Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 347 posts

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

#81

Post by wyattjoh »

unescape wrote: post #72
wyattjoh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the features offered by Talk is the ability to ignore comments from a specific user [1]. It is designed just as you described it here. As mentioned in a previous comment, our server api's should be sufficient for you as a site administrator, to write a plugin that would allow users to do exactly what you described. The idea with Talk is that we hand control to the newsroom, so they can enable or create the plugins that they like.

[1]: See a demo GIF on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ask-the-post/wp/2017/09/...

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

#82

Post by unescape »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #61
hello_there wrote: post #40

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 modera…

I like where you're going with this, but here's a question for you... Who controls the streams that are available on a website? Is it the end user or the website owner?

The end user should always be in control.

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

#83

Post by ChuckMcM »

richforrester wrote: post #46
dionidium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them . If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when…

That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.

I wonder if there is an algorithm to score comments vs the article so that you can warp the article toward something the commentator would approve.

We have already seen examples where people run the same story on extreme left and extreme right web sites to get clicks and rage views and their toning, and changes are fairly algorithmic. That makes me wonder if you could build an echo chamber of one. So that what you read was always something you really agreed with, even if it wasn't written that way for anyone else. (same data and facts mind you, just slanting it toward the reader's preferences).

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

#84

Post by unescape »

wyattjoh wrote: post #81
unescape wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the features offered by Talk is the ability to ignore comments from a specific user [1]. It is designed just as you described it here. As mentioned in a previous comment, our server api's should be sufficient for you as a site administrator, to write a plugin that would allow users to do exactly what you described. The idea with Talk is that we hand control to the newsroom, so they can enable or create the plu…

This is a step in the right direction, but why hand control to the newsroom as opposed to the user?

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

#85

Post by dionidium »

KGIII wrote: post #60
richforrester wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.

Similar, I skim the article and read the comments. In some cases, I just read the comments. Though, I don't do this on any direct media sites, like online newspapers. At Slashdot, chances are that I haven't read the article. I go straight to the comments and read those. Curiously, I can't do that as often here on HN. Here, the quality of article is often higher and the comments are usually more on-topic and, often, m…

We're not saying different things. As I said: I love the comments here (usually). I also learn a lot from them.

I think "forums" like reddit and HN are fundamentally different from inline comments on news websites.

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

#87

Post by jedberg »

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 others from using their embeddable comments? As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control. You may not get quite as much data as Mozilla's solution, but in exchange you get the benefit of Reddit's 12 years of spam data that train its filters.

I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.

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

#88

Post by xienze »

intopieces wrote: post #65
mobilefriendly wrote: post #57

Mozilla -- the organization that fired its CEO because it disagreed with a political donation he made in California -- lacks credibility when it talks about building an "open society".

"Brendan Eich was not fired. After his appointment, there was backlash from the Mozilla Community. He came under pressure to resign and he did. The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation; they did not "remove him because of his views." If that alone was the issue, they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place. Resignation (after only 11 days in the CEO role) became the only viable p…

> Brendan Eich was not fired. ... He came under pressure to resign and he did.

So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. Let's not play games, he wasn't going to survive that episode.

> The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation

I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes -- which would open a major can of worms (you didn't promote me because I donated to Trump). The whole episode reeked of someone digging around and raising a stink shortly after he made a highly visible move -- otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior?

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

#89

Post by logfromblammo »

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…

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/meaty, etc.

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

#90

Post by elihu »

How do users authenticate? Do they need to register for an account and give their email address to every website they want to comment on?

This seems like it would have been a good use-case for Persona, but that project was cancelled; is there any good replacement these days, besides the ubiquitous "sign in with your facebook account"?

Post reply on HN