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.
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.
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.
To be honest, it is because reddit still feels... frivolous? It doesn't have the toxicity that it did a couple years ago, nor the shallowness of its nothing-but-cat-pictures reputation. But neither is it a good platform for gaining customers or revenue. It is a place to gain traffic, but traffic without revenue is not the goal for most organizations. Now, if reddit traffic converted, I'd look deeper at it - but when traffic from reddit has conversion rates that are 25% that of the traffic from other social media? I just see no reason to engage any deeper.
>I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing)
Really? I hate the tree style of comments. It's all well and good when you're reading a chain of replies, but then you run into a comment that's halfway back up the tree and have to make several attempts at collapsing comments to figure out which one is the sibling.
I much prefer a comment system like 4chan, where the post you're replying to is linked and previewable, as are posts replying to yours.
(I'm developing it.) It's inspired by Reddit & HN, and has some additional features that makes it simpler to navigate large discussions, e.g. instantly jumping to the parent post (if it's far away) to refresh one's mind, and then jumping back. I made a video: (scroll down to "Jumping to the parent post, and back") https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... (everything not ported to embedded-iframes yet, though.)
Maybe Reddit aren't advertising their embedded comments, so no one knows about it? A while ago I searched for embedded comments alternatives, and I found some abandoned projects (that had gotten super many upvotes here at HN), + Isso, + Disqus, + Talk, but cannot remember having found anything about Reddit. I wonder why they build it, but then won't focus on marketing it. Maybe they haven't thought about any way to make money from their embedded comments, yet. Hmm.
So... after reading your post, I went over to reddit to try to figure out how to embed comment threads for use as a discussion section on a site.
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.)
> I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.
1. You can't leave comments after an amount of time has passed on Reddit. On even my blog, conversation will spark up 1+ years later. Why would a website want to inherit that limitation?
2. Users have to have a Reddit account. Some of the best conversations in my comments section are anonymous.
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 likes of course.
Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.
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.
I worked on the blog team for Barack Obama's '08 campaign. The comments section developed a culture of posting a link to their personal fundraising page as the top comment, and other commenters would then donate to it.
Someone on the team got annoyed by this so for a while we would post the top comment before publishing such that they couldn't post their personal fundraising link. Then we ran some numbers and realized how much money it was costing the campaign (a lot).
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 I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.
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.
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 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.
I agree with the shortcomings of NYT comments you note. But they're at least an order of magnitude better than those at WaPo because they have humans curating them.
I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments.
It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.
As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.
> the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters
I think that's the problem with comments on any website. The questions are 1) how to bring out the best from people, and 2) whether that is sufficient.
The same person will behave very differently in different contexts. They may be professional but constrained in a business meeting or around superiors; intellectual, curious, and challenging in a classroom; and obnoxious and loud in a bar. How do you make your comment section, and website in general, bring out the qualities you want in your comments? I'd guess that many websites are not so altruistic as to want intelligent comments more than provocative ones, to generate traffic. I recently read an interesting history of the NY Times Op-Ed section, which said that provocation, rather than wisdom, was the intent.
And even if you bring out the best in people, is that sufficient? I find almost all columnists and op-ed writers to be a waste of time; how much time do I have for uninformed, random people? (And I appreciate the irony of saying that in my comment!)
The biggest problem is WaPo. And I'd say being a frequent read of WaPo isn't anything to be proud of either. In my estimation, WaPo is one of the most evil news institutions in the country and certainly the most powerful and the most involved in censoring/manipulating social media.
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...
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:
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."
Let me distract you from the actual content of the article first (I am sorry), because I am a little frustrated (I usually don't, and always almost give credits to the awesome works done by Mozilla; disclaimer: used to be a Mozilla intern).
This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons.
The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for.
It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first,
ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers,
and offer a range of audience reactions.
Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo).
I suggest next time the writer should:
* tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples
* the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments
* explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues
This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed.
----
Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do.
There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...
Can a client make a request to fetch all the things from a specific comment thread?
Example: I go to a mailing list for pick-your-favorite-old-grumpy free software project. I click through the ancient, craggy mailman web interface. Hey, there's a button that says, "download the full archive (x MB)." Now I have all the things.
Real World Use Case: The Guardian once deleted some comments on a Greenwald op-ed because of insert-old-craggy-British-law-here. Archive access would have empowered users to periodically archive the comments so that they have control over content they want to read, while the publisher is still able to remove comments from flow and archive when forced to censor.
Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc...
Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can learn both from the language and reactions from people.
Just like in "real life", if someone is always talking out their ass, you learn to listen to them less and less because they don't have anything meaningful to say. It's just noise.
The comment system should do the same. It learns from multiple comments and their reactions to determine a reputation. Obviously, if your comments are always seen as "not-relevant" and "toxic", then your contribution is worth less than other "insightful" and "interesting" contributions, so past a certain threshold, you stop being able to comment.
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"?
Comment systems are tricky, everyone has an opinion on how they should work and how they should be moderated. Its very similar to forums and community building.
I was so opinionated about my comment system I decided to build my own called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)
Its embed-able like discus but I want it to feel more like hacker news or reddit (deeply nested threads). My system is still a work in progress but I'm actively dog fooding it on my own websites and so far its working well.
One major take away I've learned from this thread is that people really like to use the collapse feature here on hacker news and reddit to narrow in on the conversations they care about. I actually never used this feature on either site (I didn't even know what that [-] was on hacker news until today)
I've always been frustrated by the Washington Post comment system. Many articles have hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand comments. When I revisit an article, I can sort by newest/oldest/highest replies or something like that. I can go to my user profile, select "my comments" and view my recent comments (though not in the context of the article they came from). For the comments I left where someone replied to me, I have no way to reply to them, other than to return to the article and hit "show more comments" 100 times and locate my comment and the reply so I can reply in turn.
I hope the new system fixes that. It is otherwise about impossible to hold a conversation, so it reduces the incentive to leave a comment in the first place.
There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.
I think to have good comments, you need to build a good community. I sometimes see the same article shared across HN, Reddit and Facebook. Some sites have better comments than others..
I remember a time when commenting seemed like a weird idea. Why would someone write on your site instead of on their own site? And then dynamically generated pages and eventually social networks took over. I wonder if the internet would be a better place if everyone had their own websites and RSS/Atom feeds rather than the centralized services we have today.
[+] [-] jedberg|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] petepete|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|8 years ago|reply
Reddit's comment structure remains by far the best on the internet. You should definitely be proud of that.
[+] [-] Vinnl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyle-rb|8 years ago|reply
Really? I hate the tree style of comments. It's all well and good when you're reading a chain of replies, but then you run into a comment that's halfway back up the tree and have to make several attempts at collapsing comments to figure out which one is the sibling.
I much prefer a comment system like 4chan, where the post you're replying to is linked and previewable, as are posts replying to yours.
[+] [-] KajMagnus|8 years ago|reply
(I'm developing it.) It's inspired by Reddit & HN, and has some additional features that makes it simpler to navigate large discussions, e.g. instantly jumping to the parent post (if it's far away) to refresh one's mind, and then jumping back. I made a video: (scroll down to "Jumping to the parent post, and back") https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... (everything not ported to embedded-iframes yet, though.)
Maybe Reddit aren't advertising their embedded comments, so no one knows about it? A while ago I searched for embedded comments alternatives, and I found some abandoned projects (that had gotten super many upvotes here at HN), + Isso, + Disqus, + Talk, but cannot remember having found anything about Reddit. I wonder why they build it, but then won't focus on marketing it. Maybe they haven't thought about any way to make money from their embedded comments, yet. Hmm.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Figs|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unescape|8 years ago|reply
Isn't comment collapsing in HN the same as downvoting? I find this confusing - or maybe I just don't have enough karma for the actual downvote button.
[+] [-] spookyuser|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeachPlum|8 years ago|reply
https://www.cnet.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-to-editing-user-...
[+] [-] always_good|8 years ago|reply
1. You can't leave comments after an amount of time has passed on Reddit. On even my blog, conversation will spark up 1+ years later. Why would a website want to inherit that limitation?
2. Users have to have a Reddit account. Some of the best conversations in my comments section are anonymous.
[+] [-] creaghpatr|8 years ago|reply
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 likes of course.
Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.
[+] [-] Pxtl|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bpp|8 years ago|reply
Someone on the team got annoyed by this so for a while we would post the top comment before publishing such that they couldn't post their personal fundraising link. Then we ran some numbers and realized how much money it was costing the campaign (a lot).
Moral of the story: comment sections are weird.
[+] [-] dionidium|8 years ago|reply
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 I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.
[+] [-] ___bee___|8 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] dogruck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loopdoend|8 years ago|reply
I agree about Socrates. Overwrought.
[+] [-] davesque|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ridgeguy|8 years ago|reply
I don't read WaPo comments anymore, the signal/noise ratio is too poor. I learn something occasionally from NYT comments.
It's down to an organization's willingness to spend money on quality. NYT spends $ to improve the comment experience, WaPo doesn't.
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
I have no idea how well this worked.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] outoftacos|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thinbeige|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nippples|8 years ago|reply
Of all things Mozilla may be doing wrong, the MDN docs on html / javascript is most definitely not one of it. They are by far the best available.
[+] [-] chucksmash|8 years ago|reply
This feels like an undeserved swipe to me. How many developers prepend their searches with "mdn" when they need info on browser APIs?
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|8 years ago|reply
I think that's the problem with comments on any website. The questions are 1) how to bring out the best from people, and 2) whether that is sufficient.
The same person will behave very differently in different contexts. They may be professional but constrained in a business meeting or around superiors; intellectual, curious, and challenging in a classroom; and obnoxious and loud in a bar. How do you make your comment section, and website in general, bring out the qualities you want in your comments? I'd guess that many websites are not so altruistic as to want intelligent comments more than provocative ones, to generate traffic. I recently read an interesting history of the NY Times Op-Ed section, which said that provocation, rather than wisdom, was the intent.
And even if you bring out the best in people, is that sufficient? I find almost all columnists and op-ed writers to be a waste of time; how much time do I have for uninformed, random people? (And I appreciate the irony of saying that in my comment!)
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.
[+] [-] eighthnate|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_there|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unescape|8 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] yeukhon|8 years ago|reply
This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons.
The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for.
Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo).I suggest next time the writer should:
* tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples
* the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments
* explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues
This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed.
----
Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do.
There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...
[+] [-] intended|8 years ago|reply
Killer feature - in that its going to kill the process.
This is chat. Or close enough to chat that its going to be used as chat.
Chat is terrible for comments. A flame war on chat escalates at the rate at which someone can hit enter.
like the wake of a ship, the comment area will expand, and defeat moderation ability to clean it up.
Flame wars are bad enough, flame wars on chat which persist like comments are a bad idea.
Make it update in non-real time.
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
Example: I go to a mailing list for pick-your-favorite-old-grumpy free software project. I click through the ancient, craggy mailman web interface. Hey, there's a button that says, "download the full archive (x MB)." Now I have all the things.
Real World Use Case: The Guardian once deleted some comments on a Greenwald op-ed because of insert-old-craggy-British-law-here. Archive access would have empowered users to periodically archive the comments so that they have control over content they want to read, while the publisher is still able to remove comments from flow and archive when forced to censor.
[+] [-] Nelkins|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remir|8 years ago|reply
Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can learn both from the language and reactions from people.
Just like in "real life", if someone is always talking out their ass, you learn to listen to them less and less because they don't have anything meaningful to say. It's just noise.
The comment system should do the same. It learns from multiple comments and their reactions to determine a reputation. Obviously, if your comments are always seen as "not-relevant" and "toxic", then your contribution is worth less than other "insightful" and "interesting" contributions, so past a certain threshold, you stop being able to comment.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
This thing writes many messages to the browser console. The last line apparently prevents even displaying comments.
[+] [-] elihu|8 years ago|reply
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"?
[+] [-] foxhop|8 years ago|reply
I was so opinionated about my comment system I decided to build my own called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)
Its embed-able like discus but I want it to feel more like hacker news or reddit (deeply nested threads). My system is still a work in progress but I'm actively dog fooding it on my own websites and so far its working well.
One major take away I've learned from this thread is that people really like to use the collapse feature here on hacker news and reddit to narrow in on the conversations they care about. I actually never used this feature on either site (I didn't even know what that [-] was on hacker news until today)
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|8 years ago|reply
I hope the new system fixes that. It is otherwise about impossible to hold a conversation, so it reduces the incentive to leave a comment in the first place.
[+] [-] algesten|8 years ago|reply
This makes me feel old. Is 300kb really considered small these days?
[+] [-] hartator|8 years ago|reply
There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.
[+] [-] peterjlee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deafcalculus|8 years ago|reply