Hacker News Reader

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Agreed. I trust the guy who runs uBlock Origin over AdBlock Plus not for any great reason, but because I vaguely remember people on this site recommending it.

I imagine people could delegate moderation responsibility to people and organizations with a strong reputation. Let's say GNU, EFF, and Larry Lessig would all publish moderation data and metadata; as well as your "friends" on various social media sites, friends-of-friends, etc.

unescapeon Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

Disagreeable people also tend to get fired more, in my experience. Perhaps it balances out, which would explain why there are still disagreeable people.

unescapeon Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

Somebody at Google could write a memo proposing that sexism might not be the only possible explanation of why a majority of their top engineers are male.

unescapeon Polari: the dead language of gay British men

Significantly more rights than who? Christians?

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Better than having news outlets embed them, is having browsers support mixing federated comments with the original content. How about it, Mozilla, Brave, and Chromium? Afraid to bite the hand that feeds you?

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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?

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

It seems that their goal is to help sites move away from 3rd-party comment management services such as Facebook and Disqus. Based on this discussion, I think federated (not site-owned) comments are the way to go long-term. Maybe Talk can eventually be adapted to help with decentralized comment moderation.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing

Isn't comment collapsing in HN the same as downvoting? I find this confusing - or maybe I just don't have enough karma for the actual downvote button.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

I'm just going to point out that Mozilla and the NSF recently offered $2M for ideas to decentralize the web.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-dec...

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

My observation is that Mozilla Talk does nothing to advance the decentralized Web, so why is it a good thing?

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Then this is evidence that comments should not be on the site. It's not the place of the newsroom to control discussion.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Individuals publishing psuedonymous moderation would provide the necessary data, provided privacy concerns can be addressed.

I.e. as I upvote your comment, I publish the info that "user XYZ upvoted this comment" which you can use in your own user-local moderation schema (at your discretion).

What we have to avoid is when Potential Employer looks for info on "John Q. Smith", they can identify which articles he upvoted.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

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.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

This is a step in the right direction, but why hand control to the newsroom as opposed to the user?

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

The end user should always be in control.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

The feature I want is, as a site user, to apply my own set of filtering and moderation criteria.

E.g. "I don't want to see comments posted by user XYZ, or containing regexp W. Any comments by user ABC, or upvoted by ABC, or containing regexp D, go to the top. I trust the moderation of site trollblocker.com"

I don't see these kinds of ideas represented in the user engagement research.

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case.

https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/

unescapeon Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

Mozilla Talk could be useful if it let me apply my own moderation schema (filters, blocklists, etc). It looks like another totally centralized moderation tool:

https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

The only explanation of their approach is that they did "an enormous amount of research". This sounds about as convincing as someone claiming "Oh, I took a class in that."

unescapeon People Don’t Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness

More than 0% and less than 100%.

unescapeon People Don’t Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness

If I can produce something that will benefit 10 million people such that they would gladly pay $1 each for it, but I'd just as soon not do it unless I get paid that money, then it's in the interest of those 10 million people that I get $10M for my work.

unescapeon People Don’t Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness

> Why should a software engineer make $250k+?

Because people are paid for the value of what they produce, not the effort they spend producing it.

unescapeon People Don’t Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness

> we are not saying we want everybody to have equal wealth. The concern is about rising inequality

How can rising inequality be a bad thing, unless (wealth) inequality in itself is also a bad thing?

unescapeon Maybe We All Need a Little Less Balance

I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others.

Another way of looking at this is: rather than basing your enjoyment of life on pursuing a pleasant hobby (which you may or may not be able to get paid for), instead derive your enjoyment from doing things that need to be done.

In our society that translates roughly to "earning a living by helping others". If this is your source of satisfaction, you don't need very much luck.