Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-post-reinventing-online-comments/

by mwheeler • 9 years ago

564 316 9 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

ArchReaper• 9 years ago

Why should anyone care? I don't see anything technically novel or interesting in this.

Edit: I'm not disparaging this, I'm asking a question...

jimnotgym2• 9 years ago

I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments.

Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance.
Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight

Both are an improvement over FB IMHO

wyattjoh7• 9 years ago

Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.

gog2• 9 years ago

I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.

the8472• 9 years ago

The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Here's another open-source & ad-free & track-free alternative, 150 kb lightweight, + some unique features & look.

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (I'm developing it, ... submitted yesterday, no one noticed)

ksenzee• 9 years ago

The really hard problems in this area aren't technical. They're social. Any attempt to make comments sections useful again is a welcome step.

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

I disagree, at a very basic level.

I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points.

As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations.

Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others.

I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.

s73ver_16• 9 years ago

You asked it in a pretty disparaging way, though. The way you phrased that, it seemed like you weren't asking in good faith, but were rather sarcastically saying it, with the underlying tone being "this is stupid."

tvanantwerp• 9 years ago

As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.

ZenoArrow7• 9 years ago

"I'm not sure how this helps."

Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.

Twirrim• 9 years ago

Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.

The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I'm sceptical that removing the trolls is going to be sufficient to fix that.

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

Not sure how you could ever hope to have productive debate on say an article about global warming. It's not a local topic, it's a difficult topic, there's millions of regular people and trolls around the world waiting to blab about something they don't have any clue about.

It's hard for me to imagine what a comment on a Washington Post article could add to the article or to anyone's knowledge. It's user involvement for the sake of user involvement. "Healthy debate" is maybe unobtainable at that scale.

HN can get pretty ignorant and off in the weeds (hey we're all guilty) fairly often, and that is despite being topical, relatively small, having relatively informed users and active moderators.

eighthnate2• 9 years ago

That's the problem. Everyone thinks everyone else is a troll.

odiroot2• 9 years ago

One's healthy debate is another man's trolling. It's so obvious recently in US online media.

SubiculumCode• 9 years ago

Not just trolls. I find that moderating voices have a hard time on comment sections. There is a tendency to go to one extreme or the other, where the most hardliners tend to drown others out.

s73ver_16• 9 years ago

That's assuming there's really anyone left.

intended3• 9 years ago

Whatever tool removes the troll will tomorrow remove the whistleblower.

People are running pell mell into this arms race and are stopping to imagine how their tools could be put to ill use.

The best option for moderation is trained man power.

eighthnate2• 9 years ago

The biggest problem is WaPo. And I'd say being a frequent read of WaPo isn't anything to be proud of either. In my estimation, WaPo is one of the most evil news institutions in the country and certainly the most powerful and the most involved in censoring/manipulating social media.

forapurpose• 9 years ago

the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters

I think that's the problem with comments on any website. The questions are 1) how to bring out the best from people, and 2) whether that is sufficient.

The same person will behave very differently in different contexts. They may be professional but constrained in a business meeting or around superiors; intellectual, curious, and challenging in a classroom; and obnoxious and loud in a bar. How do you make your comment section, and website in general, bring out the qualities you want in your comments? I'd guess that many websites are not so altruistic as to want intelligent comments more than provocative ones, to generate traffic. I recently read an interesting history of the NY Times Op-Ed section, which said that provocation, rather than wisdom, was the intent.

And even if you bring out the best in people, is that sufficient? I find almost all columnists and op-ed writers to be a waste of time; how much time do I have for uninformed, random people? (And I appreciate the irony of saying that in my comment!)

creaghpatr2• 9 years ago

Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story.

Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for likes of course.

Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.

dionidium3• 9 years ago

I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor).

I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it.

But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.

richforrester2• 9 years ago

That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments.

Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about.

As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.

Consultant32452• 9 years ago

I think reading the news without commentary is its own form of echo chamber. We will tend to pick a news source that slants to our liking and just experience that over and over again. Don't get me wrong, NYT is among the top newspapers I would want to use as a citation, but it definitely slants center-left with a hint of corporatism. So much so that after the election the NYT apologized for how it covered the election and rededicated itself to honest reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade...

...we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.

I've taken a different approach, which I don't think is superior to yours, just more enjoyable for me... I intentionally watch openly biased news aggregators. For left wing commentary I will watch The Young Turks or Jimmy Dore. For right wing commentary I like Ben Shapiro. The truth usually lies somewhere in between.

Pxtl• 9 years ago

It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources.

Then the hack: this is a newspaper. They have no reason to be fair. Give community moderators super-credibility. So they can upvote people and not just give their comment visibility, but by upvoting they incidentally give them credibility for future comments. And in turn, those commenters' upvotes are more powerful as well, thanks to the credibility lent by the community mods.

It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.

inetknght2• 9 years ago

What people want isn't necessarily what they need.

When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that.

So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.

spynxic• 9 years ago

Your solution gives merit to the individual for making the comment as opposed to the the content of comment itself. Similar to a democracy where the individual is a representative of quality content.

sampl• 9 years ago

It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.

I want to eat ice cream every day, but I also want to feel good and be healthy.

Let's give people a little credit--if they're aware of their biases and are given tools to overcome them, a lot of folks might make the right choice.

kiba• 9 years ago

It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.

Done right, it will allow diversity of opinion without turning the comment section into an unreadable ranting mess.

Do you really want to read a commentator who post the same screed about republicians or democrats on every story?

seanwilson3• 9 years ago

It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources.

Are there site that do that? I know hackernews limits your voting abilities until you get so much karma.

Sounds like some variation of the above ideas would work great. The vote from a random troll who doesn't understand the community's rules shouldn't count as much as other votes but I'm not sure how you would implement it in a way that wouldn't be abused.

MarkPNeyer2• 9 years ago

How about this:

separate buttons for "this is a good/bad argument" and "i agree/disagree with this"

then give more voice to people whose votes on these two axes are orthogonal.

this rewards policing bad arguments on your side, or finding good arguments on the other side.

brad02• 9 years ago

Thank you for expressing this. Our usual news providers are mostly biased.

What I'd love is to see a tool that allows you to see fact from opinion and the ability to see multiple perspectives.

In Australia there's a government run TV channel that have programs that attempt this. Good journalism is hard to find though.

As technologists we've built this system that optimises for page views. Surely we're capable of building a system that optimises for the truth instead.

davesque• 9 years ago

It's funny that you mention that "Socrates" guy. I see him a lot. I also see a lady named "Chistine McMorrow." They're both frequently at the top of the readers' picks section. They must check the Times often for breaking stories.

tmccrmck• 9 years ago

Yeah he's everywhere. I remember that NYT did a featurette on their top commenters and he's actually Chelsea Handler's brother.

___bee___• 9 years ago

There are other media organizations that decided to disable the comments' section. I remember reading something about it last week [1](https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on...). Instead of fighting Fake accounts, this company decided to allow comments only on social media platforms. Places where they cannot collect enough information to fight back "Fake commenters ".

We feel that rather than approaching the problem with a collection of algorithms and an army of moderators, our engineering and editorial resources are better utilised building new storytelling formats that resonate with our audience.

specialist• 9 years ago

I dimly recall one or two political blogs which grant daily rations. Something like 1 comment a day for noobs, more as you gain karma.

I have no idea how well this worked.

dogruck• 9 years ago

I find that NYT comments accurately reflect the heavily liberal bias of NYT's reporting. Although I don't think that's wrong, I think there's room for constructive debate about the articles -- perhaps hosted on a different site.

memeCrasher5• 9 years ago

It's not like it'd be difficult for NYT to have whitelisted commentator accounts run by NYT editors to game their own comment/vote system and drive a false consensus for readers.

Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.

ridgeguy• 9 years ago

I agree with the shortcomings of NYT comments you note. But they're at least an order of magnitude better than those at WaPo because they have humans curating them.

I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments.

It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.

bpp• 9 years ago

I worked on the blog team for Barack Obama's '08 campaign. The comments section developed a culture of posting a link to their personal fundraising page as the top comment, and other commenters would then donate to it.

Someone on the team got annoyed by this so for a while we would post the top comment before publishing such that they couldn't post their personal fundraising link. Then we ran some numbers and realized how much money it was costing the campaign (a lot).

Moral of the story: comment sections are weird.

brosirmandude• 9 years ago

That's really interesting. Did you guys ever test adding a fundraising link in the top comment you post vs a users top comment?

loopdoend• 9 years ago

Your poem writer, Larry Eisenberg, is a national treasure: http://forward.com/culture/books/332712/how-a-96-year-old-li...

I agree about Socrates. Overwrought.

Yhippa• 9 years ago

I would love to see a big site try to use Slashdot's old commenting system. Commenting felt like a privilege and so did moderation.

CodeCube• 9 years ago

Slashdot's commenting system was 100% an echo chamber ;)

jandrese4• 9 years ago

Ultimately it's very difficult to separate "that's a bad opinion, downvote", from "troll, downvote". People won't even agree on which is which, especially the trolls.

If you require someone to post really blatant stuff like "Hitler did nothing wrong" to be ejected from the discussion, then your discussion will be filled with ideological trolls who don't argue in good faith but insist that any moderation to their participation is censorship and echo chamber creation.

Their theory that Global Warming is a big conspiracy demands attention, and they have plenty of links to "studies" to back it up.

KGIII4• 9 years ago

Observationally, that is untrue. There is a wide display of varied opinions that are given positive moderation.

Of course, it takes some work to read through the trolls, but their moderation system is cushioned by the meta moderation impacting who gets mod points and who does not.

I have, for example, been given great scores for comments defending Microsoft and even systemd. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it.

Iv2• 9 years ago

Really? I thought that often the +5 informative or +5 insightful post may have well articulated ideas that run contrary to the majority opinion.

Also, I was often curious to read what was "beneath my threshold" and often clicked. Which played a big part in convincing me that slashdot's moderation was top notch was that I usually did not find anything of interest.

cookiecaper• 9 years ago

Many people make the naive mistake of assuming that this isn't what people want. The truth is that most people, and especially your average reader who doesn't spend their time on online forums as a matter of routine, are distressed by dissenting opinions on important topics, and will reject platforms that thrust this upon them.

For example, I've posted a number of "controversial" comments on HN that were purely technical and resulted in substantial discussion of the intricacies of the solutions discussed. Because these comments condemn the listless tech-hipsterdom that many devs rely upon to feel valuable (and that many important companies subtly leverage), people complained to the mods, seeking protection of the echo chamber. Apparently some of these people were important enough that HN reacted by throttling my account, initially by claiming my posts were too "tedious" and later revising the rationale to the facially spurious explanation of "engages in flame wars".

I haven't flamed anyone, but now I can't participate much in active discussion threads, hitting a something like a 3-hour throttle at something like 5 comments within an hour. Because my voice was drowning the chorus of echoes a little too much for comfort, and this displeased people whose opinion HN values.

This craving for echoes of validation is why reddit can't shed its negative image. reddit's concept of a unified identity with "default subreddits" severely limits the site's appeal, because anyone whom doesn't find the front page appealing is going to leave. Since the front page frequently contains acerbic content that is either critical of a large section of the public or presented in a manner that is conventionally considered crude, hostile, or defamatory, many leave not only uninterested but actively offended. How would your mom react if she loaded up reddit.com and looked around?

This is why the big players like Facebook and Twitter start each user with a blank feed and suggest only the most generic initial follows (usually late-night talk hosts, reality TV stars, and sports figures), and proceed to give each user total control over what they see. People demand echo chambers.

It surprises me to see jedberg still confused about this after all these years.

narrator• 9 years ago

Because it has been attacked and gamed by various troll armies over the years, the Slashdot comment system works about as well as any comment system out there. What's interesting about it is, if you really want to, you can see all the troll comments, but you have to specifically tweak all the comment knobs to unhide them.

KGIII4• 9 years ago

The moderation at Soylent News (uses a forked version of Slashcode) is pretty good, for such a small community.

badsectoracula• 9 years ago

I don't know about commenting, but reading the comments felt like a chore with all the sliders, buttons to load more comments that went to another page where you couldn't follow the discussion, some comments being partially loaded or whatever.

By far the worst UI in a comment system. And they still do the slider and "load all comments" bit, but at least the UI feels a bit better than some years ago.

jccalhoun• 9 years ago

agreed. I always liked the old slashdot system. I could decide how many points a "funny" or "interesting" post got. I would always give "funny" posts negative points because they were usually not at all funny.

jessriedel• 9 years ago

Are there any notable new techniques used here, whether social or technical?

_rpd2• 9 years ago

The open source angle could be interesting in the long term.

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

I got the impression that there are some improvements with moderation tools and banning / blocking people, that is, things that aren't directly visible to the reader.

Here's an alternative to Talk, with some new features / "techniques"?, directly visible to the reader: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments

E.g. makes large discussions simpler to read / navigate, by using arrows, which one can click, to jump to the parent post (if it's far away), and then Back to jump back down and continue reading. (I'm developing this.)

thinbeige• 9 years ago

After reading this article over and over I am still clueless.

What is this all about? Feature-wise it doesn't sound better than a comment system from HN, Reddit or StackExchange.

Besides, Mozilla is really lacking communicational skills. This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

carroccio• 9 years ago

4lch3m1st2• 9 years ago

Well, It's pretty much a commenting platform like Disqus, but with user privacy in mind, which seems a little strange to me, since it was conceived with (stopping) trolls and harrassment in mind. Point is, isn't identifying such individuals a way to explore their online data? I might be jumping to conclusions, but it is one of those topics that stink more whenever you mess with it.

AgentME3• 9 years ago

The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.

fortythirteen• 9 years ago

Right below the fold of the Talk site [0]

We’ve created a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments.

Seems like one of its primary functions is a censorship tool. "Disruptive" is a very subjective term.

[0] https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

ZenoArrow7• 9 years ago

I'd suggest that the article gives enough clues about why this Mozilla Talk solution is as beneficial to news sites as it is for their readers, but you have to consider who they're competing against. Do you think this has benefits for news sites over the solutions that players like Disqus and Facebook put out?

jonathankoren• 9 years ago

Yell Mozilla certainly thinks it's moderating tools are better.

smcnally• 9 years ago

Also: maintaining direct relationships with some of their most loyal and valuable customers is key for news sites. Relinquishing that relationship to Fb, Disqus, Reddit, et al. can add friction to their business -- their ability to generate revenue from and Talk with their readers and community.

https://digiday.com/media/times-london-finds-commenters-valu...

xienze2• 9 years ago

It's about preventing wrongthink from being expressed on newspaper comment sections. Previously they just removed commenting from politically contentious stories, so I'm not sure why they're bothering with bringing it back.

stephengillie• 9 years ago

It's about allowing "rightthink" comments to be expressed on politically contentious stories, without having to deal with the backlash of weeding out certain comments, or having to pay the comment weeders.

It's part of a larger narrative being sold to the 21st century investor, that AI are taking everyone's jobs, so buy your robots before someone enslaves you with theirs. (It's all still leading to the Butlerian Jihad of Dune.)

memeCrasher5• 9 years ago

No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.

Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.

Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".

Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.

chucksmash• 9 years ago

This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

This feels like an undeserved swipe to me. How many developers prepend their searches with "mdn" when they need info on browser APIs?

will4274• 9 years ago

Agreed. MDN is for the web what MSDN is for Windows programming - long, detailed, sometimes confusing, sometimes contradictory, and the number one resource you can find online. My three top resources for web documentation are: RFCs, MDN, and StackOverflow. I'm not even sure where I would find a list of all properties that a given DOM element support and what browser version support was added if not on MDN.

Kiro2• 9 years ago

I personally hate MDN. I actually prefer W3Schools. I want straight to the point examples.

yoran• 9 years ago

I do. I feel like Mozilla is the only organization that I can trust to provide neutral, unbiased documentation about all the standardized web APIs out there.

Plus with GitHub single sign-on it's actually very easy to contribute to or edit an article (assuming most web developers have a GitHub account). I was surprised when I found that out.

jacurtis• 9 years ago

MDN is so confusing when it comes to their documentation. Some pages are better than others, but some are even contradictory in what they say. Then there is the PHP documentation which is both amazing and horrible. Each page starts off with official documentation which is even worse than MDN, but then they created a community documentation on each page (for that method/function/class whatever) below the official ones which are voted up and down by randoms and actually works out to be some of the best documentation on the web. Maybe we should all just jump to community maintained documentation. If i ever am pushed to a PHP doc page, I scroll past the official documentation and read the top rated community post which almost always gives me what I need instantly.

Stackoverflow is my preferred source of course.

AgentME3• 9 years ago

It sounds like it's a ready-to-go free open-source project like Disqus that you can host yourself instead of trusting an outside company with your user data and relying on them to keep it up. I thought the "Here’s what makes Talk different" section with the bolded topic lines was pretty to-the-point.

codinghorror2• 9 years ago

Stack Exchange is not a commenting system. Source: I am one of the co-founders.

alanbernstein• 9 years ago

That seems like an unnecessary nitpick, considering Stack Exchange clearly includes a "comment" feature. Would you care to elaborate?

nippples• 9 years ago

This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

Of all things Mozilla may be doing wrong, the MDN docs on html / javascript is most definitely not one of it. They are by far the best available.

jmngomes• 9 years ago

Well, it's an embeddable comment system that doesn't track its users, unlike major "players" like Disqus or Facebook.

If you're struggling to grasp the importance of plug-ins for commentators, there's a good explanation of their relevance in the article.

tyteen4a032• 9 years ago

Any NRK-style pre-comment quizzes?

dredmorbius5• 9 years ago

NRK???

tyteen4a032• 9 years ago

Yes, they've launched a beta tool that forces people to take a quiz before they're allowed to comment to ensure they actually read the article: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

Animats• 9 years ago

Doesn't work if you have Ghostery turned on. The Washington Post has 15 trackers, and the comment thing has a cross-site scripting request.

This thing writes many messages to the browser console. The last line apparently prevents even displaying comments.

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EasyTiger_• 9 years ago

The top of HN for an article which says nothing much at all, really?

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Interestingly enough, I submitted something similar yesterday, about another open-source commenting system with different features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242630 — it got zero upvotes, although i think it's a bit interesting to read, for those interested in online comments. And the Mozilla post got > 500. Interesting how HN works, ... and the accumulation principle.

yeukhon• 9 years ago

Let me distract you from the actual content of the article first (I am sorry), because I am a little frustrated (I usually don't, and always almost give credits to the awesome works done by Mozilla; disclaimer: used to be a Mozilla intern).

This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons.

The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for.

     It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first,
     ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, 
     and offer a range of audience reactions.

Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo).

I suggest next time the writer should:

* tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples

* the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments

* explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues

This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed.

----

Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do.

There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...

redavni• 9 years ago

They did give examples. The Miami Herald, which uses Facebook comments. PBS Frontline which uses Discus, and Omnivision or something...which I couldn't find any comments. lol

perhaps showing examples

hello_there3• 9 years ago

Here's a slightly off-topic dream about online comments:

In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client. That would would provide transparency to the moderation process, ability to comment anywhere, and it would allow moderators to become effective spam-filters without giving them the power of censorship. Now, imagine if this system was built into the browser and it became the default commenting platform for all websites...

ZenoArrow7• 9 years ago

I like where you're going with this, but here's a question for you... Who controls the streams that are available on a website? Is it the end user or the website owner?

unescape22• 9 years ago

The end user should always be in control.

hello_there3• 9 years ago

I haven't thought out the details, but I really think that it should not be the website owner, or any other individual or organization, but rather some sort of decentralized community effort. For example, one could imagine a distributed log that every commenter and moderator appends to and that is replicated to different parts of the world -- each of which a client could subscribe to.

s73ver_16• 9 years ago

Why would I, as a site owner, want to cede control of the comments that are associated with my site? If, for example, a comment was just a string of racial slurs, there's no way in hell I would want that associated with my site, and I would want that deleted as soon as possible, regardless if you would want to see it.

Iv2• 9 years ago

What hello_there proposes is a comment system that is not associated with your website. It would akin to having an article of your website linked to a subreddit and people commenting on it.

aethertron• 9 years ago

Agreed, this is the correct framework for web comments.

I'd perhaps do most of my commenting in a private comment stream with 2 or 3 friends.

gkya2• 9 years ago

I believe it's better to have discussion happen elsewhere, as in HN, Reddit, Usenet, &c., or in blogs and columns. This is cheaper for the publisher, and often those communities generate better discussion as they are comprised of more interested individuals with more genuine participation.

_rpd2• 9 years ago

It isn't better for the publisher though. The longer that they can keep eyeballs at a site that they control, the more advertising they can sell. Commenting also allows the publishers to collect more demographic and psychographic data, which allows the publisher to charge advertisers more per view/clickthrough.

gkya2• 9 years ago

I really hope we will devise a better way to monetise online publishing, because ideally as a reader you'd want to keep your eyeballs at a site for the shortest amount of time possible.

unescape22• 9 years ago

Mozilla Talk could be useful if it let me apply my own moderation schema (filters, blocklists, etc). It looks like another totally centralized moderation tool:

https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

The only explanation of their approach is that they did "an enormous amount of research". This sounds about as convincing as someone claiming "Oh, I took a class in that."

wyattjoh7• 9 years ago

Believe it or not, you can! Check our the documentation https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ where you can use plugins to hook any any part of the commenting process.

unescape22• 9 years ago

Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case.

https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/

wyattjoh7• 9 years ago

Good site also to check out is our Guides [1]. We've collected research on user engagement into a format that should be easy for newsrooms to adopt to create better discussion.

[1] http://guides.coralproject.net

unescape22• 9 years ago

The feature I want is, as a site user, to apply my own set of filtering and moderation criteria.

E.g. "I don't want to see comments posted by user XYZ, or containing regexp W. Any comments by user ABC, or upvoted by ABC, or containing regexp D, go to the top. I trust the moderation of site trollblocker.com"

I don't see these kinds of ideas represented in the user engagement research.

peterjlee• 9 years ago

I think to have good comments, you need to build a good community. I sometimes see the same article shared across HN, Reddit and Facebook. Some sites have better comments than others..

mobilefriendly• 9 years ago

Mozilla -- the organization that fired its CEO because it disagreed with a political donation he made in California -- lacks credibility when it talks about building an "open society".

intopieces2• 9 years ago

"Brendan Eich was not fired. After his appointment, there was backlash from the Mozilla Community. He came under pressure to resign and he did. The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation; they did not "remove him because of his views." If that alone was the issue, they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place. Resignation (after only 11 days in the CEO role) became the only viable path forward when a sizable portion of the Mozilla Community refused to follow the person that the Board designated to lead the organization. That wide refusal and rejection fomented the issue, and Eich's decision to maintain his public stance on gay marriage -- as is his right -- created an impasse. It is incorrect to say that he was fired or removed; it is fair, though, to say that he was forced out."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...

xienze2• 9 years ago

Brendan Eich was not fired. ... He came under pressure to resign and he did.

So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. Let's not play games, he wasn't going to survive that episode.

The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation

I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes -- which would open a major can of worms (you didn't promote me because I donated to Trump). The whole episode reeked of someone digging around and raising a stink shortly after he made a highly visible move -- otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior?

toweringgoat• 9 years ago

Brendan himself says he resigned.

The company should've given more support given it was a ridiculous situation, but it's understandable why he'd resign given how much noise was being made.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

You don't need to go to the comments sections of Washington Post to find trolling. There is plenty in the articles, particularly the opinion section. Of course they are mostly trolling Donald Trump lately so some people don't mind.

schemathings• 9 years ago

I think it would be interesting to see a filter that generates something along the lines of Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", the most distinctive phrases in the text of books, but for articles, and then tracks how closely the comments line up for that particular article .. might be a good indicator for authority ?

Nelkins• 9 years ago

If anyone was looking for it, the source is here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk

jedberg5• 9 years ago

Reddit has had embeddable comment threads for over two years. It was a feature I actually worked on nine years ago, but the standards weren't there at the time to make it work with voting.

I know I'm super biased, but I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing).

Is it really just bad marketing it on Reddit's part that keeps others from using their embeddable comments? As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control. You may not get quite as much data as Mozilla's solution, but in exchange you get the benefit of Reddit's 12 years of spam data that train its filters.

I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.

monk_e_boy2• 9 years ago

The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments.

On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting)

Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I guess it puts a burden on the users to select the right 'up vote' .... do you have a funny button, an informative button, etc?

Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons (like, funny, shock, heart) so user apatite is there for this kind of classification.

jedberg5• 9 years ago

On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting)

You can just collapse it.

I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating. But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.

52-6F-625• 9 years ago

>> Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons

The Globe and Mail (Canadian national newspaper and growing media company) has executed something similar.

They actually have some pretty innovative work going on (at least with respect to the rest of Canadian media), and maintain a lab for this express purpose.

example (scroll to the end of the article, comments are expandable):

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/recognizing-indigen...

http://globeedge.ca/about/

disclaimer: I work for a national media outfit in Canada that isn't the Globe

dredmorbius5• 9 years ago

Reddit + RES and "collapse all child posts" is pretty awesome. All threads start off collapsed. You can individually expand them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeoPolitics has a very nice CSS in which the collapse toggle runs down the side of a thread. You can collapse, and set the level you want to collapse, from within the thread. It's genius, seriously.

The bar appears on mouse-over, running vertically.

See for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/6z27gx/rgeopol...

thaumaturgy3• 9 years ago

I think there are a few disadvantages Reddit has here. The first that comes to mind is that website administrators, especially for large and politically-charged sites, might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture. "Just embed Reddit" sounds approximately like "just embed 4chan".

While smaller sites are happy to give up some control for the sake of easily adding a major feature to their site, larger businesses are probably going to want to own their own content and self-host their code as much as possible. Reddit has a non-trivial set of dependencies (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Dependencies), so it's not very attractive as far as that goes.

My from-my-ass guess is that once Reddit ended up in the mainstream news a few times for some drama or another, it lost the opportunity to be taken seriously as an embeddable feature by other major sites.

jedberg5• 9 years ago

But that feels like a marketing fail.

You don't have to accepts reddit's culture to embed it's comments. You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don't like.

As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.

Ajedi32• 9 years ago

might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture

Which culture? Outside of the default subs, I'm not sure its really accurate to say that Reddit _has_ a singular culture, except perhaps in the same broad sense we might say that "the internet" has one.

Rather, each subreddit has its own unique culture, and there can be a _lot_ of variance between the cultures of different subreddits.

blhack2• 9 years ago

You guys seriously did a good thing with nested and collapsable comments.

Reddit's comment structure remains by far the best on the internet. You should definitely be proud of that.

dredmorbius5• 9 years ago

The comment tools in Scoop (the Kuro5hin CMS) were pretty slick. You could select flat, nested, or minimal, and the display would automatically cycle through those as the number of comments grew.

I'm trying to remember if it had the ability to filter comments below a threshold, though I'm thinking it did.

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

I still really like Slashdot's comment moderation, with multiple characteristics, and the ability to quickly collapse all ajudged low-value comments with a slider.

The ability to promote certain users comments (and vice versa) is good too; but you have to use that carefully.

Would love to have that with the content and users here.

codingdave• 9 years ago

To be honest, it is because reddit still feels... frivolous? It doesn't have the toxicity that it did a couple years ago, nor the shallowness of its nothing-but-cat-pictures reputation. But neither is it a good platform for gaining customers or revenue. It is a place to gain traffic, but traffic without revenue is not the goal for most organizations. Now, if reddit traffic converted, I'd look deeper at it - but when traffic from reddit has conversion rates that are 25% that of the traffic from other social media? I just see no reason to engage any deeper.

Retra• 9 years ago

I would expect that's because conversions are antithetical to high quality discussion (and thus site loyalty).

memeCrasher5• 9 years ago

Far as I can tell, reddit functions best as a PR platform for businesses and corporations to communicate with their customers and fan-base.

It's not the sort of place I'd go to for serious conversations about anything.

unescape22• 9 years ago

HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing

Isn't comment collapsing in HN the same as downvoting? I find this confusing - or maybe I just don't have enough karma for the actual downvote button.

jedberg5• 9 years ago

Collapsing only hides it for you.

With enough karma you get a downvote button.

sbierwagen• 9 years ago

Collapsing a thread is absolutely not the same as downvoting the parent. It's just a display toggle.

kidproquo• 9 years ago

Are you getting confused between the down arrow to down-vote and the [-] button to collapse? I am assuming there's a down arrow, since I don't have the privilege to down-vote :-)

reificator• 9 years ago

It'd better not be, I collapse good comments all the time when looking for something specific.

spookyuser• 9 years ago

I completely agree with this. I'm surprised reddit hasn't monetised the actual comment threads themselves and become a better disqus.

petepete• 9 years ago

I have been a Reddit user for more than ten years, and am a software developer, and this is the first time I've heard of embedding Reddit comments.

whipoodle• 9 years ago

Same here. Though I stopped being able to enjoy reddit long ago.

winry• 9 years ago

There's an extension that replace all Youtube comments with their respective reddit thread if available and it's great.

PeachPlum• 9 years ago

I'm not going to use a site where the CEO edits people's comments.

https://www.cnet.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-to-editing-user-...

Vinnl• 9 years ago

Doesn't that require a reddit account to comment? That sounds like a pretty large con to me...

empath75• 9 years ago

Because they don't want the alt right and Russian bots all over their site, I imagine.

Figs• 9 years ago

So... after reading your post, I went over to reddit to try to figure out how to embed comment threads for use as a discussion section on a site.

You know what? I can't find anything helpful on Reddit about how to do it.

I found how to embed reddit buttons easily enough (from the link on the bottom[1]). Checking the FAQ eventually led me to a page that says: "We’re working to support comment embeds shortly. We will update the publishers page and the FAQ when it’s out." [2]

Googled for it, and found an announcement blog[3] that made me realize "embed" exists under each comment. That only seems like a peculiar way of quoting a specific comment though -- and if there is some way of replying to comments through it or upvoting, I don't see how. I can't imagine anyone would want to have to comment on their own post in order to start a comment chain on their own site either.

Finally realized that "share" existed under each post as well. (Like 'embed', my brain just tunes that stuff out as junk -- seriously, why would I need help emailing a thread when I know how to copy and paste?) In addition to social media icons, there's a weird icon that seems to give you the option to embed a fancier looking link to a reddit thread. I don't see any comments attached to that in the preview though. This seems like the most likely place to find the functionality, but I'm not seeing it.

So, jedberg, I'm going to have to go with "no one knows how to do it" as the main reason that nobody embeds reddit comment threads for their own comment sections.

(Honestly though, I'd rather read reddit comments on reddit than have them embedded.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/buttons/

[2] https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/reddit-101/post-emb...

[3] https://redditblog.com/2015/03/23/announcing-embeddable-comm...

kyle-rb2• 9 years ago

I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing)

Really? I hate the tree style of comments. It's all well and good when you're reading a chain of replies, but then you run into a comment that's halfway back up the tree and have to make several attempts at collapsing comments to figure out which one is the sibling.

I much prefer a comment system like 4chan, where the post you're replying to is linked and previewable, as are posts replying to yours.

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

What do you mean with "halfway back up the tree"? You mean you read a comment C5, and then there are lots of replies to C5: C5-A1, C5-A2, C5-A3, ... but you want to find C5's sibling, C6?

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Since you like Reddit style comments, maybe you'd like this online commenting system too: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (click ^ to collapse)

(I'm developing it.) It's inspired by Reddit & HN, and has some additional features that makes it simpler to navigate large discussions, e.g. instantly jumping to the parent post (if it's far away) to refresh one's mind, and then jumping back. I made a video: (scroll down to "Jumping to the parent post, and back") https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... (everything not ported to embedded-iframes yet, though.)

Maybe Reddit aren't advertising their embedded comments, so no one knows about it? A while ago I searched for embedded comments alternatives, and I found some abandoned projects (that had gotten super many upvotes here at HN), + Isso, + Disqus, + Talk, but cannot remember having found anything about Reddit. I wonder why they build it, but then won't focus on marketing it. Maybe they haven't thought about any way to make money from their embedded comments, yet. Hmm.

always_good• 9 years ago

I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.

1. You can't leave comments after an amount of time has passed on Reddit. On even my blog, conversation will spark up 1+ years later. Why would a website want to inherit that limitation?

2. Users have to have a Reddit account. Some of the best conversations in my comments section are anonymous.

elihu• 9 years ago

How do users authenticate? Do they need to register for an account and give their email address to every website they want to comment on?

This seems like it would have been a good use-case for Persona, but that project was cancelled; is there any good replacement these days, besides the ubiquitous "sign in with your facebook account"?

StevePerkins• 9 years ago

I started by reading the comments section here on HN. Couldn't find any solid information about what this Mozilla thing actually is.

So I broke down, and clicked the link to actually read the source article. Still couldn't find any meaningful information about the thing.

At this point I considered this a personal challenge. So I clicked the link at the bottom of the article, to ITS original source (http://coralproject.net/). Still couldn't find any solid non-marketingspeak information about the thing.

The Internet in 2017, folks. It's just turtles (comments) all the way down...

dredmorbius5• 9 years ago

TFA actually does break down the deets on the technology reasonably clearly. I find your comment mischaracterises it significantly.

abiox• 9 years ago

can't tell if this is serious or not.

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Some people here at HN might be young people who are just getting interested in tech and internet stuff. The one you replied to might be a super bright young person, who just doesn't recognize all company names, just yet. ... Hmm, but when s/he says "this is year 2017" then it seems to me as if s/he has been around for a while, and likely would haven seen "Mozilla" before. :- )

B.t.w., Steve (the grandparent poster): Mozilla makes a super famous browser named Firefox. That's maybe the main reason "everyone" knows who they are.

snakeanus• 9 years ago

It would be nice if they would drop the account system and just let the users post their comments signed by their private key if they want to associate a comment with themselves or their persona. It would also be nice if they supported NNTP for commenting and reading comments.

Moreover I think that it would be great if it worked without any js (or if at least worked with addons like librejs) - knowing mozilla however they will probably not care about these.

hartator• 9 years ago

Shouldn't they be focusing on the browser?

There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.

pcr0• 9 years ago

Could you give some examples?

Particularly ones that are open-source and framework-agnostic.

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Here's one that innovates a bit, when it comes to browser side features, e.g. making large discussions simpler to navigate: (I'm developing it)

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments

(example feature: click the arrows to jump to the parent post and refresh your mind, then click "Back" to jump back down & continue reading. But haven't ported the Back button to iframes yet.) (submitted yesterday, got zero attention :-/ )

Maybe for the staff at the newspaper, moderation features are more cool innovations, because that's what they will be using the most?

tasty_freeze• 9 years ago

I've always been frustrated by the Washington Post comment system. Many articles have hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand comments. When I revisit an article, I can sort by newest/oldest/highest replies or something like that. I can go to my user profile, select "my comments" and view my recent comments (though not in the context of the article they came from). For the comments I left where someone replied to me, I have no way to reply to them, other than to return to the article and hit "show more comments" 100 times and locate my comment and the reply so I can reply in turn.

I hope the new system fixes that. It is otherwise about impossible to hold a conversation, so it reduces the incentive to leave a comment in the first place.

heroprotagonist• 9 years ago

I love Mozilla's efforts and I think this is an important area to improve.

But, as petty and selfish as it sounds, I wish it were built in my development language of choice. Then I could modify and use it myself, or contribute, without that irrational dirty feeling.

I know, node is very popular, and no disrespect to you if you use it. It's a personal failing. I just can't put my personal time into it any more. When I see a great project I get excited, and search out the source to see what it's written in. Then I often feel disappointed. Maybe I need to gain some flexibility.

remir3• 9 years ago

Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc...

Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can learn both from the language and reactions from people.

Just like in "real life", if someone is always talking out their ass, you learn to listen to them less and less because they don't have anything meaningful to say. It's just noise.

The comment system should do the same. It learns from multiple comments and their reactions to determine a reputation. Obviously, if your comments are always seen as "not-relevant" and "toxic", then your contribution is worth less than other "insightful" and "interesting" contributions, so past a certain threshold, you stop being able to comment.

colejohnson66• 9 years ago

Isn't that what Facebook does with their curated newsfeed? Doesn't that just make echo chambers?

remir3• 9 years ago

I'm not on Facebook so I don't know much about the newsfeed, but the goal is to eliminate trolling and toxicity, not debates.

colordrops• 9 years ago

Seems dangerous if the rules are not adjusted right. It could end up amplifying certain narratives and extinguishing others, and causing a divide between sets of people as they move to communities where they don't get blocked. Furthermore an AI would be more opaque than a simple voting system, and could easily be manipulated for unethical purposes. Lastly, this sort of system would heavily bias towards the mainstream viewpoint, which is a good heuristic, but the mainstream isn't always right about everything. There is a place for minority voices. I would posit that the extreme political division we now see in the US is a result of more powerful systems for influencing online discourse.

remir3• 9 years ago

I get where you're coming from. I guess it depends on how the system is made, but there's a risk, absolutely.

jancsika• 9 years ago

Can a client make a request to fetch all the things from a specific comment thread?

Example: I go to a mailing list for pick-your-favorite-old-grumpy free software project. I click through the ancient, craggy mailman web interface. Hey, there's a button that says, "download the full archive (x MB)." Now I have all the things.

Real World Use Case: The Guardian once deleted some comments on a Greenwald op-ed because of insert-old-craggy-British-law-here. Archive access would have empowered users to periodically archive the comments so that they have control over content they want to read, while the publisher is still able to remove comments from flow and archive when forced to censor.

davidy123• 9 years ago

Comments just aren't a very good approach if the point isn't to just pass time. Annotations are much better. Systems like hypotheth.is are slowly becoming more pervasive.

freeflight2• 9 years ago

Wouldn't the easiest approach to this whole "issue" be to give every user access to individualized blacklisting tools? Just put a "This comment makes me angry" button next to each one and people who feel offended can click it to hide said comment and check a box to hide any future comments from that commenter.

There, problem solved with no need for fancy machine learning algorithms or other institutions to play big brother for the internet commenting culture. Voting based systems generally seem to do a pretty decent job most of the time, especially when the community can be segregated by topics/interests like on Reddit.

dmckeon• 9 years ago

Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable, but did not scale in the face of "endless September" (1993).

If a site allows a near-infinite number of anon or sock-puppet accounts, individual or even distributed blacklisting amounts to trying to empty the ocean with teaspoons.

If posts or comments were strongly associated with an individual identity, then a distributed scoring system could help produce a more useful set of content, but would be likely to make an echo chamber. But, the scoring system could be gamed by persistent vandals.

Also, anonymous or persistent pseudonymous posters may contribute valuable content - how can one allow for that content but defend against abuse?

freeflight2• 9 years ago

There's always room for improvement, like making blacklists shareable, AdblockPlus does this with their filter lists, afaik Twitter has, or at least used to have, a feature like that.

Even simple measures, like preventing multiple accounts being registered to the same email address, can already greatly cut down on the trolling potential of most garden variety trolls.

Nothing about this "problem" is new except for the perceived scale due to Internet-access having become widely available and more people being exposed to Internet culture, but the problem itself is pretty much as old as human interaction in general: How to deal with people whose views seem to be utterly incompatible, even offensive, to mine?

Germany has been down this road for quite a bit longer, the only result so far: Comment culture is dying out, in many places it doesn't even grow in the first place anymore because there's isn't even the chance for it, as more and more site operators decide not to implement comment options at all because it puts them in muddy waters, legally speaking.

Censorship is never an option, even less so when it's outsourced to some unaccountable entity, even worse when it's some machine learning algorithm where nobody understands how it actually works but people rather like the outputs they got from their inputs, it's basically a censorship blackbox.

Honestly, I don't see the need for any of this and it's quite scary how this kind of authoritarianism has become so popular in past years. We used to look at China as a negative example, something we would never want to emulate, this has changed and now increasingly politicians are openly voicing their opinion that a system like China's might actually be "good".

Maybe it's just me having gotten a thick skin for this kind of stuff, after 20 years on the net, but I neither see the need for any of this nor the "good" this is supposed to do, all I see is lot's of potential for making the Internet a worse place for open discussion, especially across ideological lines. All I see is yet another move towards more echo-chambers and less diversity of opinions. Which is important regardless how shitty some of those opinions might be, they can always serve as a bad and educational example, censoring them out of sight like they don't even exist, does none of that.

tambourine_man• 9 years ago

Off topic, but this is the first time I see two slightly different sandwich menus on the same page

intended3• 9 years ago

New comments and reactions update instantaneously

Killer feature - in that its going to kill the process.

This is chat. Or close enough to chat that its going to be used as chat.

Chat is terrible for comments. A flame war on chat escalates at the rate at which someone can hit enter.

like the wake of a ship, the comment area will expand, and defeat moderation ability to clean it up.

Flame wars are bad enough, flame wars on chat which persist like comments are a bad idea.

Make it update in non-real time.

memeCrasher5• 9 years ago

A conversation that a moderator can't clean up, does save you from biased and unfriendly moderators.

Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people.

(and who is the wrong sort...?)

algesten• 9 years ago

Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight

This makes me feel old. Is 300kb really considered small these days?

explodingcamera• 9 years ago

Not really, 300kb for a pwa seems sane but for just for a comment system? That seems incredible bloated.

pvdebbe• 9 years ago

Not just 300 kB of downloadable code, it's 300 kB of executable code. That's huge

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

I'm developing an embedded comments system, it's 150 kb on page load. https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments

Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).

deafcalculus• 9 years ago

I remember a time when commenting seemed like a weird idea. Why would someone write on your site instead of on their own site? And then dynamically generated pages and eventually social networks took over. I wonder if the internet would be a better place if everyone had their own websites and RSS/Atom feeds rather than the centralized services we have today.

camus2• 9 years ago

Back in the days I thought that what made the Huffington Post popular, politics aside, was its gamified commenting system which I though was excellent. Since then of course, it degraded UX wise until it was replaced by Facebook comments(horrible UX) and something completely useless today. At the end of the day what makes the difference between a good community and a bad one is tight moderation without censorship and focus.

lewisl9029• 9 years ago

You own your data.

I was super excited when I came across that first sentence in bold (italics here) on one of the points under "Here’s what makes Talk different".

Wow, I thought to myself, does this mark yet another step in the revolution of the re-decentralization of the internet? Is Talk a product sharing the same ideological foundations as awesome projects like Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/), Matrix (https://matrix.org/), remoteStorage (https://remotestorage.io/), Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/), and many others that I'm doing a grave injustice to by not mentioning here (please do remind/enlighten me in the comments if you're aware of others!), that strive to give back to users the ability to control their own data to whatever degree technically feasible: where it lives, who has access to which pieces of it, how they may access/manipulate it, under what circumstances, and for how long, etc, etc.

The concept of apps built on user-provided and user-controlled data-sources, envisioned by projects like these, has always been immensely appealing to me. If users truly controlled their data, and only granted apps access to the data they need to function, instead of depending on each individual app to host user data in their own locked-off silos, then switching to a different app would be a simple matter of granting another app access to the same pieces of data! Lock-in would completely stop being an issue!

Imagine that! We could have a healthy and highly competitive app ecosystem where users choose apps by their own merit instead of by the size of their moat built on nothing but network effects. Newcomers could unseat incumbents by simply providing a better product that users want to use! Like a true free-market meritocracy!

And then I read on:

Unlike the most popular systems, every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. This is great for journalistic integrity, good for privacy, and important for the internet.

And I realized, No, they were not talking to me, a lowly user hoping against hope to one day live in a world where we can truly own and control access to data that rightfully belongs to us. Rather, they were talking to platform owners like Washington Post, loudly proclaiming that with Talk, that they get to own my comments, my profile, my data, and that somehow it is "good for privacy, and important for the internet".

Sadly, this is just yet another data point in the unrelenting trend in silo-ization of user data, and stopping that trend is becoming more and more of a distant dream because both newcomers and incumbents today realize the massive competitive advantage lock-in and network effects afford them. Incumbents will never give up their moat and allow the possibility of interop without a fight, and newcomers all end up racing to build up their own walled-off data silos because they have ambitions to become an incumbent enjoying a moat of their own one day. Even products that are built on top of open protocols and allow non-trivial interop tend to eventually go down the path of embrace, extend, extinguish, once they reach any significant scale.

Regardless, for this particular instance, my rational mind realizes that platform owners are the group that Mozilla must appease and market to, in order for Talk to stand any chance of success, and that Talk as a product is definitely the lesser of many evils in the same space, and that fundamental change usually manifests itself as a series of small, incremental improvements, much like in this case where an open-source, privacy-respecting product manages to defeat numerous much more deeply pocketed and deeply entrenched rivals to secure a foothold in a competitive market. But as a longtime Mozilla Fanboy, however irrational it may be, I can't help but feel a little bit betrayed when even they are forced to send messages like this in a painful compromise that confirms my lingering suspicion that we're still a long way off from winning the battle for a user-centric internet.

foxhop• 9 years ago

Comment systems are tricky, everyone has an opinion on how they should work and how they should be moderated. Its very similar to forums and community building.

I was so opinionated about my comment system I decided to build my own called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)

Its embed-able like discus but I want it to feel more like hacker news or reddit (deeply nested threads). My system is still a work in progress but I'm actively dog fooding it on my own websites and so far its working well.

One major take away I've learned from this thread is that people really like to use the collapse feature here on hacker news and reddit to narrow in on the conversations they care about. I actually never used this feature on either site (I didn't even know what that [-] was on hacker news until today)

binthere• 9 years ago

It’s fast. Talk is small — about 300kb

Hopefully that's not the client size

KajMagnus10• 9 years ago

Here's one that's 150 kb Javascript on page load, instead of 300 kb: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments — and innovates a bit when it comes to features for the readers. (I'm developing it.) Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).

manbearpigg• 9 years ago

It's an echo chamber propaganda tool. It lets the content creator choose which comments are seen.

Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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