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Comment by unescape | Hacker News Reader

The end user should always be in control.

You say that, but have you considered the downsides?

Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

The musician can display whatever they want on their website; they don't have to host content they don't like. In the "dream" commenting system, the comments are independent; you can apply your own filters and fetch comments from sources the site owner may not approve of.

But they're still associated with that site, and that musician.

Only in the sense that someone who makes a Wix site that says "Neil Young Sux" is associated with Neil Young.

I disagree. I don't think this is like that at all. Especially given now that comments are displayed on the actual site in question. If you're going to say it's something separate, then now you're talking about Twitter or, more likely, Mastodon.

If you look at the top-level comment you're replying to, we're describing "an ideal commenting system", not Mozilla Talk.

> Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments

In my mind it would be the users, not the site owners that would enable the comments.

> People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?

My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to. Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into the system to make it easy for site owners to suggest a "default" moderation stream that the end-users can opt-in to.

In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored.

Isn't this now Mastodon? If it's not actually connected to the site in question?

"My advice in this case would be to create a moderator stream that the end users can subscribe to."

That sounds like a pretty complex thing to do, which doesn't solve the problem of, "The comments on my site are overrun with people posting racial slurs."

"In this case the site owners would be able to moderate comments through voluntary cooperation with its users, but it wouldn't be able to censor opinions that it didn't agree with, because the end users would always be in control of how its stream is filtered and would always be able to verify that on-topic posts aren't censored."

I don't believe that's actually a problem, though. You can always go make your own site if you want your voice heard.

doesn't solve the problem of, "The comments on my site are overrun with people posting racial slurs."

I think you're misunderstanding the proposal. Comments and moderation are independent of the site, not on the site.

If distributed commenting and moderation is too complex to implement, then we need to move to network designs that make it simpler.

Commenting systems are setup and enabled by the admins of the site. Otherwise you're just talking about Twitter or Mastodon.

We're talking about something like Twitter or Mastodon but (a) can be found using the original URL of the site, as in IPFS or content-addressable networking; and (b) uses distributed opt-in moderation, meta-moderation, and filtering; like a decentralized AdBlock.

It's something that doesn't actually exist yet, but maybe will.

So they're still associated with the site, but don't actually keep people on the site, site owners have no ability to screen content of these comments which are still associated with the site, and it seeks to deny revenue to the site.

I'm sure you'll have hoards of sites signing up for that.

No, the idea is that they don't sign up for it. It's independent of the originating site.

Except it's not, because you still want it to be associated with the site. If you just want to comment on something, you already have Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, your own blog, and probably a dozen other outlets. What you're asking for is the added legitimacy of the site itself, without their consent.

It's literally like having a browser add-on enable comments on a website by appending the Reddit/HN thread after an article [1]. But with the added benefit of the user being able to choose from a number of algorithmic/community moderation strategies to apply to the existing comments in order to show/hide/rank them.

[1] This add-on actually exists for YouTube/Reddit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-on-you....

Read the top-level comment from hello_there:

In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client.

What he is asking for is the exact opposite of "the added legitimacy of the site itself". He's asking for a user interface to integrate content that does not come from the site itself.

That would be a lot cooler than another comment moderation system, of which there are already multiple open-source implementations. Could someone at least provide an argument of why Mozilla Talk is better than the existing solutions?

If that's what you want, then again, you have multiple sources for that. Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, your own blog, etc.

What's still needed is a set of tools to

1. Aggregate comments from Mastodon, personal blogs, etc.

2. Interact with these comments by upvoting and applying filters, etc (i.e. moderate)

3. Publish your moderation actions and apply the same type of metadata from other moderators (and moderation aggregators).

If Talk has any value, it's to serve as a starting point for Tool 2.

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