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

respectify.org

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

#131

Post by amarant »

I like the general idea, but try playing devil's advocate with it! I went with the topic of trump and transgender rights and tried to formulate a pro-trump comment that would pass. It was not easy! I was downright civil by the end of it, describing a somewhat credible viewpoint that might lead someone to argue the "wrong" side. It seemed to find the opinion itself offensive, and how can you have a discussion if only one opinion is allowed?

Meanwhile my first, low effort comment arguing the "correct" opinion got published directly.

Conservatives are gonna scream that their views are being censored by this tool, and as it currently stands, I'd have to agree with them!

Edit to add: it did a lot better with non-political topics, and if I'm being honest, I've never ever seen a productive discussion online on a political topic. I'm not sure they can exist! So I would honestly want this tool for any forum I'm interested in viewing. I think. Pending further testing.

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

#132

Post by tacitusarc »

vintagedave wrote: post #105
Miraste wrote: post #68

It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments. However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this: "This is a…

Dave here -- I've tweaked a bunch of the internal rules during the HN discussion today, and your comment now passes (using the default settings.) As for equivocation, that should be strongly dialed down too. It annoyed me too, it was "mush", and did not help. I hope you'll find the current version a lot more human. I'm grateful for the feedback! Changing it based on all these comments has been intense over the past c…

Perhaps in keeping with age-old internet behaviors, it completely fails to recognize sarcasm.

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

#133

Post by freakynit »

These days, I just try to clone the core functionality of such sites as fast as I can. So, tried the same with this.

For this, I screenshotted the demo panel and asked chatgpt to generate relevant prompt. Here it is: https://sharetext.io/zy6ccjrm

Then, tested with demo question and a sample comment of mine as answer to it:

Input text: `Die Hard: Is It a Christmas Movie?`

Comment: `nop, its not actually`

===

And here's gemini flash 2.5 lite's response: https://sharetext.io/e7y7kyoe

Total cost: $0.00115

Per dollar: 860+ comments.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

vintagedave wrote: post #24
badc0ffee wrote: post #7

This thing seems to be more about enforcing a political PoV than about avoiding logical fallacies. All my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate. Using this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from havi…

Thankyou — I’d love to hear what you wrote, if you wouldn’t mind sharing? We’ve tried to aim it not to enforce any specific view — that’s a design goal — but focus on how it will feel to the other person. Also things like logical fallacies or other non-emotional flaws in comments (there’s a toxicity metric for example, or dogwhistles). An echo chamber is the exact opposite of what we want. There are too many already.…

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by goatlover »

coleworld45 wrote: post #48
ceejayoz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In other opinion polls they back up that he doesn't suck. Either way who cares? That's not what the app is supposed to be about if it's teaching/correcting you how to argue/debate better. You completely ignored the whole point of what I said, which is that even in a simple statement like "This person sucks" it added its own implicit connotations, namely that disliking someone who happens to be black is implicit racis…

Whose discourse do you think the app would label as more toxic, Trump's or Obama's?

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

#138

Post by BikiniPrince »

ddingus wrote: post #121

I basically hate this thing. Sorry team. I know you are trying and you believe in your effort. I know your intent is in the right place too. But, here's the thing: I value real conversation. It is the only conversation worth having. This is a step toward Disneyland type conversation. And we don't live in Disneyland! Profanity is a part of speech. There are ugly things, ideas and people in this world and that is what…

Such wrong think! I think any forum that adopts this would be worth studying for simply helping to create a score to rate how soulless a site is. Maybe they could make the inverse that would rewrite whole forums for happy thoughts. Rose tinted glasses client? The name needs work.

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

#139

Post by culi »

parpfish wrote: post #120
pibaker wrote: post #117

I think the premise of this tool is flawed. Bad faith actors are not people who write poorly or aggressively because they don't know how to express their beliefs like a polite, college educated white collar professional. They are people who have an agenda to push and are willing to use whatever rhetorical techniques allowed to achieve their goals. I would even go as far as saying that we are under more threat from ba…

agreed, this just seems like a tool to make people more effective at sea-lioning[0]. i'd prefer if the trolls in my life retained the superficial appearance of trolls to make them easier to spot. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Even worse is that tools like these can be used by bot armies

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

#140

Post by arjie »

devin wrote: post #113
arjie wrote: post #73

I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because th…

This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lob…

Haha, it's funny. I just disagree with you on about every point. I don't think that all the people I find noise are annoying to others. Some of them have 5000+ karma so others find them useful. And I don't want to leave the community so I'm not going to do that.

The community has some loose norms and I'm fine with that being the baseline. I don't want to police the community to strict norms. In fact, I would prefer if society were looser and we lived like in Too Like The Lightning. I can't have that there but I can here so I'm happy for it. The technology affords it.

As for blocking people who are more tolerant than me - that seems fine. Tolerance is not some unalloyed good. There are people who are tolerant of spam and all that and I don't really care for it. They're welcome to it and I'm welcome to mine.

The virtual world affords us a glorious opportunity: we don't have to worry about occupying the same space, and we don't have to worry about broadcast media like voice over air, we can silence and amplify as we see fit. To not use that is to take a skeuomorphic approach to a new parallel world, I think.

I like that I don't need everyone to agree with me that someone belongs or doesn't belong. I can simply edit my user-agent to behave correctly for me and others can do so likewise. Free agents controlling their own experience of the world without impinging on others is great!

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