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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

#31

Post by Pxtl »

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 comment visibility, but by upvoting they incidentally give them credibility for future comments. And in turn, those commenters' upvotes are more powerful as well, thanks to the credibility lent by the community mods.

It creates an echo-chamber, of course... but ultimately, that's what people want.

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

#32

Post by JacobJans »

Twirrim wrote: post #7
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.

> 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 messages, consistently pushing aside calm discourse in favor of messages that hit emotional hot-buttons

–– Newspapers, magazines, etc have adapted their style of writing in order to gain more traction on social media, furthering the cycle of increasingly strong emotional engagement. Sure, newspapers are also often quite dispassionate, but those stories rarely gain much attention in the political realm.

–– Social media also increasingly creates identity bubbles, where like minded individuals can support one another's beliefs. This grouping of people has lead to identity being the primary consideration; facts are secondary.

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

#33

Post by jandrese »

gog wrote: post #20
jimnotgym wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments. > Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. > Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight Both are an improvement over FB IMHO

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

Woe be to the person still on dialup modem. 300kb on a 56k modem is around a full minute download if memory serves. Of course said modem user is probably already drowning in javascript frameworks anyway.

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

#34

Post by rusk »

Twirrim wrote: post #7
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.

> 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.

I wonder is this a line of thinking borne of weariness? The dreadful nature of political discourse everywhere is surely something that should be up for improvement. I'd like to think technology could be used to improve this, even though lately it seems to have been confusing things. I'd be given to thinking that once the public at large become more familiar with, and respectful of the power of social media, it will be the means through which this discourse is improved. I think we already see this in many spheres, just that the ugliness usually tends to undermine effectiveness. The trolls need to go, and they will in time but it's as much a social issue as a technological one. I think what we're seeing here is a "long 1997" similar to the "long September" phenomenon being played out as whole new massive chunks of the population join the online world.

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

#35

Post by ZenoArrow »

sbov wrote: post #27
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.

It would, but then there would be no one left to comment.

Except that by doing so it leaves a vacuum for more reasonable commenters to fill.

It's not a culture change that happens overnight, but the potential long term benefits make it worthwhile.

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

#36

Post by carroccio »

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.

+1

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

#37

Post by jandrese »

r1ch wrote: post #25
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.

I hope that 300KB refers to the backend code size, since one of the selling points is organizations run their own version. There's no way you need 300 KB of frontend code to render HTML from a database.

Import a JS Framework or two and you'll easily blow that 300kB.

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

#38

Post by wyattjoh »

walterbell wrote: post #28
wyattjoh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.

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

Not at all. The software Talk [1] it installed on newsroom's infrastructure. We only provide the software the makes this all work.

[1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

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

#39

Post by 4lch3m1st »

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by hello_there »

Here's a slightly off-topic dream about online comments:

In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client. That would would provide transparency to the moderation process, ability to comment anywhere, and it would allow moderators to become effective spam-filters without giving them the power of censorship. Now, imagine if this system was built into the browser and it became the default commenting platform for all websites...

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