Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

Hmm, I'm in 2 minds about this. The best online communities I've been in have been small & come across more human and the thought of "this is a person you're replying to" was innate. On larger forums a nudge towards that humanity might be good but I think this at times goes beyond a nudge and is more of an opinionated telling-off, which a lot of people aren't going to react so well to.

I wonder how this would be as a light touch plugin for the browser that would review a comment in context and possibly help test and refine the content.

Yes, cool, but how fucking dystopian this is.

I came to realise many people do not know how to lead an insightful discussion. They in fact might not even know how to make the point they are making in a way that other people can understand what they meant. In short: people suck at communicating.

Now a tool that gives people feedback before their comment is going out could be tremendously useful to the quality of the conversations people could have.

Very eloquently put :) I agree with your proposition that bad-faith actors often mask their true intentions behind polite or sophisticated formatting.

However, I think a tool like this could still have huge potential, but less for tone and more for structure.

E.g.: - Atomicity: Ensuring a comment presents a clear, self-contained core argument that can be debated in sub-comments, rather than a tautology or an accumulation of loosely connected arguments.

- Logical consistency: (Though whether an LLM can reliably parse logic is another question entirely!)

- Citations: Checking if the commenter provided credible sources for their claims.

- Civility of Discussion: instead of it becoming another mud battle

- Misinformation: Flagging the use of known, debunked conspiracy theories: Instead of modifying the original comment, it could simply append a contextual banner to the top with a Snopes link when a known false claim is made.

> Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?

Yes, but an awful lot of people aren’t interested in that.

I think a tool like this would be helpful for banning. LLMs are probably not reliable enough to make banning judgements themselves, but an LLM that pops up “Are you sure you want to post that? It seems to break these rules…” makes it very easy for human moderators to ban quickly and permanently. It provides incontrovertible evidence that the poster intended to break the rules but it still offers an escape hatch for when the LLM gets it wrong.