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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

#201

Post by fragmede »

laretluval wrote: post #114
inetknght wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people want isn't necessarily what they need . When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that . So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.

Do internet comment sections satisfy any need?

Internet commenting, wherein people use modern technology for group communication, facilitates the top two, possibly the top three levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The base layer accounts for physiological needs like food and water, but past that base layer of physiological necessity, human beings need interaction with other human beings in order not to be a robot. Things like friendship and familial connections, which are are facilitated by social media such as Facebook.

And, really, what is Facebook but Internet commenting on baby and cat photos of people you are related to in some form (by choice or by birth).

If we accept that humans are social creatures, and social media is able to connect people, then it is possible to say Internet comment sections are able to fulfill some needs that people have. Displaced football fans working far from home may not be able to find a local group that also supports their home team in a far away place, but there's a digital clubhouse for the displaced fan's home team somewhere on the Internet.

This may not satisfy a need like food or water, but people organized into geographically-based, sometimes tightly-knit communities before the Internet. That modern technology allows us to organize into loose-knit communities through the use of "Internet comment sections" is to realize J.C.R. Licklider's dream of an inter-networked computer system.

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

#202

Post by ehsankia »

sbierwagen wrote: post #185
unescape wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing Isn't comment collapsing in HN the same as downvoting? I find this confusing - or maybe I just don't have enough karma for the actual downvote button.

Collapsing a thread is absolutely not the same as downvoting the parent. It's just a display toggle.

On the topic of thread collapsing on HN, I honestly can't believe they still haven't fixed the performance issue. It's not noticeable on small threads, but go to one with thousands of comments (like the iPhone X one), and try collapsing. I've seen threads with noticable 1-2 seconds delay for every collapse.

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

#203

Post by 4lch3m1st »

AgentME wrote: post #153
4lch3m1st wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, It's pretty much a commenting platform like Disqus, but with user privacy in mind, which seems a little strange to me, since it was conceived with (stopping) trolls and harrassment in mind. Point is, isn't identifying such individuals a way to explore their online data? I might be jumping to conclusions, but it is one of those topics that stink more whenever you mess with it.

The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the shadiness of the issue. Too bad.

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

#204

Post by TwelveNights »

unescape wrote: post #166
s73ver_ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something doesn't advance your pet cause doesn't mean it's not good. The decentralized web does nothing to advance universal health care, so why is it a good thing?

I'm just going to point out that Mozilla and the NSF recently offered $2M for ideas to decentralize the web. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-dec...

They never said that Talk was aimed at moving that goal further along, however. They're trying to use it instead to allow better curation tools to make comments manageable.

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

#205

Post by dmckeon »

freeflight wrote: post #186

Wouldn't the easiest approach to this whole "issue" be to give every user access to individualized blacklisting tools? Just put a "This comment makes me angry" button next to each one and people who feel offended can click it to hide said comment and check a box to hide any future comments from that commenter. There, problem solved with no need for fancy machine learning algorithms or other institutions to play big b…

Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable, but did not scale in the face of "endless September" (1993).

If a site allows a near-infinite number of anon or sock-puppet accounts, individual or even distributed blacklisting amounts to trying to empty the ocean with teaspoons.

If posts or comments were strongly associated with an individual identity, then a distributed scoring system could help produce a more useful set of content, but would be likely to make an echo chamber. But, the scoring system could be gamed by persistent vandals.

Also, anonymous or persistent pseudonymous posters may contribute valuable content - how can one allow for that content but defend against abuse?

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

#206

Post by AgentME »

4lch3m1st wrote: post #203
AgentME wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the shadiness of the issue. Too bad.

I'm not sure what the privacy issue is here. That moderators could connect a user's posts together? That's true of all popular platforms (where the user isn't using Tor anyway).

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

#207

Post by TeMPOraL »

inetknght wrote: post #111
Pxtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What people want isn't necessarily what they need . When people's needs are satisfied, they want more of that . So let's satisfy their needs instead. Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.

> Echo chambers are ultimately self-defeating as they bring on more divisiveness and intolerance.

But they are excellent at driving activity => pageviews. Which is where the money for newspapers comes from. Nothing to be said beyond that - the induction of outrage and divisiveness is a desired feature, not a bug, from the POV of media companies.

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

#208

Post by ridgeguy »

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…

I agree with the shortcomings of NYT comments you note. But they're at least an order of magnitude better than those at WaPo because they have humans curating them.

I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments.

It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.

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

#209

Post by alanbernstein »

codinghorror wrote: post #188
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.

Stack Exchange is not a commenting system. Source: I am one of the co-founders.

That seems like an unnecessary nitpick, considering Stack Exchange clearly includes a "comment" feature. Would you care to elaborate?

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

#210

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

danjayh wrote: post #198
Splatter wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps the right wins local, state, and federal elections because a large portion of the country doesn't like the solutions the left proposes.

I find the typical stereotypes about conservative voters to be kind of amusing. I'm fairly young, and I have an BSCE, MSEE, and a very decent paying job doing tech work. I'm a libertarian and I vote conservative because they at least usually claim to want to reduce the size and power of the federal government. Based on what I've seen in the media about people who tend conservative, I don't exist ... that or I'm actua…

Just devils advocate here, but could it be you're the minority of that demographic?

I'm libertarian, and vote all over the map, but likely lean more liberal. I know plenty of well educated, employed conservatives. But, a bulk of voters in Trump's corner are not you. It's like going to a Free Speech rally. Some people are likely there just for speech, but if Neo-Nazis show up, and cause a ruckus, they're the face of the movement. Same goes for Antifa and taking over other peaceful protests. So, I think the disenfranchised, middle of the country, uneducated, unemployed person is simply the face of the cause. Unfortunately, some people only see things at face value.

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