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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

Comments you can't turn off and can't moderate and from which you can't ban misbehaving users seem to me like they will turn immediately into a cesspool of hate, bullying and stupidity.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson by now. Free speech, by awful people, is overrated and can result in disasters.

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Its a double edged sword. I'm actually working on building an anonymous posting board for facebook where users can switch between their news feed and the anonymous board. Creating a non hateful, troll filled anonymous environment is a mighty challenge, but I dont believe its impossible and thats part of why im attempting to take this on. There are benefits and detriments to every annotation/commenting system out there. Moderation is a high priority, but i havnt been able to come up with a solution. This article also failed to mention how they imagine moderation fitting in. Is it possible to crowd source moderation, rather than centralize it? And can it be done with anonymity?

Crowdsourced moderation, like downvote buttons on certain websites, hasn't worked particularly well. Wikipedia probably has the most appropriate moderation model I've come across. I'd mostly be concerned that annotation could become a stalker tool unless services are vetted for moderation.

Crowdsourced moderation always results in groupthink, without exception. If you don't forcibly specify and ruthlessly enforce the groupthink as something respectful, considerate, reasoned and elevated, then you will get Nazis, and you will turn into Reddit. This is an iron law of the internet.

But that's generally not how annotator.js is ever implemented. It has user authentication backends (several last I checked). And it is usually used within small teams in apps like http://www.annotationstudio.org/

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