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

I think the biggest thing forums and comment systems need to do is to ban tedious comments. On subjects that have been debated to death, it is really annoying to see all the comments for a new article just be repeated talking points that I have seen a million times before. I would suggest sites have a single mega-threads for debating hot topics. Then make a rule that for any new article, you can only write a comment that says something new or something specific about the article. Forbid writing generic arguments that have already been covered in the topic mega-thread.

I disagree, at a very basic level.

I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points.

As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations.

Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others.

I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.

Doesn't work if you have Ghostery turned on. The Washington Post has 15 trackers, and the comment thing has a cross-site scripting request.

This thing writes many messages to the browser console. The last line apparently prevents even displaying comments.

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Does Mozilla have a copy of the data, e.g. does it work like Disqus?

Let me distract you from the actual content of the article first (I am sorry), because I am a little frustrated (I usually don't, and always almost give credits to the awesome works done by Mozilla; disclaimer: used to be a Mozilla intern).

This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons.

The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for.

     It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first,
     ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, 
     and offer a range of audience reactions.

Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo).

I suggest next time the writer should:

* tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples

* the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments

* explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues

This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed.

----

Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do.

There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...