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

91–100 of 347 posts

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

#91

Post by KGIII »

dionidium wrote: post #85
KGIII wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I was agreeing with you and sharing my experience. That's why I said similar. Here, I am more inclined to read the article. HN people are just too smart for me to always be able to grasp it from comment context.

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

#92

Post by monk_e_boy »

jedberg wrote: post #87

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…

The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments.

On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting)

Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I guess it puts a burden on the users to select the right 'up vote' .... do you have a funny button, an informative button, etc?

Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons (like, funny, shock, heart) so user apatite is there for this kind of classification.

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

#93

Post by ZenoArrow »

unescape wrote: post #82
ZenoArrow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You say that, but have you considered the downsides?

Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

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

#94

Post by outoftacos »

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…

I mean that's sort of the NYT model in everything, so it's not surprising their comments are exclusionary and based around a heavily moderated clique of elite whites.

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

#95

Post by jedberg »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #92
jedberg wrote: post #87

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…

The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments. On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I gu…

> On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting)

You can just collapse it.

I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating. But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.

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

#96

Post by davesque »

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's funny that you mention that "Socrates" guy. I see him a lot. I also see a lady named "Chistine McMorrow." They're both frequently at the top of the readers' picks section. They must check the Times often for breaking stories.

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

#97

Post by hello_there »

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?

I haven't thought out the details, but I really think that it should not be the website owner, or any other individual or organization, but rather some sort of decentralized community effort. For example, one could imagine a distributed log that every commenter and moderator appends to and that is replicated to different parts of the world -- each of which a client could subscribe to.

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

#98

Post by unescape »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #93
unescape wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end user should always be in control.

You say that, but have you considered the downsides? Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

The musician can display whatever they want on their website; they don't have to host content they don't like. In the "dream" commenting system, the comments are independent; you can apply your own filters and fetch comments from sources the site owner may not approve of.

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

#99

Post by thaumaturgy »

jedberg wrote: post #87

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…

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 businesses are probably going to want to own their own content and self-host their code as much as possible. Reddit has a non-trivial set of dependencies (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Dependencies), so it's not very attractive as far as that goes.

My from-my-ass guess is that once Reddit ended up in the mainstream news a few times for some drama or another, it lost the opportunity to be taken seriously as an embeddable feature by other major sites.

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

#100

Post by ___bee___ »

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…

There are other media organizations that decided to disable the comments' section. I remember reading something about it last week [1](https://medium.com/@AJEnglish/why-were-disabling-comments-on...). Instead of fighting Fake accounts, this company decided to allow comments only on social media platforms. Places where they cannot collect enough information to fight back "Fake commenters ".

> We feel that rather than approaching the problem with a collection of algorithms and an army of moderators, our engineering and editorial resources are better utilised building new storytelling formats that resonate with our audience.

Post reply on HN