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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

#131

Post by blhack »

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…

You guys seriously did a good thing with nested and collapsable comments.

Reddit's comment structure remains by far the best on the internet. You should definitely be proud of that.

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

#132

Post by seanwilson »

richforrester wrote: post #46
dionidium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them . If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when…

That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.

> That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. > Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about.

I'm similar. You could think of articles as one giant comment from a single person. I'd rather read comments from several people as it's much easier to spot bias and get a variety of viewpoints.

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

#133

Post by s73ver_ »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #5
tvanantwerp wrote: post #3

As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.

> "I'm not sure how this helps." Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.

That's assuming there's really anyone left.

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

#134

Post by MarkPNeyer »

Pxtl wrote: post #31
creaghpatr wrote: post #4

Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story. Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for like…

It seems like a mix of Reddit google's network algorithm could work - don't just upvote/downvote the post, but lend the commenter's credibility. So upvotes from hordes of poo-flinging monkeys aren't weighted as heavily from upvotes from credible sources. Then the hack: this is a newspaper. They have no reason to be fair. Give community moderators super-credibility. So they can upvote people and not just give their co…

How about this:

separate buttons for "this is a good/bad argument" and "i agree/disagree with this"

then give more voice to people whose votes on these two axes are orthogonal.

this rewards policing bad arguments on your side, or finding good arguments on the other side.

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

#135

Post by 52-6F-62 »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #92
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…

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…

>>> Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons

The Globe and Mail (Canadian national newspaper and growing media company) has executed something similar.

They actually have some pretty innovative work going on (at least with respect to the rest of Canadian media), and maintain a lab for this express purpose.

example (scroll to the end of the article, comments are expandable):

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/recognizing-indigen...

http://globeedge.ca/about/

disclaimer: I work for a national media outfit in Canada that isn't the Globe

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

#136

Post by s73ver_ »

odiroot wrote: post #53
ZenoArrow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm not sure how this helps." Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.

One's healthy debate is another man's trolling. It's so obvious recently in US online media.

Ehh, not really.

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

#137

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

JacobJans wrote: post #32
Twirrim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate. The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I'm sceptical that removing the trolls is going to be sufficient to fix that.

> The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I am quite convinced that the nature of US political discourse is largely determined by the predominant media, and not by the individuals participating in the discourse. –– Cable news is incentivized to sensationalize any minor event, and to frame stories centered around conflict –– Social media rewards the most emotionally potent…

> I am quite convinced that the nature of US political discourse is largely determined by the predominant media

There are plenty of historical examples of partisan clashes like the USA’s "conservative versus liberal/progressive" one without a modern media. Just look at some of the appalling rhetoric between the two parties of the time in 19th-century America, or the clashes between the Blues and Greens in Constantinople.

Choosing a tribe to belong to and then adapting a harsh “us versus them” stance seems to be a human universal. Modern media has only capitalized on something that was already there.

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

#138

Post by codingdave »

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…

To be honest, it is because reddit still feels... frivolous? It doesn't have the toxicity that it did a couple years ago, nor the shallowness of its nothing-but-cat-pictures reputation. But neither is it a good platform for gaining customers or revenue. It is a place to gain traffic, but traffic without revenue is not the goal for most organizations. Now, if reddit traffic converted, I'd look deeper at it - but when traffic from reddit has conversion rates that are 25% that of the traffic from other social media? I just see no reason to engage any deeper.

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

#139

Post by chucksmash »

thinbeige wrote: post #18

After reading this article over and over I am still clueless. What is this all about? Feature-wise it doesn't sound better than a comment system from HN, Reddit or StackExchange. Besides, Mozilla is really lacking communicational skills. This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

> This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

This feels like an undeserved swipe to me. How many developers prepend their searches with "mdn" when they need info on browser APIs?

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

#140

Post by s73ver_ »

unescape wrote: post #84
wyattjoh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the features offered by Talk is the ability to ignore comments from a specific user [1]. It is designed just as you described it here. As mentioned in a previous comment, our server api's should be sufficient for you as a site administrator, to write a plugin that would allow users to do exactly what you described. The idea with Talk is that we hand control to the newsroom, so they can enable or create the plu…

This is a step in the right direction, but why hand control to the newsroom as opposed to the user?

It is the newsroom's site.
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