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Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

words4chrome.com

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Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#41

Post by notduncansmith »

greggman wrote: post #20

Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes? Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink

As someone who's received a nontrivial amount of downvotes in this community and others, I can confidently say that I appreciate them as a mechanism. Almost every downvote that I've received was for a legitimate reason - a few were just out of disagreement, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently downvotes things that don't conform to X (in HN's case, X usually being "well-reasoned commentary relevant to the thread"), people tend to shy away from those things. One could consider the utter lack of response gifs on HN "groupthink", in the sense that everyone knows the community is unfriendly to them so they don't post them (even when they're funny).

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#42

Post by fivedogit »

visarga wrote: post #35
fivedogit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky. Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere . You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker New…

> these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing I was thinking about it - why not add a view mode displaying only the comments of the early adopters? On reddit, for example, it would be interesting to see only comments of users with accounts 5+ years old.

I thought about this idea -- only displaying comments from users with high ratings or whatever -- but decided it would break conversations. Users would see comments, but not some responses or worse, some responses without the original comment, etc.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#43

Post by fivedogit »

greggman wrote: post #20

Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes? Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink

For my money, downvoting is entirely necessary. You know how a comment like "R u srs? Luv this vid!" is normal on Youtube? I want users to downvote the living hell out of that comment. I want the WORDS community to hold each other to a much higher standard.

Downvotes seem like the only way to actually maintain order.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#44

Post by fivedogit »

lajlev wrote: post #27

@fiveogit: Love the idea. Need to be prettified though. How would I see comments on mobile devices or non chrome browsers? Can I inject with JS into my website? That was some of my first thoughts :)

At one point during development, I had the extension actively replacing the Facebook comments on TechCrunch like so for visual stimulation purposes:

http://www.words4chrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/tc_zi...

Could I create a box that a site owner could embed into their page. Absolutely. But why would a site owner do that? WORDS is built for users, not site owners and would lack top-down moderation controls, etc that LiveFyre and Disqus provide.

That's why I've held back on building an injectable widget. it's dissonant with what WORDS is supposed to be.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#45

Post by fivedogit »

e12e wrote: post #30
fivedogit wrote: post #2

This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle. Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked, I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg: Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are stored on the server (and that's a RES…

You're exactly right. The backend source code is here: https://github.com/fivedogit/words-backend but there's no way to know for sure that it's the same code running on the backend other than my word.

Seems like this might be a good business for someone to start, matching a github repository to a running server; third party verification that said code is actually what's running on a server.

If it helps, I made an "about me" page, so I'm not quite a total stranger: http://www.words4chrome.com/team/

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#46

Post by fivedogit »

evmar wrote: post #28

From a skim of the source, this extension appears to ship every URL you visit to a third party. (It does so to fetch the comment count on the current URL.)

The backend code is open source and available here:

https://github.com/fivedogit/words-backend

The URL is required to retrieve the proper comment thread for that page, but is never associated with the current user.

Look for the line "else if (method.equals("getThread"))" in co.ords.w.Endpoint.java and you can follow the url variable from there.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#47

Post by fivedogit »

dingaling wrote: post #29
fivedogit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. See my dissertation about it here: http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-a...

That doesn't explain why it doesn't have a native log-in, though ( even though the preamble says it will ), or support a general protocol such as OpenID.

Here you go.

http://www.words4chrome.com/design-choices/#nonative

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#48

Post by [deleted] »

notduncansmith wrote: post #41
greggman wrote: post #20

Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes? Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink

As someone who's received a nontrivial amount of downvotes in this community and others, I can confidently say that I appreciate them as a mechanism. Almost every downvote that I've received was for a legitimate reason - a few were just out of disagreement, but that's the exception rather than the rule. In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently downvotes things that don't conform to X…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#49

Post by underrated »

notduncansmith wrote: post #41
greggman wrote: post #20

Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes? Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink

As someone who's received a nontrivial amount of downvotes in this community and others, I can confidently say that I appreciate them as a mechanism. Almost every downvote that I've received was for a legitimate reason - a few were just out of disagreement, but that's the exception rather than the rule. In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently downvotes things that don't conform to X…

A well-organized hate group can use downvotes to silence reasonable discourse and trumpet their ideology, so it looks like the popular opinion when it's nothing of the sort.

You see this happen on Reddit. A hate group called SRS does it. They've even been leaking onto Hacker News recently, with some of the same lines they regularly use.

Re: Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments

#50

Post by underrated »

fivedogit wrote: post #43
greggman wrote: post #20

Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes? Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink

For my money, downvoting is entirely necessary. You know how a comment like "R u srs? Luv this vid!" is normal on Youtube? I want users to downvote the living hell out of that comment. I want the WORDS community to hold each other to a much higher standard. Downvotes seem like the only way to actually maintain order.

There's nothing disorderly or actively harmful about that comment. It just adds little value compared to the search space of all possible comments. So it seems semantically more sound to simply withhold upvotes from it, rather than punishing it with downvotes.
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