Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

[vintagedave]

My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We've also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former?

Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?

A year ago we started building Respectify to help foster healthy communication. Instead of just deleting bad-faith comments, we suggest better, good-faith ways to say what folks are trying to say. We help people avoid: * Logical fallacies (false dichotomy, strawmen, etc.) * Tone issues (how others will read the comment) * Relevance to the actual page/post topic * Low-effort posts * Dog whistles and coded language

The commenter gets an explanation of what's wrong and a chance to edit and resubmit. It's moderation + education in one step. We want, too, to automate the entire process so the site owner can focus on content and not worry about moderation at all. And over time, comment by comment, quietly coach better thinking.

Our main website has an interactive demo: https://respectify.ai. As the demo shows, the system is completely tunable and adjustable, from "most anything goes" to "You need to be college debate level to get by me".

We hope the result is better discussions and a better Internet. Not too much to ask, eh?

We love the kind of feedback this group is famous for and hope you will supply some!

[Miraste]

It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments.

However, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:

"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter."

To this:

"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters."

The first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.

Honest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.

From a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?

[badc0ffee]

This thing seems to be more about enforcing a political PoV than about avoiding logical fallacies.

All my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate.

Using this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from having their ideas challenged.

[ryanackley]

Yeah I feel like this will funnel everyone's opinion into sounding like it was written by an AI.

Love the idea but the example they give with bears is absolutely hilarious. Calling bears dumb animals is offensive? God help us.

[arjie]

I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked

The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because they don't understand them or because they're just re-litigating or whatever (which I cannot toggle). I think it would be cool if people all published their blocklists and I'd pull from those I trust. Sometimes I open HN on my phone through the browser and I'm baffled by all these responses I got which are useless.

I'm surprised by how much more high quality comment threads are now to me and I frequently find that I want to respond to everyone. It's like in old-school mailing lists or forums where you were having a conversation so the other people are worth talking to.

Attention is precious and I wouldn't want to waste it on boring things. And it goes both ways. I communicate incompletely and there are people out there who get what I'm saying and there are people who need me to be more explicit. I would prefer that the latter and people who find me boring just block me.

[izucken]

I am bitter about this.

Do you really with your mind and with your heart believe that: - LLMs are fundamentally fit for this type of comprehension - Misjudgements posted in this thread are "bugs", "errors" - Agents who choose to act in bad faith will be anyhow affected - It is desirable by a majority of the group whose opinion you would even consider (is there such a group?), that everyone should have this kind of thing shoved into their face - Promotion of this kind of thing does not also promote (and help build) harsher censorship mechanisms

Do you think that every single thing you will ever say publicly from now on will be considered constructive by all future filters with all of their different biases and "bugs"? Do you think that this new "constructive speak" will not make you want to blow your brains out at some point? Do you not see it everywhere already and get nauseus from it? I would prefer trash talk to that - at least seldom honest and true. If you don't like the message - hide it, timeout the poster, block them or whatever - with your own agency. If you think they welcome education from you - dm them a book.

Or perhaps you imagine yourselves as above that kind of filtering? Then there is no question.

Also, nothing new under the sun. Can't remember exactly but I saw not long ago on a medical platform a review filtering system. It "isn't" censhorship per say, of course, the same as your idea. Only, you can't post a review you want - only a much more milder version (and therefore useless) with transformations akin: "This thing doesn't work" -> "I felt like this thing didn't work for me in this instance, but there were such an such positives". Way to go - turning everything into "we are sorry you feel that way".

[ProllyInfamous]

Decades ago (1995), when I was barely a decade old, I created a maintainence/repair website for a Motorola product (pre-iFixit). A fellow geek created his own similar website, focusing more on general product usage.

Neither of us webmasters took constructive feedback well, often lashing out at fellow usenet geeks who were just trying to be helpful. Tantrums, from us both.

Twenty years later we randomly met in-person @DEF-CON (recognized his unique name) — he ended up being a year younger than me! We exchanged chuckles about what big personalities us two little kids had been, blasting angst into the aether.

Motorola had linked to both our websites in their official documentation, despite our pottymouths =P

----

When I witness road rage (myself, included), I pretend the aggressor is a toddler. This makes it easier (and more effective!) to handle the rage that often passes through miscommunication(s).

----

I've been a forumjunkie since 1994, and HN is the only online forum I still participate within — mostly because of the techgenre, but also because the rules here prevent all sorts of perpetualSeptembers from scattering themselves among otherwise-constructive threads.

DanG&co: thanks for cultivating an exceptional online community

OP: Thanks for trying; I haven't used your product, but the premise seems noble... my main question to ya'll is: how do you prevent overbearing censorship (e.g. does karma influence how "tough" your product is on particular users, or are we all equally correctable)?

[earthnail]

I tried it as well with a contrarian view on UBI. I think the UBI one is a great test case. If you’re against the idea you will likely argue that it is idealistic and that in the real world it would create bad incentives.

So basically you end up arguing for a darker, more pessimistic world view, and that tends to get flagged very quickly by the tool right now. I think you should fix that. It’s a mistake in modern discussions to be overly positive; HN feels real because people can leave pretty harsh critiques. It just has to be well argued. Don’t raise the bar for well-argued too high though, because nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, I love the idea and really hope you’ll succeed. Hope my feedback has been somewhat helpful.

[pibaker]

I think the premise of this tool is flawed. Bad faith actors are not people who write poorly or aggressively because they don't know how to express their beliefs like a polite, college educated white collar professional. They are people who have an agenda to push and are willing to use whatever rhetorical techniques allowed to achieve their goals.

I would even go as far as saying that we are under more threat from bad faith arguing from eloquent, educated actors than what people usually blame. You know, "trolls." You notice this every time when a city planning meeting gets derailed by concerned citizens just asking questions about the potential dangers of a children's playground. You notice this when an abusive person in a relationship goes to a therapist and suddenly has a whole high minded vocabulary justifying their own action. You notice this when your boss talks about opening up new opportunities and chasing new fields of business while coworkers circulate rumors of upcoming layoffs.

The entire point of bad faith is saying words you don't mean to achieve your goals. The words are always just a disposable tool secondary to the bad faith actor's true intentions. You fundamentally cannot fix bad faith by fixing someone's choice of words any more than you can sugarcoat a poisoned pill and make it safe.

[vintagedave]

Folks, Dave here -- it's half past two in the morning over here, things have slowed down a little, and so we need to pause and get some sleep.

Thankyou everyone who tested it out. We modified it live a lot during the discussion so much of it is already outdated / changed -- it was fantastic feedback. As of now it is a lot more direct, accepts things we never thought of, has much more accurate dogwhistle handling, and far more. I hope the intent, to teach people how to interact better, carries through. We have a bunch of signups and if you run a blog or site with comments, I hope we can help you build a healthy community. Thankyou again from both of us!

[throwaway13337]

I was hoping 'respectify' could mean respect for the users.

This is a very important problem space. Maybe the most important today - we desprately need a digital third place that isn't awful. But I think these attempts are misled.

The core issue seems to be that we want our communities to be infinite. Why? Well, because there is currently no way to solve the community discoverability problem without being the massive thing. But that is the issue to solve.

We need a lot of Dunbar's number sized communities. Those communities allow for 'skin in the game' where reputation matters. And maybe a fractal sort of way for those communities to share between them.

The problem is in the discoverability and in a gate keeping that is porous enough to give people a chance.

Solve that, and you solve the the third place problem we have currently. I don't have a solution but I wish I did.

Infinite communities are fundamentally what causes the tribalism (ironically), the loneliness, and the promotion of rage.

No one wants to be forced to argue correctly. Forcing people into a way to think via software is fundamentally authoritarian and sad.

[ceejayoz]

The sample prompt I was given was "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?"

"Of course it is!" got an 80% certainty "off-topic" mark.

When I elaborated that it occurs at a Christmas party, it said this:

"Dogwhistles detected (confidence 80%): This comment seems innocuous, but the phrasing 'Christmas party' may be an underhanded reference to Christian themes, especially among discussions that might dismiss or attack secular or diverse holiday celebrations. This kind of language can subtly imply exclusion or preference for Christian traditions over others, which can marginalize those who celebrate different traditions."

Not a great first experience.

I've seen the trend on Facebook/Instagram to say "unalived" instead of "killed" or "cupcakes" instead of "vaccines" and suspect humans are long gonna be cleverer than these sorts of content filtering attempts, with language getting deeply weird as a side-effect.

edit: I would also note that it says "Referring to others as 'horrible people' is disrespectful and diminishes the possibility of a respectful discussion. It positions certain individuals as entirely negative, which can alienate others and shut down dialogue.", if I feed it your post, too.

[axus]

I think it did a decent job. The key might be how customizable the censorship is.

Article Context: Fun: Die Hard; Is It a Christmas Movie?

Your(my) Comment: The erotic version of Die Hard does involve Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists on Christmas Eve.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film. Results: Revision Requested. This comment would be sent back for revision with feedback.

Revise Low Effort

Comment appears to be low effort

Objectionable Phrases:

"Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists"

This phrase can be seen as sexualizing a character traditionally viewed as innocent and family-friendly, which is inappropriate. Such language can make discussions feel uncomfortable or offensive to some audiences.

Relevance Check On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)

This is off-topic - the comment about an erotic version of Die Hard strays into inappropriate content that doesn't relate to the film's actual story or its production details.

Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes

This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film.

[thelock85]

Seems like you need this when you don't have agency to go find your preferred online group(s) which might be tied to larger personal challenges in healthy communication and productive conflict. I don't know how tech solves that problem. The broad use case here would just create a new "respectified" category where members (assuming they have the attention span to be guided on comments) try to conform. I suppose that could be helpful in hyper-local or team-level contexts where there is a shared interest to conform around.

[konaraddi]

I think that’s an awesome idea and I like that it proactively gets ahead of the problem instead of the retroactive approach like moderation today. I’m interested in a very similar goal; I’ve been working on a guide on anti patterns in internet discourses at https://odap.konaraddi.com in hopes of it being used to make discourse on the internet more productive and pleasant (the guide is a work in progress).

[5o1ecist]

> Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?

Yes, of course it would. Everybody should be taught how to behave. It's important that MY FELLOW HUMANS understand that they are benefitting from a Big Brother watching over their behaviour. It's for their own good!

Damn those who don't want to behave like they should!

They get banned!

[StopDisinfo910]

The filter is implicitly tuned on American culture. It's very easy to trigger the negativity one by merely pointing facts if you don't give opposite but unequal arguments and it deeply dislikes lightly oppositions which would perfectly acceptable in my own culture. It reminded me a bit of the Copilot email coach and it's unceasing invitation to add sentences devoid of meaning to "improve the tone" your email. The overall score is mostly opaque too.

I think there is a confusion between engaging and culturally palatable to the average American and of quality.

If I add to go through this, one, I would be deeply annoyed, two, I would just pass all my comments through another LLM if I really had to interact.

[altairprime]

How can I apply this system to a random discussion archive page at HN in order to evaluate it more efficiently as a discussion guidance mechanism? I don't want to see usernames in that example, and I don't want a dynamic example either — but I think it would be much easier to convince HN that your AI product is worthwhile if you present an HN-specific example. Specifically, I suggest you take an HN discussion (the HTML is very simply structured), pipe each comment through your engine, and append the <div style="background-color: soft-blue;"> "Your comment etc etc" responses that would have been shown to each comment in the discussion.

Looking at the most popular results for " " on HN Algolia, I would recommend selecting a post that has at least a few hundred comments and is also about HN or YC or YC-adjacent people (since the mods are extra light-touch on such posts), in order to take the best possible sample for unmoderated discussion to evaluate Respectify against. This post is a good example that fits those criteria; I didn't pay attention to it at the time and I haven't assessed the discussion beyond 'total comment count >= 500': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40521657

I recognize that's theoretically a lot of effort, but from a coding standpoint, it's simply `for $comment in $dom.xpath(/blah/blah/comment) { $ai.eval($comment); undef $comment.username; $comment.append($respectify.bulleted_list_with_html_colors); }` for what has the potential to be an extremely convincing demo to the target audience of us here.

[turbocon]

Just wanted to comment to say that I think this is a wonderful product idea with a noble mission. It clearly has flaws and you guys are clearly working on it and that's okay. I really like the approach of getting people to pause and think about what they're posting to promote a more thoughtful experience

Seriously. Best of luck to you

[vivzkestrel]

- my comment "what an absolute moron"

- Comment Health - Score: 1/5 - Toxicity: 0.80 - Low effort: No

- Using derogatory terms like 'moron' targets the person rather than addressing their argument. This kind of name-calling creates a hostile environment where people feel attacked and are less likely to share their thoughts. Instead, aim to explain why you disagree without resorting to insults.

- Objectionable Phrases:

- "moron"

- Calling someone a 'moron' is a personal insult that attacks their intelligence instead of engaging with their ideas. This type of language can hurt feelings and shut down respectful conversation, making it harder to discuss different viewpoints. Spam Check

- Not spam (confidence: 95%)

- This comment is rude and insulting but doesn't promote any product or scam, so it's not spam. It's simply a toxic remark about someone's opinion. Relevance Check

- On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)

- This is off-topic - the comment doesn't engage with the discussion about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie and instead resorts to name-calling without context.

- Also apologies for writing that, had to test the system

[npunt]

Love the effort here, been thinking about what this kind of tool might look like for a while. Something like this coupled with better prosocial affordances in the medium will do a lot to improve discourse online. I wrote up one a while back [1] but things like that are only a small part of a much bigger picture.

The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify but shown to users before posting), reader affordances to reflect back to poster their behavior (and determine if things may be appropriate in context vs just a universal 'dont say mean words'), after-post poster tools to catch mistakes (like above), platform capabilities like respectify that define rules of play and foster a enjoyable social environment that let us play infinite games, and a broader social context that determine the values that drive all of these.

[1] https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

[GolDDranks]

I applaud your goal!

On the name "Respectify": it immediately reminded me of Linus Torvald's famous quote "respect should be earned". That quote, in its literal form, strikes a chord with me. While I share his sentiment towards respect, I think that lacking respect towards any individual shouldn't entitle you to be an asshole – but that's something that Linus has historically been from time to time. In that context, the quote sounds like a sorry excuse.

In my opinion, the toxicity of communication shouldn't be framed in terms of respect, but in terms of "basic human decency". To me, using the word "respect" sounds like the right to non-toxic communications should be earned. I'd rather have that as the baseline, which is a value that I expect you to share.

Maybe call it Decentify? Or Detox?

[JimDabell]

> Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?

Yes, but an awful lot of people aren’t interested in that.

I think a tool like this would be helpful for banning. LLMs are probably not reliable enough to make banning judgements themselves, but an LLM that pops up “Are you sure you want to post that? It seems to break these rules…” makes it very easy for human moderators to ban quickly and permanently. It provides incontrovertible evidence that the poster intended to break the rules but it still offers an escape hatch for when the LLM gets it wrong.

[austinjp]

Slightly off-topic, but.... the website is grindingly slow on my Samsung Galaxy A16 with Firefox. To the point that typing is a chore. Can you slim it down? Potential customers will not want to see such a slow interface.

[reconnecting]

What I've seen, the difference between spam detected or not is https://www before the domain name.

Here is an example of successful passing of all checks:

> Published This comment passes all checks and would be published.

Score: 5/5 | Not spam | On-topic: Yes | No dogwhistles detected (confidence: 100%)

Can confirm. We hit this exact issue running tirreno www.tirreno.com (open-source fraud detection) on Windows ARM — libraries were auto-selecting AVX2 through emulation and batch scoring was measurably slower than just forcing SSE2. The 256-bit ops get split under the emulation layer and the overhead adds up fast in tight loops. Pinned SSE2 for those builds. Counterintuitive but throughput went up.

[altacc]

Hmm, I'm in 2 minds about this. The best online communities I've been in have been small & come across more human and the thought of "this is a person you're replying to" was innate. On larger forums a nudge towards that humanity might be good but I think this at times goes beyond a nudge and is more of an opinionated telling-off, which a lot of people aren't going to react so well to.

I wonder how this would be as a light touch plugin for the browser that would review a comment in context and possibly help test and refine the content.

[nilslindemann]

This will only be an ethical tool when everyone is honest about the fact that an AI is moderating, and people can reedit their posts. If you give admins the option to disable reediting, in order to hide that an AI is controlling, then they will do. And then it's a tool for suppression of free speech.

[freakynit]

These days, I just try to clone the core functionality of such sites as fast as I can. So, tried the same with this.

For this, I screenshotted the demo panel and asked chatgpt to generate relevant prompt. Here it is: https://sharetext.io/zy6ccjrm

Then, tested with demo question and a sample comment of mine as answer to it:

Input text: `Die Hard: Is It a Christmas Movie?`

Comment: `nop, its not actually`

===

And here's gemini flash 2.5 lite's response: https://sharetext.io/e7y7kyoe

Total cost: $0.00115

Per dollar: 860+ comments.

[skybrian]

I like the concept. Not sure about the specifics.

I read somewhere that much of the market for robot vacuum cleaners was people who already had pretty clean houses and wanted to do even better. Similarly, I imagine this will appeal more to people like me who genuinely want to improve how they interact?

If someone started a forum for people who like this sort of tool, maybe I'd be into it.

I'm not wild about the name. It seems more confrontational than aspirational, like it's for people who want others to treat them with respect. But we do need moderation tools so maybe it's good.

[vivid242]

I like it! There are, of course, challenges a la

https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

– the swamp of subjectivity ("This is about enforcing a political PoV" vs. "This is about enforcing respectful conversation") ahead!

[selcuka]

Q: Die Hard: Is it a Christmas movie?

A: Of course it is. It was released on a sunny day, and that makes it a Christmas movie.

    [x] Published
    Relevance Check
    On-topic: Yes (confidence: 90%)

[Zak]

I thought about making something like this prior to LLMs. This version is more sophisticated than what I had in mind.

I think its response to this comment could use some work:

> The Glock 19 is a great answer to this position.

It detects spam for off-topic product promotion, but gives it a toxicity score of zero even though it recognizes that a Glock 19 is a firearm. Suggesting that a weapon is a good answer to someone's position on a topic other than weapons should probably be interpreted as a threat.

[mwachs]

I really love the tone you have for this product. I also vibecoded a thing (much more niche--https://peeps.biz/about) and felt the freedom to inject my own tone on it because it's personal. These apps/services are feeling more like zines or an indie band than a company seeking world domination or VC investment, and I think that's pretty neat.

[scoot]

> See how Respectify moderates comments in real time > Request timed out after 30000ms

Anyone working in real real-time computing would have a fit!

[casey2]

I followed all it's prescriptions (which of course conflict with each other) and it only made the comment worse in that it went from disrespectful to spam. I managed to get useless/meaningless comments like:

I understand why some people enjoy the movie, but it doesn't resonate with me because the themes don't feel engaging or relevant.

Past it with 4/5

[frm88]

How does your customer implementation work? Does the customer get to decide what the settings / strictness / political leaning the implementation for their individual instance should be like? Or is there no individual customizing of settings? Is it in the hands of the customer to manipulate outcomes as in the example by Miraste above?

[nkrisc]

Apparently discussing that Die Hard depicts murder and violence is a banned topic and thus the comment is flagged as off topic.

[fnands]

I really like the idea. I sometimes get the idea some people just start raging at the world in general when they get their comments rejected/banned, and start to develop some sort of persecution complex.

Will this fix the problem? I am not sure, but I do appreciate the effort.

[protocolture]

I like the tool, I respect the tool, and I wouldnt use it in its current form.

However: Something that would make me sit up and take notice. Have this tool police more formal debates. Have it tweakable rule out comments that dont present supporting evidence, or fall into formal (or even informal) fallacies.

That would probably need to be its own website.

[klntsky]

How do you score toxicity? Do you have a list of criteria or just let the LLM hallucinate a number out of thin air?