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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I'm a web editor at a regional news site, and moderating reader comments is a huge pain in the neck, largely because of the inherent anonymity of the web.

A few years back, I tried to come up with a solution. I created Truyoo (http://www.truyoo.com), which essentially requires a user to pay a one-time nominal fee (less than $2) to confirm their identity. They would then be issued a Truyoo ID, which could be used to comment on any site that used Truyoo.

For legitimate, constructive commenters, this is extremely inexpensive -- but it quickly becomes very expensive for spammy/abusive users.

Unfortunately, Truyoo never gained traction, largely because no publisher was willing to ask its users to pay even a tiny one-time fee to comment.

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It has nothing to do with anonymity. It has everything to do with the content on which people comment. For example, political articles are bound to bring in opposing viewpoints. And if you allow anyone to comment, you're bound to bring in a lot of people.

I'm convinced if you want to keep the level of discourse up, you can have a (mostly) homogeneous group of commenters and a large scale site or a small group of heterogeneous commenters, but you cannot have both scale and heterogeneity.

By charging your users to comment, you're probably going to reduce scale.

It's a great point that there aren't any obvious examples in the US of large heterogenous groups with good comments. That said I also am not aware of any attempt to do even Slashdot-like crowdsourced voting (including explanation of reasons for voting, meta-moderation) at scale, or to take the next step and provide a richer user experience to make it easy for users to be able to filter out what they don't want do see.

From a publisher's point of view, it has a lot to do with anonymity. Ever try to block a determined troll?

it has a lot to do with anonymity. simply look at techcrunch and what happened overnight with real names- quite large and homogenous too.

Removing anonymity discourages normal users who don't want to leave a permanent record that may come back to haunt them later ("The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink").

I agree. Anonymity is essential for honest discussion. Anonymity is almost required to know what people "really" think. That's why we created Spottiness. In our site, every "spot" has to be anonymous or won't be published. Our challenge is to weed out the garbage while we make it very easy for everybody to say what they think.

So you think 4Chan is the epitome of honesty?

Never heard of that site. I gave it a look and realized that your comment is ironic, but still I'll reply: Our content is heavily moderated, so the obvious crap that 4Chan shows has no possibility of being published. Yet, if somebody has something interesting to say about pornography, we provide the anonymous channel, as long as the idea meets common sense standards of civility and good taste.

Why does your site have user accounts?

It seems like it's combining different audiences at once - the red ones are transmission of random teenage angst (better to put in any pseudonymous journal site or tumblr), the gold ones are positive reviews (seems like they're safe on Yelp), and no black ones have actually appeared in the time I've had this window open.

It's nice that the page live-scrolls, but then why does Read More reload the page?

> Yet, if somebody has something interesting to say about pornography

They might not care whether you think it meets your standard of good taste?

> Why does your site have user accounts?

We will use registered users to help us moderate our content. We also want to work, eventually, on creating a network of trust. By the way, user accounts are optional, not required to create spots or comment about them.

> It seems like it's combining different audiences at once...

The fundamental difference between our service and tumblr, yelp, etc, is that our main content (the spots) must be anonymous. We don't want to know who is the author of a spot. Anonymity is the core of what we do because what matters to us is only what people think.

So far, about 50% of the spots are goldspots, and the other 50% evenly divided between blackspots and lovespots. The fact that goldspots are dominating makes us happy.

> why does Read More reload the page?

Read More takes you the the page of the specific spot.

> They might not care whether you think it meets your standard of good taste?

Common sense is common (pun intended). If a spot doesn't look "publishable" to us at Spottiness, the probability that it will look the same to the majority is high.

Thanks for taking the time to look at our site!

It's probably up there. Would you mind spelling the name correctly?

Just because anonymity might be useful in some online discussion forums does not mean it's necessarily appropriate or best for all online discussion forums.

Most newspapers require letters to the editor that appear in their print editions to be signed with the person's real name, and they suffer no shortage of letters as a result of that policy. I see no reason why they can't hold online users to the same standards.

Great concept - the more available approaches the better. It also works fairly well for Something Awful.

My problem with the site is that my intuitive malware/scam heuristics would get a false positive on the site, if you hadn't vouched for it here on Hacker News. If you changed the design, it might help a little, but you obviously still need to figure out the market for the service.

On the positive side, companies are starting to realize that they aren't handling comment systems very well.

Something Awful is also heavily, heavily moderated and it's a group of fairly like-minded people, especially in the subforums outside GBS. If I remember right, I think the $10 charge was more to recoup costs of running the site. Keeping out crazies is a side effect.

It's not very heavily moderated, but it does have moderators that can be summoned with the report buttons.

One of the first things you learn on SA is to "grow a thicker skin", because there aren't enough moderators with sufficient time to stop users from ganging up on some people and giving them a hard time. And as a result, moderators also allow a harsher tone.

The moderators are vital, but I wouldn't say that they are moderating heavily.

It does show the relevance of communities like SA versus random gatherings of visitors that most comment systems on websites constitute.

I think heavy, but not overly up-front moderation is the key to building a good discussion - this simply means clearing out comments which are superfluous - thereby creating richer, more readable content.

I tried the same with a social networking site (Like Reddit/HN) about a year ago. When I asked users to pay even $1 to try it, no one was interested in doing so.

http://e1ven.com/2010/09/15/lonava-com-retrospective/

ended up working extremely well for metafilter, though

What was the incentive for them to pay?

Heh ... I tried to do almost exactly what you tried to do, with similar results:

http://coding.pressbin.com/50/10-web-start-ups-all-mine--and...

Check out the blurbs on Truyoo, Utopic, and ioFeed.

Wow, reading through that, and looking at Utropic, it's amazing how similar our projects were. We had many of the same aims, ambitions, problems, and results.

I think your analysis of the situation (No Co-Founder, Not fully invested) was true for both of us, but I also, particularly after reading your ioFeed post.. We're creating technical solutions to problems.

That's not enough. Saying "I can improve on Facebook" doesn't take into account the huge network effect, and it doesn't solve the problem of getting people onto your site.

It's a good reminder that the tech isn't enough by itself.

"I'm a web editor at a regional news site, and moderating reader comments is a huge pain in the neck"

Right. You're doing it wrong.

Stop moderating reader comments. Let readers moderate reader comments.

Stop creating one way comment systems. Create ways for readers to converse with reporters.

At hacker news for example, all sorts of entrepreneurs come by and all sorts of startup wannabe employees come through as well.

When was the last time you saw a reporter have any serious interaction with his readers in the comments?

Bear in mind that mainstream, general-interest news sites can't get away with (or don't perceive themselves as being able to get away with) allowing incredibly offensive content to just sit there, waiting for other readers to flag it.

Works for some brands -- not for others.

> For legitimate, constructive commenters, this is extremely inexpensive

actually compared to the status quo, free, it's extremely expensive.

Only if your time has no value.

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