301–310 of 347 posts
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> 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?
I personally hate MDN. I actually prefer W3Schools. I want straight to the point examples.
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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.
Then again, I would be shocked if PACs of all flavors didn't have pay groups of subscribers to crash the comments sections of the most prominent publications (NYT, WSJ, etc). Especially during the primaries last year. When you consider the amount of traffic they get, the top comment is valuable thought capital real estate during election season.
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Ultimately it's very difficult to separate "that's a bad opinion, downvote", from "troll, downvote". People won't even agree on which is which, especially the trolls. If you require someone to post really blatant stuff like "Hitler did nothing wrong" to be ejected from the discussion, then your discussion will be filled with ideological trolls who don't argue in good faith but insist that any moderation to their part…
I think that a tag-based comment system, where the tag weights are set by user preference, is the best. Some people might set "funny" to zero, and some might give it +2. Some people could set "inflammatory" to -10, while others might want it at +1. You don't need many dimensions, and only one tristate control for each: humor/gravitas, inflammatory/huggler, informative/fluff, religious/factual, lefty/righty, vegan/mea…
This especially goes for anything political.
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I think there are a few disadvantages Reddit has here. The first that comes to mind is that website administrators, especially for large and politically-charged sites, might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture. "Just embed Reddit" sounds approximately like "just embed 4chan". While smaller sites are happy to give up some control for the sake of easily adding a major feature to their site, larger busin…
> might like Reddit's software, but not its ... um, culture Which culture? Outside of the default subs, I'm not sure its really accurate to say that Reddit _has_ a singular culture, except perhaps in the same broad sense we might say that "the internet" has one. Rather, each subreddit has its own unique culture, and there can be a _lot_ of variance between the cultures of different subreddits.
>As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control.
I agree that moderation is necessary (hate speech, spam, etc.), but allowing any individual(s) to create arbitrary rules feels really awful. I wish there was an overall "moderation guidelines" for popular subs that enabled discussions to occur, and some recourse if mods abused their powers. Right now it's an echo chamber machine and I'm starting to hate it.
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Commenting systems are setup and enabled by the admins of the site. Otherwise you're just talking about Twitter or Mastodon.
We're talking about something like Twitter or Mastodon but (a) can be found using the original URL of the site, as in IPFS or content-addressable networking; and (b) uses distributed opt-in moderation, meta-moderation, and filtering; like a decentralized AdBlock. It's something that doesn't actually exist yet, but maybe will.
I'm sure you'll have hoards of sites signing up for that.
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 know what? I can't find anything helpful on Reddit about how to do it.
I found how to embed reddit buttons easily enough (from the link on the bottom[1]). Checking the FAQ eventually led me to a page that says: "We’re working to support comment embeds shortly. We will update the publishers page and the FAQ when it’s out." [2]
Googled for it, and found an announcement blog[3] that made me realize "embed" exists under each comment. That only seems like a peculiar way of quoting a specific comment though -- and if there is some way of replying to comments through it or upvoting, I don't see how. I can't imagine anyone would want to have to comment on their own post in order to start a comment chain on their own site either.
Finally realized that "share" existed under each post as well. (Like 'embed', my brain just tunes that stuff out as junk -- seriously, why would I need help emailing a thread when I know how to copy and paste?) In addition to social media icons, there's a weird icon that seems to give you the option to embed a fancier looking link to a reddit thread. I don't see any comments attached to that in the preview though. This seems like the most likely place to find the functionality, but I'm not seeing it.
So, jedberg, I'm going to have to go with "no one knows how to do it" as the main reason that nobody embeds reddit comment threads for their own comment sections.
(Honestly though, I'd rather read reddit comments on reddit than have them embedded.)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/buttons/
[2]: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/reddit-101/post-emb...
[3]: https://redditblog.com/2015/03/23/announcing-embeddable-comm...
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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.
I still really like Slashdot's comment moderation, with multiple characteristics, and the ability to quickly collapse all ajudged low-value comments with a slider. The ability to promote certain users comments (and vice versa) is good too; but you have to use that carefully. Would love to have that with the content and users here.
(And then HN replaced that because of the quality of comments here)
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What makes HN comments great that other comments systems don't have? It's the guidelines. By writing guidelines that promote useful discourse you allow everyone involved to learn more about their own biases and shortcomings. Every person that writes their opinion grows when reading the varied responses (as long as they're open to other people's perspectives).
Smarter and more insightful commentators. That's pretty much it. Once the population gets too big and the level of discourse too low, the intelligent people will move to greener pastures with better signal:noise ratios. Slashdot's moderation system didn't save them, and HN's moderation system won't either. I've yet to see a comment system that promotes signal:noise ratio over groupthink.
Doesn't every groupthink community describe themselves as "Smarter and more insightful commentators"? I'm pretty sure Trump or Clinton voter websites consider their signal-to-noise high and everyone else's low.
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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.
If it is known that visibility is tied to "good/bad argument" rather than "agree/disagree", I'd expect most people to start using the 'argument' buttons for signaling their 'agreement'.
to gain visibilty, need to vote "good argument, but i disagree" or "bad argument, but i agree with the conclusion"
a naked 'good argument' or 'i agree vote' costs a small amount of karma.
a 'i agree, good argument', costs a large amount of karma, because those votes should be rare.