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Comment by thinbeige | Hacker News Reader

After reading this article over and over I am still clueless.

What is this all about? Feature-wise it doesn't sound better than a comment system from HN, Reddit or StackExchange.

Besides, Mozilla is really lacking communicational skills. This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

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> This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

Of all things Mozilla may be doing wrong, the MDN docs on html / javascript is most definitely not one of it. They are by far the best available.

> This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

This feels like an undeserved swipe to me. How many developers prepend their searches with "mdn" when they need info on browser APIs?

Agreed. MDN is for the web what MSDN is for Windows programming - long, detailed, sometimes confusing, sometimes contradictory, and the number one resource you can find online. My three top resources for web documentation are: RFCs, MDN, and StackOverflow. I'm not even sure where I would find a list of all properties that a given DOM element support and what browser version support was added if not on MDN.

I do. I feel like Mozilla is the only organization that I can trust to provide neutral, unbiased documentation about all the standardized web APIs out there.

Plus with GitHub single sign-on it's actually very easy to contribute to or edit an article (assuming most web developers have a GitHub account). I was surprised when I found that out.

MDN is so confusing when it comes to their documentation. Some pages are better than others, but some are even contradictory in what they say. Then there is the PHP documentation which is both amazing and horrible. Each page starts off with official documentation which is even worse than MDN, but then they created a community documentation on each page (for that method/function/class whatever) below the official ones which are voted up and down by randoms and actually works out to be some of the best documentation on the web. Maybe we should all just jump to community maintained documentation. If i ever am pushed to a PHP doc page, I scroll past the official documentation and read the top rated community post which almost always gives me what I need instantly.

Stackoverflow is my preferred source of course.

I personally hate MDN. I actually prefer W3Schools. I want straight to the point examples.

I'm quite the opposite. I often use MDN when I need detailed explanation of JS or DOM features. I think it's a nice resource. If I need straight examples I go to StackOverflow. W3S isn't on my list any more.

W3Schools often has incomplete or outdated information.

I don't think that's true anymore. Do you have any examples?

Stack Exchange is not a commenting system. Source: I am one of the co-founders.

That seems like an unnecessary nitpick, considering Stack Exchange clearly includes a "comment" feature. Would you care to elaborate?

I think codinghorror is just annoyed that Discourse wasn't mentioned :)

(Just kidding!)

It's a Q&A system with commenting on the Q's and A's. Similar, but different, I guess.

Sure, but even the QA is basically a post/comment system adapted to solve a different problem. It's not so weird to take the lessons learned there and apply it back to general comment systems.

- A reputation scheme for both posters and commenters.

- Pinned responses from the poster.

- The comments appear in a 'best' ordering.

- Bad comments get pushed down and hidden.

It sounds like it's a ready-to-go free open-source project like Disqus that you can host yourself instead of trusting an outside company with your user data and relying on them to keep it up. I thought the "Here’s what makes Talk different" section with the bolded topic lines was pretty to-the-point.

Well, It's pretty much a commenting platform like Disqus, but with user privacy in mind, which seems a little strange to me, since it was conceived with (stopping) trolls and harrassment in mind. Point is, isn't identifying such individuals a way to explore their online data? I might be jumping to conclusions, but it is one of those topics that stink more whenever you mess with it.

The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the shadiness of the issue. Too bad.

I'm not sure what the privacy issue is here. That moderators could connect a user's posts together? That's true of all popular platforms (where the user isn't using Tor anyway).

Right below the fold of the Talk site [0]

> We’ve created a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments.

Seems like one of its primary functions is a censorship tool. "Disruptive" is a very subjective term.

[0] https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

Well, it's an embeddable comment system that doesn't track its users, unlike major "players" like Disqus or Facebook.

If you're struggling to grasp the importance of plug-ins for commentators, there's a good explanation of their relevance in the article.

I'd suggest that the article gives enough clues about why this Mozilla Talk solution is as beneficial to news sites as it is for their readers, but you have to consider who they're competing against. Do you think this has benefits for news sites over the solutions that players like Disqus and Facebook put out?

Also: maintaining direct relationships with some of their most loyal and valuable customers is key for news sites. Relinquishing that relationship to Fb, Disqus, Reddit, et al. can add friction to their business -- their ability to generate revenue from and Talk with their readers and community.

https://digiday.com/media/times-london-finds-commenters-valu...

Yell Mozilla certainly thinks it's moderating tools are better.

There are two significant parts of the announcement:

1. Improved controls for filtering comments on prominent news sites.

2. A step towards the decentralisation of the web.

Both have potential benefits, especially if the comment filtering is user-driven.

It's about preventing wrongthink from being expressed on newspaper comment sections. Previously they just removed commenting from politically contentious stories, so I'm not sure why they're bothering with bringing it back.

No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.

Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.

Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".

Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.

It's about allowing "rightthink" comments to be expressed on politically contentious stories, without having to deal with the backlash of weeding out certain comments, or having to pay the comment weeders.

It's part of a larger narrative being sold to the 21st century investor, that AI are taking everyone's jobs, so buy your robots before someone enslaves you with theirs. (It's all still leading to the Butlerian Jihad of Dune.)

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