Cool, I've thought about something like this for ages, but lazy always prevails. The only thing I don't really agree with is:
"Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open.
The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have installed WORDS?"
That's true for now, but any system that gains any amount of steam will inevitably pick up trolls, flamers, and generally idiotic people. You can't stop it from happening. And I don't know that anyone has ever found a good solution for it. In fact, the whole 'Top Comments' and up/down-voting thing most third-party comment widgets employ is literally to combat that problem, in the hopes that garbage falls to the bottom. It obviously doesn't work perfectly and I do still agree on the whole with your assertion of it being overall detrimental to good discussion.
Anyway, I'm guess I'm mostly curious if you have plans for the future of if/when the extension gets more popular and you do start finding discussions bogged down by trolls/spammers/etc and what ways you'd try and combat such things when you have 100k+ users or whatever.
One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.
Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere.
You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker News is evolving) that these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing. Just look at Digg.
So I definitely anticipate badness down the road, but feel the code foundation is there to deal with it as it comes.
for those who don't get this: hoodwink'd[0][1] was this experiment/hack/art project by _why some years ago, which allowed implementing a parallel unified commenting system for the web.
It was super cool because you'd go to, say, hackernews or slashdot and if you were part of the network you'd get access to a different set of comments, but integrated in the website rather than as an external popup (individual sets of stylesheets+js had to be written for each website of course).
For example, here you'd get the blinking hood gif, and on click you'd see new comment threads appearing with red usernames.
Integration came through, iirc, a custom proxy server or a greasemonkey script.
Consider removing the downvotes? Keep only the upvotes?
Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink
As someone who's received a nontrivial amount of downvotes in this community and others, I can confidently say that I appreciate them as a mechanism. Almost every downvote that I've received was for a legitimate reason - a few were just out of disagreement, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently downvotes things that don't conform to X (in HN's case, X usually being "well-reasoned commentary relevant to the thread"), people tend to shy away from those things. One could consider the utter lack of response gifs on HN "groupthink", in the sense that everyone knows the community is unfriendly to them so they don't post them (even when they're funny).
For my money, downvoting is entirely necessary. You know how a comment like "R u srs? Luv this vid!" is normal on Youtube? I want users to downvote the living hell out of that comment. I want the WORDS community to hold each other to a much higher standard.
Downvotes seem like the only way to actually maintain order.
This is very sketchy. When I try to login with Facebook, it shows me chromless modal window with (what appears to be) a facebook login page. Except that I'm already currently logged in to facebook so this shouldn't be necessary. Sorry, I'm not going to hand you that info.
Historically, Chrome has not handled third party login very well, and one could argue that it still doesn't.
However, they recently took the chrome.identity package out of experimental mode and it's what I'm using for Oauth flow because it handles authentication in the browser, not in cookies and URLs.
I agree it looks sketchy and several of us have complained to Google to make it look a bit more legit. But you know how that goes.
If you're really concerned, crack open WireShark and take a look at the handshake yourself.
This is my 4-year, off-and-on passion project. All suggestions and feedback are appreciated. I'd especially welcome product/feature-based ideas about how to overcome the enormous cold-start hurdle.
Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.
Ok, so if I understand this correctly, in order to be certain I'm not tracked, I need to host my own back-end server? And the server stores the comments? And if I'm hosting my own server, I'm likely to end up talking mostly with those that sign up with "my" version of this? And if I want it to work in eg: Firefox I'd have to port it? Finally, wrt. tracking -- if the comments are stored on the server (and that's a REST service or something like it) -- wouldn't it be trivial to log activity at the routing level (eg: ha-proxy/nginx/other front-facing web server)?
This isn't meant as negative criticism, just trying to figure out if I've understood how it works correctly? (Note, I appreciate that the source is available, but obviously I can't know that the source you share is the source you run on your back-end. So we're back to trust, which is fine in my book).
[edit: re other clients -- the most straightforward thing to do would be to make an iframe(or js)-based proxy service (a la stumble upon) in order to enable any browser, I suppose?
I've thought about something similar, and I wonder if an XMPP back-end with one "room" pr url and the server-side log-extension might work? That should then make it trivial (unnecessary!) to enable better clients than web-only -- ie use a command line xmpp client to participate in the discussion, rather than forcing the use of the web browser. I realise many people think using the web browser is an advantage -- I generally find GUIs built on top of browsers to be slow and not very efficient. Extensions less so -- but the problem is of course that you'd have to port to Firefox, Opera, Webkit and IE (along with mobile variants) -- to achieve parity with systems like disqus etc]
This reminds me of a product from the 90's where it let you leave post-it style notes on any website. You could then turn the nodes on/off for any given site.
Anyway, that was a great product, so I'm glad to see that you're thinking around similar lines. A meta-commenting system that runs any site is a great idea.
The Google login is a bit too disconcerting for my liking.
At the very least showing the url bar would've have been less unsettling.
Only by opening the chrome inspector was I able to verify that it was indeed a valid login page and not a phising attempt as it appears to be at a cursory glance.
@fiveogit: Love the idea. Need to be prettified though. How would I see comments on mobile devices or non chrome browsers? Can I inject with JS into my website?
That was some of my first thoughts :)
Exactly my thoughts. I use Chrome at home while I can't get around Firefox at my workplace - is there any way to at least fetch the comments by different means?
Could I create a box that a site owner could embed into their page. Absolutely. But why would a site owner do that? WORDS is built for users, not site owners and would lack top-down moderation controls, etc that LiveFyre and Disqus provide.
That's why I've held back on building an injectable widget. it's dissonant with what WORDS is supposed to be.
From a skim of the source, this extension appears to ship every URL you visit to a third party. (It does so to fetch the comment count on the current URL.)
Good luck getting traction. The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps. The problem is that there are too many websites and too many incompatible "comment on any website" standards for any one of them to emerge as a clear leader.
P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?
'The web is littered with the corpses of "comment on any website" apps.'
There is one "comment on any website" tool that has existed from the beginnings of the web and still thrives. The way it works is, you put the comments on your own website.
[+] [-] RazorCrusade|11 years ago|reply
"Let’s face it. One major problem with embedded web comments is that everyone is invited to participate. They’re too open.
The WORDS community, on the other hand, is necessarily comprised of people who (a) use Chrome and (b) desire a better commenting experience. Why else would they have installed WORDS?"
That's true for now, but any system that gains any amount of steam will inevitably pick up trolls, flamers, and generally idiotic people. You can't stop it from happening. And I don't know that anyone has ever found a good solution for it. In fact, the whole 'Top Comments' and up/down-voting thing most third-party comment widgets employ is literally to combat that problem, in the hopes that garbage falls to the bottom. It obviously doesn't work perfectly and I do still agree on the whole with your assertion of it being overall detrimental to good discussion.
Anyway, I'm guess I'm mostly curious if you have plans for the future of if/when the extension gets more popular and you do start finding discussions bogged down by trolls/spammers/etc and what ways you'd try and combat such things when you have 100k+ users or whatever.
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.
Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere.
You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker News is evolving) that these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing. Just look at Digg.
So I definitely anticipate badness down the road, but feel the code foundation is there to deal with it as it comes.
[+] [-] visarga|11 years ago|reply
That also means that it will be a ghost town, and probably never bootstrap to a decent user base with interesting discussions.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|11 years ago|reply
Now, do you know something about a Google product from some years ago that did something like this, but was discontinued?
[+] [-] hrrld|11 years ago|reply
I miss _why.
[+] [-] riffraff|11 years ago|reply
It was super cool because you'd go to, say, hackernews or slashdot and if you were part of the network you'd get access to a different set of comments, but integrated in the website rather than as an external popup (individual sets of stylesheets+js had to be written for each website of course).
For example, here you'd get the blinking hood gif, and on click you'd see new comment threads appearing with red usernames. Integration came through, iirc, a custom proxy server or a greasemonkey script.
It was super cool.
[0] https://github.com/whymirror/hoodwinkd [1] http://ecmanaut.blogspot.hu/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html
[+] [-] greggman|11 years ago|reply
Downvoting IMO feels bad for the poster. They stop feeling like participating. They might have very good and insightful posts which might not be popular. The downvotes end up driving them away and all you're left with is an echo chamber of groupthink
[+] [-] notduncansmith|11 years ago|reply
In a way, it does create an echo chamber: when the community consistently downvotes things that don't conform to X (in HN's case, X usually being "well-reasoned commentary relevant to the thread"), people tend to shy away from those things. One could consider the utter lack of response gifs on HN "groupthink", in the sense that everyone knows the community is unfriendly to them so they don't post them (even when they're funny).
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
Downvotes seem like the only way to actually maintain order.
[+] [-] okonomiyaki3000|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
However, they recently took the chrome.identity package out of experimental mode and it's what I'm using for Oauth flow because it handles authentication in the browser, not in cookies and URLs.
I agree it looks sketchy and several of us have complained to Google to make it look a bit more legit. But you know how that goes.
If you're really concerned, crack open WireShark and take a look at the handshake yourself.
[+] [-] redisair|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-a...
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
Note: Re-posted with permission from Dan. Last week's post got dinged by a semi-false-positive algorithmic penalty after only a few minutes.
[+] [-] e12e|11 years ago|reply
This isn't meant as negative criticism, just trying to figure out if I've understood how it works correctly? (Note, I appreciate that the source is available, but obviously I can't know that the source you share is the source you run on your back-end. So we're back to trust, which is fine in my book).
[edit: re other clients -- the most straightforward thing to do would be to make an iframe(or js)-based proxy service (a la stumble upon) in order to enable any browser, I suppose?
I've thought about something similar, and I wonder if an XMPP back-end with one "room" pr url and the server-side log-extension might work? That should then make it trivial (unnecessary!) to enable better clients than web-only -- ie use a command line xmpp client to participate in the discussion, rather than forcing the use of the web browser. I realise many people think using the web browser is an advantage -- I generally find GUIs built on top of browsers to be slow and not very efficient. Extensions less so -- but the problem is of course that you'd have to port to Firefox, Opera, Webkit and IE (along with mobile variants) -- to achieve parity with systems like disqus etc]
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
Cold-start: convince a site with an existing audience to promote it.
[+] [-] akbar501|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, that was a great product, so I'm glad to see that you're thinking around similar lines. A meta-commenting system that runs any site is a great idea.
[+] [-] rohan404|11 years ago|reply
Only by opening the chrome inspector was I able to verify that it was indeed a valid login page and not a phising attempt as it appears to be at a cursory glance.
[+] [-] lajlev|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitzprog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
http://www.words4chrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/tc_zi...
Could I create a box that a site owner could embed into their page. Absolutely. But why would a site owner do that? WORDS is built for users, not site owners and would lack top-down moderation controls, etc that LiveFyre and Disqus provide.
That's why I've held back on building an injectable widget. it's dissonant with what WORDS is supposed to be.
[+] [-] evmar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/fivedogit/words-backend
The URL is required to retrieve the proper comment thread for that page, but is never associated with the current user.
Look for the line "else if (method.equals("getThread"))" in co.ords.w.Endpoint.java and you can follow the url variable from there.
[+] [-] ASneakyFox|11 years ago|reply
Edit: oh and it requires google login. No thanks.
[+] [-] fivedogit|11 years ago|reply
http://www.words4chrome.com/2014/about-words-login-options-a...
and
http://www.words4chrome.com/design-choices/#nonative
Even though there is no privacy downside, people are still afraid of Google and Facebook logins. I guess there's no way to change that perception.
Just out of curiosity, you and several others have singled out Google, not Facebook, for criticism re: the login. Why?
[+] [-] georgiapeach|11 years ago|reply
P.S. You list non-tracking as a differentiating feature, but how do you silence speech you don't like without tracking users?
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/
https://hypothes.is/blog/peer-review-annotation/
[+] [-] jitl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|11 years ago|reply
There is one "comment on any website" tool that has existed from the beginnings of the web and still thrives. The way it works is, you put the comments on your own website.