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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

#221

Post by goatlover »

freedomben wrote: post #214
asddubs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly not even sure if civil political discourse is desirable in times of radical actions being taken by the government. I almost think that's worse than no political discourse. e: To clarify my point, e.g. you can't calmly disagree with whether or not it's okay to shoot people in streets, that diminishes it as if it was just a slight disagreement

What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody…

I understand your point which sounds reasonable for a lot of debate, but the counter argument would be that in some situations you are normalizing both sides, when one side is not acting in good faith and is on the wrong side of history. Examples being Southern slave holders, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, fossil fuel interests regarding climate change.

If one did live under Nazis German rule, would it have been wrong to scream, "The Nazis have control of our government and are executing innocent people in the streets!"? At that point you're trying to wake the public up to do something about it, not sit down and have a debate over Goebbels latest speech with some fence sitter who can't decide whether Hitler has gone too far.

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

#222

Post by bigbadfeline »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #169
BikiniPrince wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of tools always show the authors bias. It’s a good strategy to quickly move on when found.

What bias did you have in mind?

The author's bias - it's different for each specific author. We should not pretend that there are moderators without bias, each AI-driven moderation tool inherits the bias of its human author.

The LLMs that power all that are "aligned", that is, they're subjected to manipulation to install specific bias in them, and so on.

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

#224

Post by cookiengineer »

NickHodges0702 wrote: post #194
cookiengineer wrote: post #110

Take my upvote! That's a really novel approach to the misinformation crisis and I love the product idea. It would be pretty awesome with a plugin system so that you can integrate it with other websites, too. Wish you the best for it! PS: the website is _really_ slow on Android Firefox. I had to use my Desktop system to try it out.

We've had people tell us the site is slow. We are looking into it. It seems somewhat hit or miss..... And do you mean the commenting process, or just the site itself?

It seems as the "spotlight effect" causes most of the performance issues. The mousemove event seems to trigger a reflow when you hover some of the sections and/or scroll down. There's also a constantly running CSS animation that uses a lot of CPU time.

I have no idea why you're setting the style property of those elements every time you move the mouse, but I suppose that's what the Astro component you're using does.

Also as a hint: Never use subpixel values in CSS, they'll make everything slow. You could've used the JS "value | 0" or "value.toFixed(0)" trick to make it an integer and to prevent the floating precision from messing up the stylesheets. Some browsers (like Safari) will ignore values when they have more than 4 digits after the dot.

I'm writing this because you're setting the style property to something like this (copied out of the Inspector):

> radial-gradient(500px circle at 325.25px 188.38333129882812px, var(--spotlight-color, rgba(139, 92, 246, 0.18)), transparent 50%)

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

tacitusarc wrote: post #132
vintagedave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by asddubs »

goatlover wrote: post #221
freedomben wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point in discourse if not to change the other person's mind? Triggering the limbic system of the person you are talking to is the fastest way to ensure they won't be able to engage with their PFC and actually hear and consider what you're saying. If the point is just to feel better about how righteous and right you are, then by all means proceed with your approach. But if the point is to influence somebody…

I understand your point which sounds reasonable for a lot of debate, but the counter argument would be that in some situations you are normalizing both sides, when one side is not acting in good faith and is on the wrong side of history. Examples being Southern slave holders, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, fossil fuel interests regarding climate change. If one did live under Nazis German rule, would it have been wrong…

yes, this was my point, thank you for articulating it much better than me

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

#227

Post by breakitmakeit »

freedomben wrote: post #212
tacitusarc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As much as I love sarcasm that is done well, I do find that it translates very poorly to written text unless explicitly noted with /s or something like that. Even when annotated, it's extremely rare that a sarcastic comment actually furthers discussion or makes a meaningful point. If a person is using sarcasm, odds are pretty high that they aren't engaging substantively anyway. Given the difficulties with detection (…

[dead]

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

#228

Post by vintagedave »

npunt wrote: post #22

Love the effort here, been thinking about what this kind of tool might look like for a while. Something like this coupled with better prosocial affordances in the medium will do a lot to improve discourse online. I wrote up one a while back [1] but things like that are only a small part of a much bigger picture. The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify b…

The ownership of "I made a mistake" (you noted responsibility) is important. I feel strongly in the value of accountability, not in a blame or even necessarily consequences sense but in an integrity and character sense. The way you phrased it there is important. You noted this and other aspects, but that part struck me.

Also: a forgiveness button. I sometimes feel like society has forgotten forgiveness: we seek revenge and punishment more than redemption and growth. So your Forgive button: I love it.

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

#229

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

The filter is implicitly tuned on American culture. It's very easy to trigger the negativity one by merely pointing facts if you don't give opposite but unequal arguments and it deeply dislikes lightly oppositions which would perfectly acceptable in my own culture. It reminded me a bit of the Copilot email coach and it's unceasing invitation to add sentences devoid of meaning to "improve the tone" your email. The overall score is mostly opaque too.

I think there is a confusion between engaging and culturally palatable to the average American and of quality.

If I add to go through this, one, I would be deeply annoyed, two, I would just pass all my comments through another LLM if I really had to interact.

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

#230

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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…

It flagged me saying UBI by giving money to the rich was a form of negative transfers as "negativity" and said it was polarizing. I don't think it's ready for prime time.
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