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Comment by ArchReaper | Hacker News Reader

Why should anyone care? I don't see anything technically novel or interesting in this.

Edit: I'm not disparaging this, I'm asking a question...

The really hard problems in this area aren't technical. They're social. Any attempt to make comments sections useful again is a welcome step.

I disagree, at a very basic level.

I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points.

As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations.

Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others.

I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.

The advantage of our technical solution Talk [1] is that we provide a flexible plugin layer. The benefit is that tools like the Perspective API [2] that provide machine learning tools to augment the experience. So really, we're providing a framework for newsrooms to attach more sophisticated tooling to solve the issue from both a technological perspective and a social one.

[1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html [2]: https://www.perspectiveapi.com

I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments.

> Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance.

> Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight

Both are an improvement over FB IMHO

Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.

Does Mozilla have a copy of the data, e.g. does it work like Disqus?

Not at all. The software Talk [1] it installed on newsroom's infrastructure. We only provide the software the makes this all work.

[1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

Do you think the Facebook "social networking" GraphQL patent applies to Talk?

https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-n...

I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.

I hope that 300KB refers to the backend code size, since one of the selling points is organizations run their own version. There's no way you need 300 KB of frontend code to render HTML from a database.

Import a JS Framework or two and you'll easily blow that 300kB.

Woe be to the person still on dialup modem. 300kb on a 56k modem is around a full minute download if memory serves. Of course said modem user is probably already drowning in javascript frameworks anyway.

My point is that compared with Facebook SDK this project is tiny

I understand your point, I just hijacked your comment to voice my frustration about current trends.

I tried checking the actual size of the JS being loaded, but since the site for an article I opened made over 500 requests to load the page after I turned off add blockers I gave up. In their case, 300kB _is_ tiny.

Here's one that is of size half-tiny then :- ) another open source embedded commenting system, with different features & look, & 150 kb JS:

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments.

I'm developing this. Still, even just 150 kb is actually a bit slow, on slow 3G connections.

The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.

Here's another open-source & ad-free & track-free alternative, 150 kb lightweight, + some unique features & look.

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (I'm developing it, ... submitted yesterday, no one noticed)

You asked it in a pretty disparaging way, though. The way you phrased that, it seemed like you weren't asking in good faith, but were rather sarcastically saying it, with the underlying tone being "this is stupid."

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