Mozilla to Develop Comments Platform for New York Times and Washington Post

Regardless of how successful this project ends up being, I find this to be its most interesting aspect: instead of building or buying a proprietary system, the New York Times is retaining a not-for-profit, pro-open-web organization to build what I can only assume will be a free, to-be-open-sourced platform.

I like that.

From my position as a fellow Knight grantee (i run DocumentCloud, and interact with many of the folks involved in this upcoming project) i'm pretty excited.

The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news.

And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier.

Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.

The best part of this is that Mozilla is getting money from a source other than Google.

The biggest question mark in this whole thing is how they are going to raise the level of discourse around articles via smart moderation features. News sites are often a race to the bottom in terms of comment quality where all the trolls kill off any meaningful discourse.

A while ago when this very problem for news sites was discussed on an HN thread, someone posted a pertinent question "Why should the discussion of an article occur in the same place as the article itself?". The point that person was making is that all the aggregator sites like HN and Reddit for example, have done a good job providing a forum for commenting on content posted elsewhere (like the NYTimes and WaPo). With that in mind, how would one turn this splintering into manageable communities into a feature. There needs to be a way where there is automatic segmenting based on quality of commentary. Maybe like a Major leagues, minor leagues and troll leagues, where there are two or three simultaneous threads going on. People who've never commented before and have no karma end up in the minor leagues by default. If they get upvoted enough their, their comments go to the major leagues. Likewise, if their comments get downvoted enough it ends up in the troll leagues, where the trolls can quibble among one another.

The hardest part is going to be establishing a culture that reinforces high quality content like here on HN. I can't even begin to see how you build something like that overnight. It takes weeks to months of slow stable growth with really good people to establish a high quality commentary culture that is self policing without using their moderation powers for censorship. I have no earthly idea how you create a feature that promotes the same in a community where hundreds to thousands of commenters are going to show up on day one. Maybe you could launch the comment system as a private beta feature where entry into the private beta is based on posting a really high quality comment and that good enough comments get inducted into the thread so that current private beta people can comment. Once you've posted enough such high quality comments, you get general access to participate. Then, like on HN, you eventually earn the right to upvote comments and one day, with enough points, the right to downvote comments.

> Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a news release, “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.”

So it sounds like they want to create a new social network, or at least their own form of Discourse/phpBB....why? The impetus for this seems to be the infamously dreadful comment sections of news sites...so...why not start by building a better commenting filter system? Even something that can sit atop of Disqus or any other third-party platform, and quickly sift for comments that are irrelevant, based on such heuristics as user account's signup time, the user's overall "karma", the length of comment, maybe even some configurable NLP factors to determine how relevant the content of the comment is to the overall article? This wouldn't/shouldn't have to be an auto-flag system, but merely create a priority queue of messages to be modded...which would be far more efficient than whatever system most news sites currently use.

But to build a system that is basically another social network, except for news sites? That's a lot of faith in your customers to think they'll sign up for something new that is also cognitively demanding.

Looks like they want to build a open-source discussion API with identity management (so people can be anonymous) and good moderation tools. So you can spin-up a forum, a comment box or even an HN-like community with the same API (ala Discourse/Disqus).

I don't know if I would bet on their success (see Persona, another great idea that flopped) but, a least, there are trying something big.

A little more info from Dan Skiner's blog

http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-new-...

At first I was wondering why Mozilla would send its developers out on a consulting gig instead of working on its products. But then I see that this isn't Mozilla, it's OpenNews, which seems to be some kind of internship program funded by Knight Foundation and Mozilla.

This article is misleading, almost like the NYTimes got bamboozled into thinking they were hiring Mozilla.

EDIT: This comment might be confusing now that HN changed the headline, but the NYT article still says that Mozilla is the one doing the job. If I was Mozilla I would not be happy.

Discourse seems like it'd be a good candidate and let everyone win http://www.discourse.org/

Good luck Moz.An exemple of what not to do is the Huffpo comment plateform.

It is so horrible they are downgrading to Facebook comments(which are horrible too but at least one can follow comments without context switching). I wonder who thought comments in popups were great UX,horrible and stupid.

Keep the think simple and readable.Dont over do realtime features.When I read something I dont want my eyes to be distracted with "X new comments" notifications. Dont over nest either. Limiting nesting levels is good for the discussion flow. And of course,the main job is to make moderation easy.

Online commenting is something I'm secretly passionate about.

“The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one to one pattern. And television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one to many pattern. The Internet gives us the many to many pattern.”

Think of how awesome it would be if we figured out how to refine communicating/ commenting online. Does anyone know if it's possible to contribute to this project?

Having been a product manager at a newspaper working on a comments platform.. Good luck Mozilla

Would be cool if The Times and The Post could figure out some way for their respective readers to engage each other via this new platform.

Please please please use Mozilla Persona as the login mechanism. Pretty please.

Hopefully they'll take advantage of reddit's open source and use our commenting system as a model.

Enabling comments in newspapers and website that have world wide reputation and high quality articles will reduce the number of pages visited by a single users, and will affect the final perception of the reader on the article that he read. witch in a long term will affect the future articles wrote by journalist making them targeting "narrow low minded" people that are the general stereotypes who comments on articles by letting their hidden violence go out through subjective violent comments.

please don't do that.

It will take 2 years to develop this bitch?

My bet: It will flop. Systems that take long to complete usually flop. Reminds me of Diaspora. The things that take off are usually created in a short time. Hacker News, Git...

How long did the first version of Facebook take? Wikipedia says "Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003". Does that mean it was coded in one day? Since it was a hot-or-not type site, that could very well be. About the second version - then called "Facebook" - Wikipedia says it took less then a month to code.

My most successful project ever took me one day before I launched it. My second most successful one weekend. Then years of development went into these. But only after I saw people use the core functionality.

My hope and wish for this project that it will turn into an open-source, non-profit comment system able to be deployed and plugged into any and all web apps. Kind of like what Google+ is trying to do (with comments, YouTube) but not so evil.

I find it interesting and old-school that people still assume the best way to create software is via the capital-new-project-investment system instead of the strengthen-existing systems. The latter approach takes advantage of the millions of people and the free, evolutionary market (i.e., selecting from github or the best out there, forking, etc. - like with say KHTML). The former approach is one or two people thinking they can outperform the filtering, evolutionary processes in all that (sometimes they can, but it strikes me as old school in the sense of maybe capitalism is old school in the sense of single large investments of capital).

Is this project going to interoperate with W3C web annotation efforts, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ ?

How about interoperability with crowdsourced Linked Data for events, people, places and times? NYU has a project: http://pleiades.stoa.org/ for ancient history, but the concepts apply to journalistic fact-checking.

I think it is fantastic that Mozilla is getting funding.

That being said I have some reservations about browser maker in bed with news organization. While I perceive no immediate danger, I guess I feel platform should be independent of propaganda.

interesting...kind of like a news focused discourse?

This is really cool. I'm excited to see how Mozilla takes on a CMS (or whatever it may be at that point).

Any idea where can one check the status, participate in discussions and contribute to this project?

Better idea - turn off comments.

Ha, I bet the main design goal of this system is to figure out how to make sure comments they don't like aren't right under the article. It's been typical that a highly upvoted and articulate top comment blows massive holes in the political agenda of a given article or oped. This is why so many of these publications have yanked comment sections altogether.

$3.9m over 2 years? Give me 2 years and I'll build that for $3.8m.

So Mozilla's a web development company for hire nowadays?

It seems to me that Mozilla has over expanded and is in search of a mission. A useable browser not beholden to the latest UX fads would be a start.