mind me saying that she is a force, and I have learned a lot by listening to her and watching her have conversations about everything from immigration to online harassment to black culture that I didn’t know anything about. And I am just so elated that she took the time to be on the show today. Sydette, welcome to No, You Go! Sydette Harry Thank you! Thank you for having me! SWB So I’m really happy to have you here and to hear more about how you ended up doing what you do. So the way I understand it, you are currently running editorial at Mozilla, and I’d love to hear more about how you ended up there and what that day-to-day looks like. SH Ok. So. What it is — I am the editor of the Foundation website and editor of the Network. So my real goal is to develop processes and systems and discussions. I was like, “How do people talk? How do you get online? How do we get stuff out?” Really shifting from the kind of traditional like, oh this is a Foundation and we kind of do these things, into a, so how do we start a global push towards something Mozilla has called internet health. They’re writing reports on it, there are fellowships around it, but this discussion of how do you know that the internet you use is healthy and sustainable and useful for you? And that it works for what you want to get done and what you want to do in life. And I think that that is super, super important to think about in a way that is informed by my experience online. My experience online is that I am from Far Rock. It is a two-hour train ride, if you are very, very lucky. And it became very, very apparent to me that if I wanted to — once, and I was also, right after I graduated from college, so that was one of the first colleges to get Facebook. [15:00] So it was like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. And it’s like, “Oh! We have Facebook. Yay us.” And there was also very much — at the same time, my father got deported the year I graduated college. And then the economy tanked in around 2007. So … there becomes this very big thing of, “How do I navigate this idea where I’m leaving this place of great privilege, where I’m leaving this great place of, oh, you have everything available to you in ways that you never had before,’” and it’s now you are part of a broken family. Literally broken: they took your father and they deported him. And you are not — and you were told at your very, very expensive graduation: “This is how you will amass the world and blah blah blah blee da blee blee.” And you now have no job, you’re going back to your house, and you’re going to have to try and rebuild your life from what is, essentially, a very traumatic place. And I have a background in theater, so my thought was, “I now have a forum to talk!” And ever since then I have been commenting on anybody who’ll give me a password and some access. And I tried everything. But my actual training was history and theater and dramaturgy and pipes and processes. So while I was doing that commentary, I became very interested in, “How does this work? How does this apply to communication theory? How does this work for what we’re doing?” And, through that and writing and commentary — I had a blog called Having Read The Fine Print — trying to get into this space of so how do we know what we’re doing is correct? And how do we know that what we’re doing is useful? Because that is a huge question. And Coral had seen some of my work, and they hired me, and I’ve been working from that ever since. SWB OK, so Coral Project. I’m a big fan of the Coral Project, which has been working on making comment systems more healthy and humane for quite some time. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Coral Project? SH Coral Project was started in 2014. People got together and said, “Comments are terrible.” So it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, Knight Foundation. We were under Open News, and we are now under Mozilla. And we worked out of The New York Times building. It was like, “So how do we build better comments?” The first person hired was the project lead, the general, Andrew Losowsky, and I call him The General because [laughing] he always gets so — he’s like, “Why do you call me The General?!?” And I was like, “Partially because it makes you blush,” and also it was right around the time of Hamilton [laughter]. We’re like, “OK, you’re The General.” But he does not make me call him that. But — and then I was the second hire. And then we were working with our tech leads, and one of the things we came to really quickly was that it wasn’t enough to focus just on comments, we had to look at how communities were sorted. So people were like, “We’re going to write guides on how to use better comments.” And it was going to be research on comments and then it was like — as we were talking, we were like, “All of this stems from larger systemic problems, larger editorial problems.” If you really want to talk about why your comments are bad, you have to talk about how you set up your community online because the experiences of community, even communities that deal with some heavy, heavy stuff, have a wide range. There are communities that deal with some of the most traumatic things that are genial, well-run, not to say that they are always perfect, but there’s a real sense of community there. And then there are communities that deal with what I think would be like pretty superficial things in the sense of — on top they’re superficial, but the same issues show up and they become important, and they implode often. And communities can implode really quickly. And it’s like, why does that happen? What leads to that happening? And how do we talk about that? SWB In that work, it sounds like, you know, your experience firsthand commenting anywhere and everywhere during this really difficult moment of your life was directly applied there. Can you talk more about how you brought that experience into Coral? SH The way I think about it is I try to create communities where, depending on how I’m acting, it would not be at all difficult to kick me out. And I think that that’s important. And people always, like, stutter. It’s like, I try to create communities that are supportive of the least—the people who have the least advantage, the least resources, the least training, to become a member. And I want to continue to make people aware of what it’s like to try to be a member of these communities. And there are some communities where I’m like, “If I was a moderator of the community, I would put myself out.” And that’s good. And that is how you really have to think about these things, and not because it’s some level of altruism, but it’s very much the first question we ask all the time: who is your community for? Who do you want this community to serve? And how do you make your community represent that? Because what happens with a lot of people is, “Oh, we just had — we just had a community and then we didn’t do anything.” And I am like, “Well, you did do something.” Whether or not you believe you made it. [20:00] No choice is a choice. Because people see that you didn’t make that choice, you didn’t do whatever you said you were going to do, and they very much responded accordingly. If they are the type of people who take advantage of these things, they did that. If they are the type of people who are very likely to be targeted by violence and see that you don’t do anything, they stop responding. They stop being involved. And that is a choice. And with Coral it became varied things from, do not look for the quick fix of “tech will build a tool” or “this will be the tool” or whatever. It’s very much about, so, “this is what you want to do. How have you built it in that this is what you can do? And this is something that you had given space for your community to be able to do? Have you done that?” SWB Yeah, totally, that makes a lot of sense, and I think about a lot of this in the context of something really big that many of our listeners would have familiarity with, like Twitter. They spent a really long time with such a hands-off approach, and with this idea that somehow they were going to be the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” as they said so many times, and therefore their approach to their community was that they weren’t a community, right? They’re just a platform. And the result is, well, they’ve been entirely unable to deal with harassment and abuse on their platform for years and years and years after many people, including you, have told them about it. SH Oh. So one of the things that constantly happens now that I’ve moved from commenting about tech to working in tech is, I don’t ever want to hear the word “scale” again. It has started to become like — I start to get twitchy a little. Because people use scale as an excuse to not talk about very basic stuff. And it bothers my soul. Because ultimately what people want to know is, how are you going to take care of them? And people go, “Well, it doesn’t scale! We’re not in scale!” And I’m like, “Well, that’s nice. What are you going to do for the people inundated right now? If you’re working on it, let’s be honest.” There’s also this myth of the early adopter and what early adopter tends to mean is early adopter with social capital, not actual early adopter. Because I found out very quickly that I was actually — I’m actually one of the first people to adopt Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for nine years. And I didn’t know that. Because I had never considered myself among the [in mocking voice] “early adopters” because I was never talked about in that fashion. And part of the reason that I wasn’t talked about in that fashion is because I didn’t have social capital when I was an early adopter. Now I have it. And I’m like, oh! OK, so that’s what that means. That’s what you are talking about when you say “early adopter,” you basically are trying to say “someone who matters to us.” SWB Well, yeah, and at Twitter it was very much conceived of people who are like us … “us” being the founders. And who were the founders of Twitter? It’s a bunch of young, white guys. And so I think that they certainly were not thinking about people particularly different from them as being part of those early adopters. But the way I understand it there are tons of stats going back maybe not a full 10 years ago, but at least eight or so years ago, around adoption of Twitter by black people, and how high the black user base was of Twitter, and I just think they didn’t even think enough about it to even consider caring about it. SH And it’s not easy in the way folks want to talk about it. It’s — there is a — “do you have beef with @jack @Twitter @support?” Of course. But that’s not the thing I want to focus on. It’s not the thing that I care most about. The thing I care most about is, how is this affecting who we look at, and who we take care of, and how we take care of them? Because very simply, very, very simply: the way we talk about and look at abuse, the way this is designed isn’t good. And the reason it’s not good is because it hasn’t been designed well, it hasn’t been considered well, and it’s because, and this is my new thing, is that nobody who has a social science degree or had a social science focus sat there and thought about what happens when you get a large black population. What happens when you get a large population of abusers and harassers and things like that? How do you successfully set up your experience? Not a free speech wing in the free speech party, but what does each specific user get when they step on? And that’s very much what I often rave about is the racism and the sexism and the Nazis. I’ve talked about that in public. You can look that up. But what is very hard for me, and a lot of times, and this is what most scares me about it, is the difficulty it is to get people to focus on: so how are you going to help a user in this case? How is this one person going to get what they need from you? Right now? Not at scale. [25:00] Not at scale. Because that’s the word everybody likes to bring out. “We’re going to talk about scale. We’re going to talk about scale.” And I’m like, “When are we talking about the specific person? And it’s very hard to get people to think about that and talk about that because they almost have an innate sense of shame of like, “Well, we really didn’t think about that.” And I could probably use a lot more curse words when I say it. It’s like, I’m completely uninterested in how bad you feel about the fact you didn’t do it before. I want to know how you’re going to do it now. SWB Yeah, you know, I think so much of that reluctance, like you were saying, kind of comes back to shame that they didn’t think about it, and then also that — that fear of looking it dead in the eyes, right? Like when you look at it at scale only, you don’t have to think about the individual people, and as soon as you’re asked to think about the individual people, that becomes a human-level problem that is, you know, is a little bit painful to look at. And avoidance is powerful. So something I would love to talk more about because I think it’s really relevant to this conversation is something I’ve heard you speak about a lot more recently, which is making this argument that the voices we hear in news and the voices that we hear online are not representative of people, like, where you’re from. SH There is very much a non-acknowledgement, especially coming into media, and I have it from a really specific perspective. I am a member of a program called Prep for Prep … which is, it’s specifically designed to try and address systemic equality. So it’s about 40 years old. It was started in 1978, right around “the Bronx is burning.” President Ford basically tells the city, go burn in a fire. We don’t have any resources. And how do you take kids who are under-resourced by the city and whatever and what-have-you, and make them into the leaders, the people who are going to be the dreamers coming out of the progressive sixties and seventies? And the way they thought about it was, you are going to equip the kids who show the most ability to endure — straight up just endure — and high IQs and certain psychological profiles. You’re going to put them through academic, like, basically bootcamp, and you’re going to put them into the NYSAIS system. NYSAIS system being the New York State Alliance of Independent Schools. These are private schools so old that some are older than Harvard and Yale, and some are of age of Harvard and Yale. This is old, old money that can link itself back to the Oxbridge. And what happens with Prep is that you develop a machine to address the fact that we may not have resources and all of that, and we become trained in being leaders, and you do that for 14 months. I did that. I started that when I was nine. This is all going on in the middle of the crack eighties, in the middle of Reagan America, in the middle of the nineties, this is happening while IIRIRA, which is ultimately what my father was deported on, was being signed into law. And at this time, I’m doing a two-hour commute back and forth from Far Rock to Trinity Day School. And I ultimately ended up graduating from Poly Prep… about how this is how you’ll make your mark on the world, this is how you’ll make your world better is that you learn how to be among power. And we mentioned beforehand a lot about code-switching and talking. I also have the experience that I’m a first-generation American. So my general speaking voice is not my speaking, speaking voice, because there’s a voice that very much a lot of people recognize as “home” voice. And it’ll come out in certain words I say but there was very much this, “You are on presentation. You are on presentation.” And then I graduated from college and it all broke down. It wasn’t — like I had done my best, I graduated from college two years early, and there wasn’t a there there for me. And, most importantly, there, to this day, I don’t think in a full encapsulation of who I am, there is a there for me. I go in often, I’m not alone, but I may be the only of my specific background in a room. I might be the only person with my specific sense of experiences in a room, often. And especially post having like a job in tech and a job in news. And these are decision-making rooms. What became important for me is that I didn’t want to have the conversations that I had been taught to have, which were, “Prove that you deserve to be there, and then make it so everyone knows that you are of a certain class.” Because what I actually want to have is, like, these are actually really simple things, and these are tools, and these are mediums designed for everybody. So if you are saying you are going to design for anybody, and you cannot understand me when I try to speak as clearly as possible but in the voice that I speak when I am comfortable and with myself and fully aligned with all of my experiences and my full self, you are not doing your job. This isn’t my fault. SWB Yeah. [30:00] SH Code-switching is a very real thing, but there is also a lack of looking at how for a lot of folks and for a lot of things, you speak multiple languages and there are multiple layers to how you speak. You are forming your use through who you are. And what does it say about these platforms and these places that they can’t support you being your full self? And I find too often at certain engagements when I talk to people, specifically within tech and sometimes journalism, there is a deep, deep jump into jargon, into non-understandability, and I’m just like, “No! We are going to talk about it using language everyone can understand, because that’s what we’re supposed to do.” So we can talk about scale, we can talk about pipeline, we can talk about design, I’m conversant in all of that. I’m conversant in all of that in almost three languages. At the end of the day, am I still dealing with a Nazi or am I not? Am I still dealing with an inaccessible piece of a tool, or am I not? If I am still dealing about that, and me and you have sat here for three hours having a conversation that makes us both feel very smart, but then we didn’t do no shit, we weren’t successful! For me it’s like, you can or you can’t. And how are you communicating to people about whether or not you have the ability? How are you communicating to people about whether or not they can expect this of you? And a lot of this is not even — it’s funny to talk of language, it’s not necessarily about what your answer is, it’s about how you talk to people. So you get a lot of this, it’s like, this person is speaking on high and is telling me that they can or cannot do this thing. Or they will or will not do this thing. Because they don’t think that I deserve to actually know, straight up, that you don’t actually have the capacity to deal with the fact that Nazis are coming for me? Or it’s not on your number-one to-do list? But you wonder why people are mad?” SWB Right, right, yeah, like, “Oh let’s definitely spend 30 minutes explaining to you why we haven’t done it yet,” instead of just saying, “You know what? This isn’t one of our priorities.” Like at least if they were honest about where it sits on the priority list, it would be refreshing in some ways. SH And in some ways I think sometimes they’re not even sure. Like, “it is a high priority, but we have no idea of how to attack it.” OK then. So if you don’t know how to attack it, and you’ve been working on it for how long? Maybe you need some new people in the room to answer that question for you. You might want to talk to some new people. I don’t know. That might be an option. SWB Right, like perhaps there are people with expertise that you don’t have and that you have not previously recognized as even being experts in the first place. So, you know, something you talked about a little bit in there that I was really interested in and I’d love to go back to a little bit more is you talked about sort of your upbringing and going through this really intensive Prep program and it being very much about, you know, I guess I would put as like bringing you from where you’re from, bringing you to a more privileged and richer, white culture. And it sounds like one of your frustrations is this idea that that is only happening in that direction. Right? It’s like, OK, we can give somebody like you some new opportunities or give you access to these communities that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t know how to get access to, but there’s not a lot of effort to go to those communities or to understand people there or to meet people where they’re at. Is that part of the way that you would see that problem? SH Definitely! And it’s something where I’m always very particular to talk about is that, yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. [Sings] That being said [finishes singing], I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education. I’m still the kind of person who would survive and go through all of these things. So when you say that I am diversity, let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good. So what bothers me is not so much that people are creating exclusionary products, that is problematic to me in and of itself, but often what truly, truly disturbs me is that they’re exclusionary and nobody seems to know that they are. So everybody’s like, “Yeah, we make this for everybody!” And I’m like, “According to what?!” You can make a really great business just off of catering to you and your friend set if you know their income, if you know their strides. And that is so, to me, completely acceptable and wonderful, and if you can make a business model off of that, awesome! The issue I have is that there are people who are like, you don’t admit that you’re making it just for your friends. You really think everybody lives like this, and you do not have a feedback loop for anybody to tell you you’re wrong. SWB I know that you’ve talked recently about losing weight and the shifting way that people treat you since then. [35:00] Can you tell us a little bit more about what that’s been like? SH Sure! I mean, I had what is called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy, and they cut out half of my stomach, because I have a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s very prevalent, usually among lower-income African American women. And it can lead to anything from sensitivity to insulin to death, and it’s not well-studied. And when you live in a fat-phobic society, I was experiencing problems all my life with my reproductive system. And finally there was a just a moment of, OK, I have to get this done. I have to be able to live my life in a really specific way, and if I want to have children, I need to be able to do this. So I went from being about a size 26 to a size 12, 14. I’m on the teetering edge. And it is not accidental to me in any way, shape, or form, that people are kinder to me. People are nicer to me. People also occupy my space more, so that there is a lot of this where I’m like, “Oh I understand what women say now, when they say that there is a lot of physical imposition,” because — I’m very tall, I’m about 5’11,” but I was also about 350 pounds. So I never dealt with people trying to physically impose me, because that was not necessarily a fight they thought they could win. Now at about 230 pounds, I am — I look more like an average woman. And I realize that people will be up in my space more. Men will try to physically intimidate me more. And it was never something I thought about. And it also makes me very aware of the idea of … there are times when I see my ideas get accepted better. They are just accepted more readily because I am in — I look different. You don’t understand how badly you’ve been treated until you stop getting treated that badly. SWB You’ve done so much work to bring this thinking to tech and to media and to start conversations that I think are painful and difficult for people in those industries. What are you hoping to do next? Like what’s on your radar that you really want to focus on this next year? SH We might be denying amazing people the ability to fully live their lives. We might be denying amazing folks the ability to fully express themselves, to fully deal with the work and the joy that they have in themselves, and that is… that is what — if somebody was like, “What really like pisses you off?” I’m like, “That’s what pisses me off.” The idea that we’re not — we’re creating a world where folks cannot be their full, amazing selves. And that is something that we have to look at. And what I hope this year is to do more work that allows folks to be their full, amazing selves, to be fully present, fully active … in their work and their joy — and that allows that for me too. I’m not above anybody. I’m part of that set. SWB Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, I, for one, definitely want you to be able to live your full life and be your full self, and also continue to do the amazing work that you’ve been doing for the community that you come from and for all kinds of marginalized communities. So I’m so thankful that we got to talk to you about all of this today. SH Yeah! I’m always glad to talk [music fades in] with you about it. JL [Music fades out] let’s keep the awesome going: we got any Fuck Yeahs this week? KL Heck we do! Our Fuck Yeah of the Week is Ladies Get Paid. It is a newsletter I just signed up for, and it’s not just a newsletter, it’s like a community. And it’s really awesome because in the newsletter, which comes weekly, you get news and info and all sorts of great heads up about webinars and workshops all over the United States. Like meetups to get drinks and advice from peers and potential mentors, it’s really cool. And it sort of covers everything from like practical advice for how to take advantage of a vacation when you’re not, let’s say, really good at letting go, like me. So it’s just — it’s really nice, and I think it’s also cool because it shows you where things are in not necessarily real time but it’s like, “Hey, there’s a thing tonight,” or “There’s a thing tomorrow.” And you could go there and learn how to negotiate better. JL I see there’s a “Ladies get drinks in Hawaii”! KL Oh, we should do that one. JL We should definitely do that one. [40:00] SWB So the entire thing for Ladies Get Paid, it’s about, like, teaching women negotiating skills and that kind of thing, or what? KL Yeah, it’s like negotiating how to get more money or a raise, or step into leadership positions when you’re not sure, you know, how to quite do that. SWB I totally love this idea and I’m going to check it out, because I know on the show we’ve talked about things like wage equity a bunch of times, and sort of like some of the issues that we’ve had ourselves. A couple of episodes ago, you were talking about kind of being backed into a corner by a boss and like asked to agree to salary in a phone booth room, as opposed to having any time to think about it. And I think, you know, so many of us could really use some of that feedback from other people and practice having these conversations when they’re in sort of low-stakes environments. So I think that’s like a perfect complement to stuff that keeps on coming up on the show. KL Yeah, absolutely, it’s just really nice to know that there’s a whole bunch of resources out there for this and ways that you can actually talk to other people who are going through the same thing and people that you could learn sort of techniques from. SWB So do they have like a chapters in different cities kind of thing? KL Yeah, I know there’s one in New York and they actually just — they did their first conference, which was kind of cool. And that was, I think, just in the last month or so in New York. And they’re taking that on the road. So they’ll be in Seattle next. But I know that there are meetups and stuff all over the place. SWB So that’s a pretty cool concept for anybody who was sitting at home, listening to one of our previous episodes where we were talking about wages and talking about, like, how do you have these conversations with your friends? Try to find a community like that, and if there isn’t one near you, maybe it’s time to start creating these kinds of things. KL Fuck yeah. SWB & JL Fuck yeah! SWB That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Sydette Harry for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please go ahead and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about No, You Go. We’d love to have them here! We’ll be back next week [music fades in] with another great guest [music ramps up to end].

Imagine you want to collect donations for a food bank. You could place an empty box on the street, walk away, and hope there's food inside when you return. The likely result? Your box will be filled with trash. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew Losowsky (@losowsky) is project lead ofMozilla'sCoral Project. The Coral Project builds open-source tools and guides to community practice to bring journalists closer to the communities they serve. Alternatively, you could think strategically.

Hannah and Matt tackle questions from some of their favorite advice sources from the week of June 18th, 2017, and beyond, including:  Ask A Manager: "Employee Drew Genitalia on an Intern’s Cast"; The Cut: "Sexual-Harassment Claims Against a ‘She-E.O.’"; Ask E. Jean: "How Do I Get My Fiancé to Stop Catcalling Me?"; After Hannah reached out to Elle to point out how problematic E. Jean’s answer was, Elle silently took down the page. It nevertheless did not escape Archive.org preserving the question forever; Swipe This!: "My Friend’s Faux #Feminist Persona Makes Me Bonkers"; Dear Mariella: "My Ex-Best Friend Is Threatening to Expose My Private Messages"; Listener Redacted for Privacy: "How Can I Tell a Non-Profit Blog To Respect My Need for Anonymity?""; Caroline Sinders: Homepage; Boing Boing: "That Time the Internet Sent a Swat Team to My Mom's House"; New York Times: "Anonymity Online Serves Us All"; The Coral Project: "The Real Name Fallacy"; Submit your favorite questions or questions you may have for the podcast to hanandmattknowitall@gmail.com, anonymously at bit.ly/askhanandmatt, or to askahelpinghan@gmail.com for a Han-only written answer on hanandmattknowitall.com. Looking to support us? Desperately in need of a fantastical alter-ego? You can become a Patreon supporter and donate to us monthly for all kinds of sweet perks!

According to our guest on this episode, much of the news industry is engaged in a battle they can’t win, a fight over eyeballs and ad revenue with companies like Google and Facebook, where the terms will get worse and worse as time goes by. The answer? Community. By building a community that values the work that they create, they can wrestle back some of the control over their audience and receive support directly from the people who consume and appreciate the product they are creating. Andrew Losowsky is the project lead of The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, that is helping news organizations build better communities and more loyal readers through tools, research and strategy. Among our topics: Forcing a layer of community over traditional journalism vs. providing newsrooms with a cogent plan Why they are building Talk, an open source comments platform Are news organizations better served by hiring another reporter… or a community pro? Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Higher Logic. Big Quotes “[Forcing community on newsrooms] is saying to journalists that they have to spend time in the comments without actually giving them the tools or the training to be able to do so effectively. … It looks like saying, ‘You need to ask your readers for help’ or ‘You need to crowdsource this’ or ‘Why don’t you go and talk to people at this event or in these comments?,’ without actually giving any strategy or thought to it. What you end up with is journalists who are very resentful of having another task placed on top of them. A task where they don’t see the connection between their journalistic work and this community work that they’re being asked to do.” -@losowsky “If you don’t understand and have a real commitment to community as part of your journalistic mission, as part of the strategy of what you’re trying to achieve in the totality of the newsroom, not just within one corner of the it, then it will, ultimately, always fail. We’ve seen this repeatedly. For me, a little part of me dies when I see that happen because what we’re really missing is the kinds of connections that journalism needs, in order to survive.” -@losowsky “Community is not a choice. The choice is what you do with it.” -@patrickokeefe “Right now, so much of the news industry’s revenue model is based around advertising and creating clickbait in order to get the numbers that will then get enough eyeballs on the advertising. I think this is a really shortsighted strategy. … Over half, I think, of the online advertising money goes directly to Facebook and Google. This is not a battle that the news industry is going to win. The terms are going to get worse and worse as you move forward from that. It really is antithetical to community because what you’re saying is, ‘I want people to come here, and I don’t care where they come from.’ Versus trying to build a community who value what we’re doing and will pay for it.” -@losowsky “If somebody flags a thousand times, and you’ve only ever deleted two of the comments they’ve flagged, then the next time they flag, maybe you don’t bring it straight to the moderator’s attention until somebody, who is more reliable as a flagger, does flag it. Then on the other side of that, if somebody is really good at flagging, if they flag 100 times and 90% of the time they end up flagging something that you end up deleting, they’re as good as our moderators. If they flag something, maybe we should just pull it for the moderator to look at immediately and just not have it there in the stream.” -@losowsky “The [real name] issue really comes down to whether or not people will behave better because of real names or maybe they will behave worse. If a name sounds like the person might identify as a woman, that can really change and worsen peoples’ behavior towards them. If there’s no way of hiding, if there’s no way of being anonymous, then you could be encouraging a great homogeneity in your community as a result, or/and encouraging different kinds of harassment and abuse.” -@losowsky About Andrew Losowsky Andrew Losowsky is originally from the UK and, since the age of 18, has lived in Hong Kong, Spain and now the U.S. In 2003, he became the editorial director of an indie Spanish editorial startup that built communities around original content. Andrew co-ran a biannual festival of independent publishing in Luxembourg, bringing together magazine makers from around the world. He has also been a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and worked on product and editorial at News Corp and The Huffington Post. He co-created a pop-up magazine (created by a community of people stranded by a volcano), a community museum on a street, a printed time capsule, a human-sized board game about city development and a card game about community management. Andrew used to run an indie magazine subscription service and has written several books about design, print, visualizations and doorbells. He is currently the project lead at The Coral Project. Related Links Sponsor: Higher Logic, the platform for community managers Andrew’s website Wikipedia page for le cool, an indie Spanish editorial startup where Andrew was editorial director “Colophon 2009: A New Seriousness” by James Pallister for Creative Review, about the biannual festival of independent publishing that Andrew co-ran Stranded, a pop-up magazine co-created by Andrew and a community of people stranged by a volcano The Museum of Westminster Street, a community museum on a street, co-created by Andrew Urbanology, a human-sized board game about city development, co-created by Andrew Cards Against Community, a card game about community management, co-created by Andrew Books authored by Andrew The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, where Andrew is project lead, dedicated to designing “products to meet essential needs of journalism through effective online communities” Bassey Etim, product manager for community at The New York Times, who was involved in The Coral Project at the earliest stages Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at The Washington Post, who was involved in The Coral Projectat the earliest stages Community Signal episode with Bassey Etim Community Signal episode with Greg Barber Community Signal episode with Mary Hamilton of The Guardian Community Signal episode with Talia Stroud of the Engaging News Project Community Signal episode with Sarah Lightowler of CBC Ask, The Coral Project’s tool which allows you to ask your audience a specific question and then manage and display the responses Community Signal episode with Rachel Medanic, which Andrew cites when talking about the difference between community and engagement “Turning Content Viewers Into Subscribers,” a research paper by Lior Zalmanson and Gal Oestreicher-Singer for MIT Sloan The Information, an online publication that promotes a “high-powered community” as a subscriber-only benefit The Financial Times and The Economist, two outlets that Andrew says are investing heavily in community Talk, The Coral Project’s open source comments and community platform Details on The Coral Project’s plugin architecture Sherloq, which “uses the latest advances in deep learning and natural language processing to detect hate speech and cyber bullying” Sherloq’s plugin for The Coral Project’s Talk Project tracker for The Coral Project’s Talk, showing upcoming features “‘Trust,’ the First App from The Coral Project, Debuts” by The Washington Post PR, about the Trust tool, which allows you to segment community members based upon various data points “How Community Software Can Use Forensic Science to Identify Bad Members” by Patrick Community Signal episode with Heather Merrick, where we discussed the series of videos posted on Facebook, covering a murder that was committed “Facebook Murder Suspect Has ‘Shot and Killed Himself,’ Police Say” by Merrit Kennedy for NPR “Community Standards and Reporting” by Joshua Osofsky, VP, global operations for Facebook, about the company’s response to the videos relating to the murder “Comment Section Survey Across 20 News Sites,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud, Emily Van Duyn, Alexis Alizor and Cameron Lang for the Engaging News Project, funding by The Coral Project “Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud for the Engaging News Project, about how “respect” buttons can increase civility in comment sections “The Real Name Fallacy” by J. Nathan Matias, a summary of research related to effects of real name usage on behavior The Coral Project’s research section “Mozilla-The New York Times-The Washington Post Collaboration, The Coral Project, Moves Forward” by Dan Sinker for the Knight Foundation, about the initial funding and the hiring of Andrew Heroku, a cloud platform-as-a-service that is used as a web application development model The Coral Project’s blog The Coral Project Community The Coral Project’s guides, not online at the time of publication, but should be launched soon The Coral Project on Twitter Andrew on Twitter Transcript View the transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be grateful if you spread the word. Thank you for listening to Community Signal.

The Coral Project provides free, open-source tools for journalists looking to better engage with audiences away from social networks

Why Comments Suck - Episode 26 Scott and Randy tear into the history and problems of comments on "news" sites, and identify the most overlooked problem. They then talk about current and future solutions (well, other than just giving up an shutting down.) Show Notes Links Popular Science -"Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments" -Sept 23, 2013 Shadow of the future: "The shadow of the future promotes cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma for children" Original paper: Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation by James D. Fearon How others are addressing comment quality Shutting down onsite comments: a comprehensive list of all news organisations How the Huffington Post handles 70+ million comments a year We discussed the history of HuffPo comments with Justin Isaf in Jan 2015 Tablet Magazine: A Jewish magazine is testing an unusual solution for toxic internet comments After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet's conversation moves to Facebook Improvements along the roads! Civil Comments: Reforming the Trollosphere: Creating Conversation in the Comments Section The Coral Project: "We need to change how people are submitting their content and we need to make sure that we're giving them good reasons to behave well." The Coral Project unveils its first product to make comments better New York Times: Quora: How does the NYT determine which articles have comments? Model & Enforce the context New York Times: A Community Manager Walks Into A Bar:My AMA with Bassey Etim, Community Desk Editor at The New York Times The Engaging News Project: Journalist Involvement in Comment Sections Comments Are Terrible (But They Don't Have To Be) - SXSW PanelPicker submission for The Coral Project and the Engaging News Project. Additional links Hey reporters: An alternative to #DontReadtheComments: Jump in Case Study: Yahoo! Answers Community Content Moderation from Building Web Repuation Systems The Washington Post is using Slack to create a reader community focused on the gender pay gap Transcript Scott: Hi listeners, in this episode we ask why do comments on sites suck so much, and what can we do about it? Randy: They're sucking because they lack context, and we'll tell you what that means. Scott: Now, this isn't a new problem, and many are trying to address it. We'll share their approaches ... Randy: ... And give our recommendations based on our personal experiences. Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media and platform and product design. Scott: I'm Scott Moore. Randy: I'm Randy Farmer. Scott: We're discussing the problem with comment sections. You may have heard that a number of news sites have been shutting down comment sections in the last couple of years, or generally complaining about the poor quality of comments they receive on their articles, and we think that there's a real simple problem here, and it's the model in that people are presented with just a blank text box with no context about what to say or how to behave. Randy: Part of that is because we don't know who the audience is. It's not clear from a plain text box who you have in mind when you're writing a comment, and what you're actually writing about. Are you writing to the publisher of the article? The reader? The commenter? The author? It's not at all clear, and I don't think the publishers were even sure. I think they assumed that the post, the content it self, would be a sufficient context for commenting, if they thought about context at all. One way I like to put it is, there's no "to:", expressed or implied, when a visitor creates their own context. Is it to the author? The publisher? The topic? Or a reply to another commenter? There is one context that I like to refer to all the time, which is when you post a public content, it's actually to God, Google and everyone. Scott: This creates an attractive nuisance. The vicious circle goes like this. Publishers are not creating a clear context to their commenters, and without that clear context, people don't have enough context to care about each other, so they don't really focus on developing relationships. They tend to focus on being an audience to the rest of the world, and they have their own axes to grind or they ignore the content of the article, and post anyway, and these low-quality comments tend to wind up drawing more bad comments than good comments, and the circle starts all over again. Randy: In contrast, there are communities with blank text boxes that have strong context and therefore have less difficulty with comment quality, because they're constructed around either topical content, or group goals, and they tend to be smaller and more intimate. Scott: These tighter contexts provide what's known as "the shadow of the future," and that is, that's the probability of future interaction. If you expect to interact with other people in the future, you treat them differently. If you don't expect to interact with somebody in the future, then your cooperation is going to be lesser than. It's like comparing a small town diner where you expect to see the same people over and over, you're going to be nice to them, verses a bus station where everyone's passing through, and bus stations aren't really known for their friendliness. Randy: Now it's time to discuss how others are trying to address poor quality comments on their sites. Scott: For too long, folks have been treating the symptoms. There's a long list of sites that have closed their comments absolutely, completely, but there's a cost to that. You lose your SEO from comments. You lose potential ad revenue from people participating on the page where you're selling ads. Some sites exert editorial control over which content can have comments enabled, and for how long. For example, the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Guardian, Fox News, all pick and choose which pieces of content are going to allow comments at all. This can increase your editorial costs and you can also suffer from a dip in your SEO and ad revenue from people commenting. Randy: Some, like Ars Technica and Boing Boing have put comments behind a click. This is an editorial speed bump. It's complex and it's all about context, and bad comments can cost you significant revenue. When I worked at Yahoo, Yahoo Health had comments related to articles about drugs and treatments, and when the drug companies were advertising, they were paying the highest ad rates on the internet, and they didn't like the detracting and often medically dangerous comments that were showing up on the same page as the article about their treatment or drug. They moved the comments off of that page in order to recover that revenue. The critical context turns out to be the advertisers for many of these applications, not the users. Scott: Then we can't forget the ever popular increasing your moderation. Whether moderation happens before or after publication, these systems wind up being expensive, mostly because they don't scale well, and definitely don't respond quickly. Randy: Some are pushing moderation tasks to Facebook comments, and for me, this is completely baffling, because now you have confused the context one more time, because now, instead of just the other people reading and the other people commenting, you now have brought in the entire user's social graph. Anyway, who gets notified when you post on a site using remote Facebook comments? Who are you talking to? Are you writing for your Facebook friends or are you writing for the author of an article? Scott: We've come across a really novel approach. Make your commenters pay before they can view or comment. Tablet magazine is a magazine for a non-profit organization, and they actually charge for commenting. They have a daily rate of 2 dollars, or a monthly rate of 18 dollars, or a yearly rate of 180 dollars, and you might think, "Who would pay to comment?" Randy: Nobody. Scott: Well the answer is no one. They killed the comments on their site. All of their commenting happens on their Facebook page where they repost the articles anyway. According to them, this is exactly what they wanted. They are very happy with it exactly happening this way. If somebody wants to comment from the wild web, then pay for it, and they'll be happy to moderate your comment. That works out well for them, but it might not work out well for you if you're relying on things like advertising revenue and SEO. Randy: This has been a problem for quite a while. It's well known. The grousing about it is everywhere, and we now join that group, but there have been several efforts to standardize and platformize. One of them is Civil Comments. Civil comments is a platform launched by Aja Bogdanoff who is involved with Ted Talks Communities, and Krista Morgan. Aja told Tech Crunch in October, "We need to change how people are submitting their content. We need to make sure that we're giving them good reasons to behave well," so when you write your comment, in order to post it, you actually have to review 2 other comments on the site for quality and civility. This gives you a chance to edit your comment before submitting. Then comments may go live or be held for review based on whoever is using the platform. This approach is a definite improvement, and it starts to set the context, but it's only after the user has invested in writing a potentially context-less comment. We think this approach might be able to be improved by changing the order, getting people to read comments from others before composing a new one. Scott: Another tool for publishers to facilitate curation in moderation comes out of the Coral Project. They have one tool called Trust. It's actually part of 3 planned modules, Trust, Ask and Talk. The Trust module is largely so that journalists can find new sources, reveal potential troublemakers and identify useful contributions within all the contributions that are going on. It's not out yet. Some people are experimenting with it, and it still doesn't address what we're talking about, which is the whole idea of context. There's nothing to provide context. It's really looking at things after all of these context-less comments come out. Randy: So far it looks like it's very early and there might be a little bit of reinventing the wheel, but we'll see how it turns out, and I'm certain they'll uncover some useful lessons I hope they share with us all. Scott: The New York Times has really changed how they're operating with comments. They started by following the popular but misguided, generic goal of "building community", but that lacks context, and that's the whole problem we're talking about. Since then, they have transformed into a better "letters to the editor." As Bassey Etim, the New York Times community editor, says, "Our goal is to have every New York Times comment thread offer tangible, added value to each article for our readership." Randy: That's a goal. Scott: That's a goal, and it limits the scope. With that goal clearly stated internally and externally, that allows them to select which stories have comments and how long the comments are going to be open on a particular story, and when those comments come in, they're human reviewed. They prioritize what comments are reviewed based on whether it's on the home page, whether it's getting a lot of attention, and when they review their comments, they hold off on publishing every comment just because it passes reviews. They actually hold on to a couple of comments until there is a spectrum of positions that support or add to the article. Randy: This does a great job of modeling. Scott: Exactly. It's done by your paid staff and it teaches regulars what's going to wind up getting published, and then also they curate and they highlight. They do this either by having picks of particular comments that really add to the context of the rest of the article, or they do modeling by highlighting the New York Times Picks community by doing profiles of folks. Randy: I really like that they preserve the context, as I was talking about earlier. They put the comments behind a click, which is the same kind of speed bump as I described before, but it's displayed as a pullout sidebar that allows the article and comments to scroll independently, so it keeps them connected, but it doesn't detract from either thing. It's great. Scott: You're right, but ultimately with all of this, there's still just an empty text box at the top of the comments, which makes it way too easy to skip a lot of this really great context modeling that they're doing, so good effort, but we're still calling them out on the one piece that we're saying is, we're missing context. Randy: My advice to them would be instead of just putting the FAQ link there, if you've never posted before, actually making you read the shorthand version of their FAQ, which is pretty short. After the break, our recommendations. Randy: There are plenty of problems to go around and lots of people are trying different things, but we're going to tell you what we think. We think the most important thing is to decide the context. Ask yourself the questions that are important. Why do you want comments at all? What do you want from the commenters? This is a behavioral question. What benefits do the commenters get? How do we want them to behave? Gather those questions clearly in your minds, and then talk about how you might be gathering this information. Once you know these things, you want to communicate them clearly. You want to be transparent about your answers to those questions. If it's about ads, is that why you want comments? What are you going to do to trade off to get that revenue? You want to communicate everything about that. Don't just present a white box. It has no context. Make it really, really obvious by putting context everywhere. Make knowing the context a speed bump. Some examples include making context a click through, as we talked about a couple different ways already. Put the text box after or to the side of other comments, and we added that to the side of after we saw the New York Times. That model is pretty cool. Reward and require reading other comments. I worked on a project called Discourse.org, which is a message board system, and before you could contribute, you actually had to read through threads. Scott: Part of communicating your context clearly is making sure that you've got the right technical bits for communicating the context. One of the challenges I found with working with traditional UX and UI approaches is that they tend to focus on what happens with one user behind the keyboard and not what's happening with hundreds of thousands of users in a social context, all taking that same action, and this plays out in terms of whether you want to have a community talking to each other or whether you want to have an audience talking to the publisher. If you want a community, set the context. Put the reply box on the bottom. Put the replies in chronological order. If you're looking at having the audience speak to the publisher, having the text box on top or having comments in reverse chronological order lends itself to talking to the article as opposed to other people. Labels can help. Consider changing the word "comment" to something else. Discuss, reply, contribute, and consider changing the label of your "like" buttons to "respect." There's something that backs this up. The Engaging News Project did a little research on simply changing "like" buttons to the word "respect," and they found that respondents who saw the respect button clicked on more comments in the comment section, and from an angle of participation, respondents seeing the "respect" button clicked on more comments from other political perspectives in comparison to either using "like" or even "recommend." Randy: That sounds great. Scott: Once you've set and communicated the context, it's important to shape it and reinforce it. Be willing to decide if comments are even needed on individual stories, much like the New York Times does, and this is a decision that can be based on your staffing capability, if the author is willing to or even able to respond in the comment section, if the topic is polarizing or if the top has recently had comments enabled. Also, set expectations for how you would like people to behave. Bassey Etim at the New York Times recommends you consistently tell your readers that they're part of a quality club, and this is the kind of quality that we're looking for, and this goes right back to our questions, "what benefit do the commenters get?" And, "how do we want them to behave?" Randy: You also want to model commenting behavior. Calling back to the New York Times policy of holding comment publication until a balance is available is a way to teach people what gets published. Make sure your content authors and staff are participating to your best standards. Scott: Don't forget, we're talking about people here, so directly engage with your commenters. Work with the folks who are writing the content, creating the content, to engage in the comments on their posts. This increases the quality of user contributions, and again, there's a little bit of experimentation from the Engaging News Project that found that when a reporter interacted in a comment section, the chances of an uncivil comment declined by 15 percent, and the commenters were 15 percent more likely to provide evidence over opinion when the reporters participated. Make sure your moderation staff is there supporting authors, so they can focus on meaningful engagement with the people commenting. Randy: It's really popular to talk about recognition, reward and celebration, and in appropriate measure, these are good practices. Just don't substitute recognition and reward for diligent moderation. Here are some recommendations that don't require special technology, just people. Dedicate a portion of your moderation strategy to finding good content. Reward the kind of comment quality you want. Reply to the person directly, and thank them or congratulate them for a particular quality. Of course, highlight and promote the best contributions, and do a retrospective of model commenters. Sometimes the technology you have just won't cut it, and you need to consider an alternative approach. One approach I've used with several clients, and has been implemented in the Telegent platform is the ability for users to be the frontline in identifying the worst content, and allowing them to flag it and then automatically hiding it, perhaps for later review, but I must warn you, we're calling this out as an alternative approach because if you do it wrong you can actually make things worse. If you do it right, the response time between a bad post it disappearing can drop to seconds, fundamentally improving the apparent quality of your content, and discouraging bad contributions from vandals. Scott: Sometimes you have to go back to your very first question, and ask yourself why you want comments, and realize that free text comments are not the right choice for your community or for feedback, and if you really want a community, consider a purpose-built community platform such as Discourse.org or even Slack. Now, the Washington Post is trying out an experiment where they have a small Slack community of Washington Post readers, mainly women, who are focusing initially on issues of pay gap, but it's turning into other discussions, which are becoming rich sources for the Washington Post to generate more stories or greater insight on this particular topic, or consider personal stories from your audience or your community that can give insight into a topic without a lot of back and forth that can be the source of conflict, and also consider that text is not your only tool. Submissions of images or videos, particularly if they are coming from members who are close to a particular topic or close to a particular location, where they can supplement or add flavor to the original topic are also ripe sources for content. That can give a sense of community without resorting to a blank text box. Randy: It was a challenge putting together this episode because it's difficult that there are so many different variants of text boxes for user feedback out there. There are so many techniques that people are using in an attempt to fashion quality out of that content. For example, we didn't talk much about moderation techniques here today. That's what people talk about a lot and we hope to have an episode about that in the very near future. If you have ideas for specific things we should discuss in this area, please give us feedback. You can reach us on Facebook at Social Media Clarity and on Twitter as @SMClarity. Scott: Thank you so much for listening. Randy: Yeah, see you next time. For links, transcripts and more episodes, go to SocialMediaClarity.net. Thanks for listening.