I remember a time when commenting seemed like a weird idea. Why would someone write on your site instead of on their own site? And then dynamically generated pages and eventually social networks took over. I wonder if the internet would be a better place if everyone had their own websites and RSS/Atom feeds rather than the centralized services we have today.
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
#252Earlier 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…
It's kind of like how liberals are all urban poor or coastal elites.
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#253Can'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 find that NYT comments accurately reflect the heavily liberal bias of NYT's reporting. Although I don't think that's wrong, I think there's room for constructive debate about the articles -- perhaps hosted on a different site.
It's not like it'd be difficult for NYT to have whitelisted commentator accounts run by NYT editors to game their own comment/vote system and drive a false consensus for readers.
Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#254Reddit 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…
Far as I can tell, reddit functions best as a PR platform for businesses and corporations to communicate with their customers and fan-base.
It's not the sort of place I'd go to for serious conversations about anything.
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#255>New comments and reactions update instantaneously Killer feature - in that its going to kill the process. This is chat. Or close enough to chat that its going to be used as chat. Chat is terrible for comments. A flame war on chat escalates at the rate at which someone can hit enter. like the wake of a ship, the comment area will expand, and defeat moderation ability to clean it up. Flame wars are bad enough, flame w…
A conversation that a moderator can't clean up, does save you from biased and unfriendly moderators.
Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people.
(and who is the wrong sort...?)
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#256After 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.
It's about preventing wrongthink from being expressed on newspaper comment sections. Previously they just removed commenting from politically contentious stories, so I'm not sure why they're bothering with bringing it back.
No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.
Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.
Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".
Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#257Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#258Reddit 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 completely agree with this. I'm surprised reddit hasn't monetised the actual comment threads themselves and become a better disqus.
Re: Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
#259After 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.
I'd suggest that the article gives enough clues about why this Mozilla Talk solution is as beneficial to news sites as it is for their readers, but you have to consider who they're competing against. Do you think this has benefits for news sites over the solutions that players like Disqus and Facebook put out?
Also: maintaining direct relationships with some of their most loyal and valuable customers is key for news sites. Relinquishing that relationship to Fb, Disqus, Reddit, et al. can add friction to their business -- their ability to generate revenue from and Talk with their readers and community.
https://digiday.com/media/times-london-finds-commenters-valu...