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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

#71

Post by wyattjoh »

unescape wrote: post #67
wyattjoh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, you can! Check our the documentation https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ where you can use plugins to hook any any part of the commenting process.

Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case. https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/

As a site admin, not a user. If you see our server side plugin api [1] you can see ways to extend the graph schema, hook into existing mutations/queries completed by the system to apply any set of rules or moderation policies you want. It would be a neat implementation if as a user, you were given the ability to create your own filters, which would certainly be possible if implemented via a plugin! But don't expect to do that on WaPo anytime soon.

[1]: https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/plugins/server/

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

#72

Post by unescape »

wyattjoh wrote: post #59
unescape wrote: post #48

Mozilla Talk could be useful if it let me apply my own moderation schema (filters, blocklists, etc). It looks like another totally centralized moderation tool: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html The only explanation of their approach is that they did "an enormous amount of research". This sounds about as convincing as someone claiming "Oh, I took a class in that."

Good site also to check out is our Guides [1]. We've collected research on user engagement into a format that should be easy for newsrooms to adopt to create better discussion. [1]: http://guides.coralproject.net

The feature I want is, as a site user, to apply my own set of filtering and moderation criteria.

E.g. "I don't want to see comments posted by user XYZ, or containing regexp W. Any comments by user ABC, or upvoted by ABC, or containing regexp D, go to the top. I trust the moderation of site trollblocker.com"

I don't see these kinds of ideas represented in the user engagement research.

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

#73

Post by frou_dh »

devinhelton wrote: post #22
aaron-lebo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how you could ever hope to have productive debate on say an article about global warming. It's not a local topic, it's a difficult topic, there's millions of regular people and trolls around the world waiting to blab about something they don't have any clue about. It's hard for me to imagine what a comment on a Washington Post article could add to the article or to anyone's knowledge. It's user involvement f…

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…

Let the inaugural cordoned-off HN comment sink be about Electron apps having high resource usage.

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

#74

Post by _rpd »

gkya wrote: post #45

I believe it's better to have discussion happen elsewhere, as in HN, Reddit, Usenet, &c., or in blogs and columns. This is cheaper for the publisher, and often those communities generate better discussion as they are comprised of more interested individuals with more genuine participation.

It isn't better for the publisher though. The longer that they can keep eyeballs at a site that they control, the more advertising they can sell. Commenting also allows the publishers to collect more demographic and psychographic data, which allows the publisher to charge advertisers more per view/clickthrough.

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

#75

Post by schemathings »

I think it would be interesting to see a filter that generates something along the lines of Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", the most distinctive phrases in the text of books, but for articles, and then tracks how closely the comments line up for that particular article .. might be a good indicator for authority ?

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

#76

Post by ZenoArrow »

jonathankoren wrote: post #69
ZenoArrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yell Mozilla certainly thinks it's moderating tools are better.

There are two significant parts of the announcement:

1. Improved controls for filtering comments on prominent news sites.

2. A step towards the decentralisation of the web.

Both have potential benefits, especially if the comment filtering is user-driven.

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

#77

Post by unescape »

wyattjoh wrote: post #71
unescape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case. https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/

As a site admin, not a user. If you see our server side plugin api [1] you can see ways to extend the graph schema, hook into existing mutations/queries completed by the system to apply any set of rules or moderation policies you want. It would be a neat implementation if as a user, you were given the ability to create your own filters, which would certainly be possible if implemented via a plugin! But don't expect t…

Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.

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

#78

Post by alethiophile »

jandrese wrote: post #23
CodeCube wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slashdot's commenting system was 100% an echo chamber ;)

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…

The exact same set of moderation actions will look like a necessary and correct restriction on bad actors to one group, while looking like a choking echo-chamber imposition to another.

The reality is that any social space needs to have a set of norms, including ideological norms, that are enforced to a degree to ensure they're followed. The idea of purely "open discussion" is a fantasy; if you ever have something that feels like that, it's because the participants have internalized the enforced norms sufficiently that they never run into the enforcement.

The difficult problem is picking out a set of norms that successfully produce the quality of space you want. Sometimes that is an outright ideological echo chamber. (In fact, it almost always is, to at least the limited degree that there is some ideological position that would be rejected without consideration by the participants and met with hostility. This is a good thing.) Any talk of "open discussion" must always the include the important context of "within what boundaries".

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

#79

Post by xienze »

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.

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.

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

#80

Post by the8472 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #6
ArchReaper wrote: post #2

Why should anyone care? I don't see anything technically novel or interesting in this. Edit: I'm not disparaging this, I'm asking a question...

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

The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.
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