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Comment by robbles | Hacker News Reader

Federated comments/annotations sound really cool from a developer's point of view, but also seem like a nightmare for publishers. If you cede administrative control over the comments on your site, how do you control trolls/attacks/spam/etc.?

Services like hypothes.is can do some filtering automatically, but this is missing the level above that - editorial privileges on comments on your own domain.

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In terms of controlling for trolls/spam, etc annotation service providers will need to use the same combination of automatic filtering and editorial or community moderation that are relied on widely elsewhere. The success of any individual service will presumably at least partly depend on how good of a job they do.

Ultimately annotation is something that readers choose to enable by adding to their browser, and by choosing the service they prefer-- just as they may elect to have a discussion about the page on reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.

With regard to whether sites should be able to have editorial privileges on their own domain, or to what degree should page owners have consent over annotation, we've blogged about that here: https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation...

There's a wide diversity of opinion. Some suggested a flag where site owners could register their preference not to be annotated. Overriding that flag would invite additional scrutiny from moderators. Others have suggested that such a flag not be able to be overridden.

We also facilitated a panel discussion on this discussion at our last I Annotate conference in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2yFnu_pCGI&list=PLmuJEyeapl...

Perhaps the filtering would also be done by a third party. This isn't entirely foreign now: if you write an article online, you can't control the comments on reddit, HN or 4chan. However, users have some control over which comments they see, in that they can select which sources of comments they want, and each source has different moderation policies. The roles of publishing content and moderating comments are totally de-coupled from each other.

This is a moderator's worst nightmare. I don't think anybody on this team has ever had to deal with spam or brigading before.

It just decouples commenting communities from publishers of the content being commented on, it doesn't change (increase or decrease) the work required or tools available for moderation. In effect, it just provides a standard structure for consumer-driven discovery of what already happens in off-site discussions that already happen (e.g., via sharing and dicussing the source on social media.)

It increases the discoverability significantly. The negative information or spam that's not on your site is suddenly...on your site.

It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! review display scrolling at the front door.

(assuming I understand the proposal correctly...I didn't see much control there for website owners)

Certainly if browsers integrate annotation natively, it would increase the discoverability of conversation considerably which is of course the point.

I personally think if that is done it should require the user to purposely choose an annotation service as well. The actual act of inviting the conversation to pages should involve a user choice.

See further thoughts on the question of page owner consent-to-be-annotated in another of my replies above.

I guess you'll have to choose wisely your annotations sources... If you see too much spam on 1 source, just unsubscribe. As said earlier, it's not so different of reddit/HN discuussions abouut content. The publisher may not even be aware of the discussion.

Again, it's about discoverability. If browsers support this natively, visiting a website would put up a virtual "link" of some sort to see the discussions for every url, as you visit them. There's a difference between discussion exists somewhere, and discussion is tied to your website/url.

I think it's more like customers always being able to display Yelp reviews for the restaurant they're currently standing in front of on their phones or AR glasses or whatever.

In a world where AR glasses are ubiquitous, and each pair does this by default, sure.

> It's like making it mandatory for restaurants to have a live updating Yelp! review display scrolling at the front door.

It's more like AR technology existing and allowing consumers to have any review source they choose accessible and popping up live reviews as they walk by businesses (actually, without the actual AR part, mobile virtual assistance like Google Now provide that today based on geolocation, so much it's really something that already exists in physical space extending into cyberspace); but, yes, you control your content, but not what other people say about your content, and not how other people find and share what other people have said about your content.

I'm assuming browsers will implement this natively, with a default provider, much like they do search engines.

I'm not saying it's necessarily bad.

It is, though, more discoverable than anything preceding it in this space, assuming browsers leverage it. It would likely create a fair amount of churn.

It's more about preventing offensive remarks than honest critical reviews.

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