Hacker News Reader

Funny, I've always hated scrolling down and accidentally seeing comments on news articles, which are almost uniformly garbage. I think it's a terrible way to present any kind of serious story, it makes for a worse experience.

If I want to discuss an article, there's Twitter, Reddit, etc. The NYT used to have a good public editor (Margaret Sullivan) you could complain to, but she's long gone.

I will say that The Verge has a good approach, where there's a comment section on every story but it's hidden behind a button at the bottom you have to actively click. That's a fine compromise.

One of the nice features of Google reader was that you would see discussions of urls by people in your contacts.

A similar filter could be really useful for this sort of discussion plugin.

> If I want to discuss an article, there's Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Most articles don't have a Reddit thread, and it's impossible to view commentary around a URL on Twitter in any kind of cohesive forum-like way.

Also, I don't want to have to constantly be copying and pasting URL's into other sites. I just want it right there automatically.

Funnily, this is an idea that keeps recurring. I talked with a would-be founder circa 1999 who wanted a discussion sidebar for every website. He too was excited about wresting control of the experience of a site from the site's owners. My memory is kinda fuzzy here, but I think this is what the idea turned into:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000301142549/http://www.shopto...

It looks like it went from being a global community (which raises lots of questions, both the ones you mention and things like who moderates it) to something with a much clearer revenue model, one where companies pay for add-on forums. And then blew up at the same time Bubble 1.0 did.

The fact that people keep trying this but that we still don't have it makes me suspect there are fundamental flaws, but I've been wrong about that before.

> a much clearer revenue model

can you please explain the business model?

Your url comment reminds me of the concept of the semantic web [0] Whereby we can have a structured machine readable and pure URL structure backed by ontology and linked data. There's a project that is working on this for Wikipedia called Dbpedia. [1]

[0] Unfortunately this concept has been completely bastardized by random research groups shoehorning the technology for EU grants, from my experience working in one such group.

[1] https://www.dbpedia.org/

That reminds me of Wikidata[0], which aims to be a general purpose semantic knowledge graph, which runs on Wikibase[1], a MediaWiki extension set that you can run yourself for any collection of data.

[0] https://wikidata.org/

[1] https://wikiba.se/

I desperately do not want this to succeed. Who moderates it? No moderation means a fractal of spam, hate, propaganda, and low-value posts. You cannot have a system like this that's resistant to Sybil attacks without centralization or federation (or at least not without forcing users to get into crypto to use it... No thanks).

You either accept that it's centralized, and it becomes siloed (see: reddit, Twitter) or you federate it and it's an echo chamber or nearly empty.

Who moderates wikipedia?

Unpaid contributors who care a lot about maintaining the quality of articles (and spend a lot of time doing so).

Editors, controlled by a (mostly benevolent) centralized authority

I really don't think that is the case, but I'm interested to hear why you think it is. In my understanding the community is not controlled by a central authority.

The rules for how Wikipedia is edited are ultimately set by the people who run Wikimedia. They have the final say. It's a centralized service (there is a single Wikipedia at a singular domain, being the sole source of truth).

In the context of this discussion, there is no such notion of a federation of wikis on various hosts contributing to the content. There's obviously no decentralization of Wikipedia.

Wikimedia is therefore the centralized authority.

Yup it sounds awful, at least with Reddit and to a much lesser extent Twitter the conversation is kept somewhat in control by people having to subscribe to a Subreddit or follow accounts that interest them.

Imagine the signal to noise ratio on some random NY Times article, or any other moderately popular website. I expect most people are thankful the NY Times only enables comments on selected articles.

> Imagine the signal to noise ratio on some random NY Times article

Yes, it's pretty fine on the articles they enable it for. They're sorted by upvotes so the first few comments are usually pretty decent. There's no reason to think it would be different on the articles they don't enable it for, since they're enabled on a wide range of types of articles (straight news, divisive opinion, etc.).

> I expect most people are thankful the NY Times only enables comments on selected articles.

I think it's the exact complete opposite -- nobody is thankful for that. Comments don't appear unless you click to open the comments panel, so anybody who never wants to see comments, never does. But of course people who do want to see comments, are prevented from doing so if they haven't been enabled.

OK, let's spitball. Maybe too much for an HN comment, but here we go:

- Define an open protocol

- There are multiple viewers (browser plug-ins), so different users can choose a different viewing/comment ranking interface experience

- There are multiple "channels" of comments for any piece of content, but usually channels will be topic-wide, sitewide, or even internet-wide. All content for a channel comes from a single server. If channels were pulling from existing sites, an episode of TV might have a channel of Reddit comments, a channel of Vulture comments, a channel of AV Club comments, and anyone can create a channel. (Maybe Reddit and Vulture don't participate at all)

- The person/group who runs a channel does/delegates all of the moderation for that channel. They do this out of the good of their hearts, much like Reddit moderators

- Each plug-in gives you a default, or a choice of, approved/blocked channel lists according to your political/cultural/etc. preferences. These lists are maintained similar to adblock lists, each of which are curated by groups with those preferences. So you can avoid unmoderated toxic channels or view them exclusively

- And so each viewer will combine all of the comments from all approved channels into a single comment list. Each top-level comment can come from a different channel, but all subcomments always belong to that same channel. When you leave a top comment, you can choose which channel to leave it in (or have it default to whichever channel is most popular, similar to picking the most popular subreddit on a certain topic)

- User accounts are managed by separate servers, but user servers don't hold comments/upvotes/etc. They merely provide signing to prove comments came from the same user, index comments left by that user, sum the user's received votes (which can be independently verified by the channels), etc. These servers are similarly moderated to kick out abusive users. Channels don't allow comments from users from user servers that don't kick out abusive users. Ultimately your identity is proved by a private key you can always take to a new server. Probably, the groups behind the most popular channels and/or most popular lists will provide these user servers as well

Whaddaya think?

I thought about this sort of thing as a reddit replacement. Browser extension that creates a forum on any arbitrary page. Backend is just nntp so pick your own server.

Can't work on it because of corporate ip ownership and all that nonsense. It's a pretty trivial idea though, pretty much anyone could implement it if you don't bother writing a bespoke news client.

>Can't work on it because of corporate ip ownership and all that nonsense.

Is this an American thing? I'd understand that being an issue if you were using company provided equipment, doing it on company time, or creating a competitor.

But if you're just doing a side project in your own time on your own computer, how can your employer assert any sort of ownership over that?

Yes, it's an American thing.

The details are immaterial. Who stores the data at rest? If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense. If it's controlled by a central authority, it's subject to the whims of that authority. If you choose a federated hub (a la Mastodon), you're stuck in your echo chamber or an empty room.

The protocol doesn't matter. Right now, those are the only three options (minus crypto) given our current technology. Without going into the technical feasibility of your solution of federated identity with distributed storage or deciding who becomes a moderator or how to avoid a bad actor spinning up thousands of servers to create millions of fake users to spam or any of the other problems, the issue is social: people choose to be in the place where the moderation is most agreeable to them, which will become the natural partition for how the users divide themselves. Whoever those moderators are responsible to (how do you get "fired"? who decides?) ultimately answers the question of centralized, federated, or distributed, and decides the implications and downsides of that approach.

> Who stores the data at rest?

Each channel stores all the comments left on it. (They're not copied anywhere else, except for caching clients might choose to implement.)

> If it's distributed, you have a cesspool of spam and nonsense.

Channels that moderate will not, and most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate.

> people choose to be in the place where the moderation is most agreeable to them

Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use, like I said maintained analagously to adblock lists. There would probably be one or two popular "mainstream" lists, and then various "progressive-only", "right wing-only", "lulz" etc. ones.

Think of it basically like Reddit, except each subreddit is its own server (channel) that moderates according to its own policies, and whenever you view a NYTimes article you pull up combined comments from the well-moderated subreddits and not from the badly/un-moderated ones.

Does that make sense?

> Yes, those would be the lists of approved channels that clients use

Who moderates the list of channels? Who decides which curated lists of channels are available?

> most people won't be viewing channels that don't moderate.

Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that the moderators are doing their jobs, nominates new ones, and fires ineffective ones?

> Does that make sense?

Nothing you described is technically infeasible, it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers.

The problem is not in storing or distributing the bytes, it's about policy and governance. What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people). Someone is still in charge, just not a singular centralized authority. That's a federated system, and they exist already, and the social and political problems with running them are well known.

> Who moderates the list of channels?

Like I said, groups of people create lists the way adblock lists are currently created.

> Who decides which curated lists of channels are available?

Viewers will come with default popular lists (like adblockers do), but anyone can add any list or channels directly.

> Who decides the moderation policies? Who enforces that

The owner(s) of each channel.

> it's just you're trying to describe a federated system while avoiding storing data on federated servers.

Exactly, since there are a lot of problems we know are associated with that.

> What you're describing is a federated system, with power being put in the hands of the people who maintain the lists of channels and the people who decide which lists to publish to their users (assuming they're different people)

Exactly. That's really the most crucial part here.

> the social and political problems with running them are well known.

Are they? Because I'm not aware of any federated system set up in this particular way. Subreddit moderation works pretty well, and adblock lists that adblockers use work pretty well, so I'd love to know if there's an obvious social/political gotcha I'm missing here.

I know crypto is a curse word here, but what you're describing is literally a perfect use case for IPFS and a DAO

...or just basic public key crypto for non repudiation and authorization of admin actions.

How would IPFS help here? IPFS is a data-replication utility - it doesn't work well for mutable data (eg. comments).

I agree with your idea - I've been working on a similar one for a while.

However, what you write above could almost completely describe USENET news groups. Learning what worked for USENET news and what did not will give you a starting place for this idea.

For the most part, USENET discussions worked just as well as Reddit discussions according to the skill and motivation of the moderators, although that was the very early net and most of those involved were educated white men, not teenagers or nations engaging in information warfare.

I'm continuing to work on a design for a federated discussion system just because I think the world needs discussion boards that aren't bound by national law or corporate desire any more than necessary.

However, I think the original intent of the sidewiki stuff was slightly different. That said, they could be a combined system, with one presentation of the various groups/subs/channels being via a reddit like website, and another being a side bar attached to a web browser window. It depends on what is being discussed.

I want it to be a small-ish group of people I care about.

>And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Reddit), giving more weight to users who are consistently upvoted, etc.

This is what I most certainly would not want to see. The prioritisation of "upvoted" content and comments is the number one source of all kinds of perverse problems with modern social media (echo chambers, manipulation, incentivisation of simplistic or short-form content, promoting base anger and outrage, etc)

> The prioritisation of "upvoted" content and comments is the number one source of all kinds of perverse problems with modern social media

I (unsurprisingly) like the HN method… the public can’t see the exact number of votes for a comment, but the comments are still ordered by number of votes. And comments with negative votes are styled differently, but you don’t know exactly what the vote totals are.

Yes, you can still have echo chambers and manipulation, but it’s more difficult to effectively manipulate. (At least without a lot of external coordination, in which case the site is already fighting a losing battle).

Yep, the main problem is that whatever.com could be a completely different page for user A and B, and if they both commented on it, they'd be commenting about different things, then user C goes to view it, and is confused.

Which could be helped by storing the page source or something (which still has a ton of issues associated with it) but then you have a problem of discovery, and how do users tell the pages apart with the same URL? Simple version numbers?

Another problem is you might have 2 URLs that are basically the same page, but with some query parameters that subtlety distinguish them - they are different URLs though. Should there really be two discussion sections for a page that's only differentiated by a referral link or a stylistic preference? Probably not, but there is not an objective metric here we can use to make the call.

What if we use just the base path, e.g. facebook.com? It could be useful for small sides but for large sides you'll run into issues with scoping topics.

it's a really hard problem IMO

You want the reddit sidebar back...

I miss the reddit sidebar. But it got blocked because new technology does not allow it.