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Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#101

Post by gog »

jimnotgym wrote: post #44
gog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.

My point is that compared with Facebook SDK this project is tiny

I understand your point, I just hijacked your comment to voice my frustration about current trends.

I tried checking the actual size of the JS being loaded, but since the site for an article I opened made over 500 requests to load the page after I turned off add blockers I gave up. In their case, 300kB _is_ tiny.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#102

Post by jedberg »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #99
jedberg wrote: post #87

Reddit has had embeddable comment threads for over two years. It was a feature I actually worked on nine years ago, but the standards weren't there at the time to make it work with voting. I know I'm super biased, but I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing). Is it really just bad marketing it on Reddit's part that keeps…

I think there are a few disadvantages Reddit has here. The first that comes to mind is that website administrators, especially for large and politically-charged sites, might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture. "Just embed Reddit" sounds approximately like "just embed 4chan". While smaller sites are happy to give up some control for the sake of easily adding a major feature to their site, larger busin…

But that feels like a marketing fail.

You don't have to accepts reddit's culture to embed it's comments. You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don't like.

As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#103

Post by StevePerkins »

I started by reading the comments section here on HN. Couldn't find any solid information about what this Mozilla thing actually is.

So I broke down, and clicked the link to actually read the source article. Still couldn't find any meaningful information about the thing.

At this point I considered this a personal challenge. So I clicked the link at the bottom of the article, to ITS original source (http://coralproject.net/). Still couldn't find any solid non-marketingspeak information about the thing.

The Internet in 2017, folks. It's just turtles (comments) all the way down...

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#104

Post by gkya »

_rpd wrote: post #74
gkya wrote: post #45

I believe it's better to have discussion happen elsewhere, as in HN, Reddit, Usenet, &c., or in blogs and columns. This is cheaper for the publisher, and often those communities generate better discussion as they are comprised of more interested individuals with more genuine participation.

It isn't better for the publisher though. The longer that they can keep eyeballs at a site that they control, the more advertising they can sell. Commenting also allows the publishers to collect more demographic and psychographic data, which allows the publisher to charge advertisers more per view/clickthrough.

I really hope we will devise a better way to monetise online publishing, because ideally as a reader you'd want to keep your eyeballs at a site for the shortest amount of time possible.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#105

Post by hello_there »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #93
unescape wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end user should always be in control.

You say that, but have you considered the downsides? Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

> Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments

In my mind it would be the users, not the site owners that would enable the comments.

> People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to. Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into the system to make it easy for site owners to suggest a "default" moderation stream that the end-users can opt-in to.

In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#106

Post by monk_e_boy »

jedberg wrote: post #95
monk_e_boy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments. On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I gu…

> On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) You can just collapse it. I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating. But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.

> You can just collapse it.

Yeah, but I've usually swiped down and I don't know if its worth going back up to collapse it.

Default sorting by category would be nice, push the funnies down and pull the interesting ones up.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#107

Post by oh_sigh »

unescape wrote: post #77
wyattjoh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a site admin, not a user. If you see our server side plugin api [1] you can see ways to extend the graph schema, hook into existing mutations/queries completed by the system to apply any set of rules or moderation policies you want. It would be a neat implementation if as a user, you were given the ability to create your own filters, which would certainly be possible if implemented via a plugin! But don't expect t…

Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.

User-local moderation will be hamstrung by the lack of data. Sure, you can block certain users or reorder the results a little bit, but anything interesting would probably require the server shipping over huge amounts of data to a client which may never even do anything useful with it, which sites are unlikely to do.

Your best bet if you really want this feature is to implement it yourself server-side with just enough knobs to make it useful for your user-local case, and hope that other sites agree...

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#108

Post by thaumaturgy »

jedberg wrote: post #102
thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few disadvantages Reddit has here. The first that comes to mind is that website administrators, especially for large and politically-charged sites, might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture. "Just embed Reddit" sounds approximately like "just embed 4chan". While smaller sites are happy to give up some control for the sake of easily adding a major feature to their site, larger busin…

But that feels like a marketing fail. You don't have to accepts reddit's culture to embed it's comments. You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don't like. As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.

Subreddits don't exist in a vacuum though (and I say this as a big fan of some smaller subreddits with pretty awesome communities, like /r/vandwellers).

So even if we set aside the question of self-ownership of data vs. embedding, WaPo would look at this as an opportunity to either create their own culture, with their own weirdos and brilliant people, or to start with Reddit's and try to moderate their way towards the culture they want. Framed that way, I think Reddit's at a disadvantage.

If Slashdot had provided the option of just embedding their comment system onto Reddit pages, would Reddit ca. 2004 had done that instead of building their own?

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#109

Post by natrius »

jedberg wrote: post #102
thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few disadvantages Reddit has here. The first that comes to mind is that website administrators, especially for large and politically-charged sites, might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture. "Just embed Reddit" sounds approximately like "just embed 4chan". While smaller sites are happy to give up some control for the sake of easily adding a major feature to their site, larger busin…

But that feels like a marketing fail. You don't have to accepts reddit's culture to embed it's comments. You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don't like. As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.

It's a marketing fail. The commenting system needs a separate brand. If you were going to use Kinja or Chorus, you wouldn't assume you were dragging along the culture that its existing publishers have.

To an extent, "just use the subreddit's moderation" is a product fail, too. It needs to feel like a standalone product, not embedding another site that you might not completely understand.

Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

#110

Post by jedberg »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #108
jedberg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that feels like a marketing fail. You don't have to accepts reddit's culture to embed it's comments. You can have a subreddit that you control where you can moderate it and remove any content you don't like. As a site owner, you can have full control over the content if you want.

Subreddits don't exist in a vacuum though (and I say this as a big fan of some smaller subreddits with pretty awesome communities, like /r/vandwellers). So even if we set aside the question of self-ownership of data vs. embedding, WaPo would look at this as an opportunity to either create their own culture, with their own weirdos and brilliant people, or to start with Reddit's and try to moderate their way towards th…

> would Reddit ca. 2004 had done that instead of building their own?

Maybe, but probably not, largely because they could not fully control the content, like WaPo could do today.

In this day and age, commenting on the internet is pretty mature, and the best systems have years of data to feed their anti-spam algorithms.

Just like you can run your own mail server today, most people don't because it's a pain in the butt and it's a lot easier to take advantage of someone else's expertise.

It's the same with comments. It's a lot easier to let someone else do it.

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