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

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.

As far as overcoming the cold start, I'm looking not so much for marketing ideas, but for product or feature enhancements that would be valuable to users immediately, without a huge number of other users.

Google search - useful for 1 user Facebook - theoretically useful for a handful of friends Twitter - useful for a slightly larger network

Words doesn't have friend/follower mechanisms -- it's just not the nature of the product. The intention is for users to interact with each other as they happen upon the same content. It's a dynamically-changing social graph. Unfortunately, this means the critical mass of users is definitely north of 100k, probably higher.

"Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open.

The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have installed WORDS?"

That's true for now, but any system that gains any amount of steam will inevitably pick up trolls, flamers, and generally idiotic people. You can't stop it from happening. And I don't know that anyone has ever found a good solution for it. In fact, the whole 'Top Comments' and up/down-voting thing most third-party comment widgets employ is literally to combat that problem, in the hopes that garbage falls to the bottom. It obviously doesn't work perfectly and I do still agree on the whole with your assertion of it being overall detrimental to good discussion.

Anyway, I'm guess I'm mostly curious if you have plans for the future of if/when the extension gets more popular and you do start finding discussions bogged down by trolls/spammers/etc and what ways you'd try and combat such things when you have 100k+ users or whatever.

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 News is evolving) that these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing. Just look at Digg.

So I definitely anticipate badness down the road, but feel the code foundation is there to deal with it as it comes.