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Mozilla Working On a New Website Comment System
sfcrazy writes Mozilla is working on developing a content and commenting platform in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post. The platform aims to be the next-generation commenting and content creation platform which will give more control to readers. Mozilla says in a blog post, “The community platform will allow news organizations to connect with audiences beyond the comments section, deepening opportunities for engagement. Through the platform, readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions, and manage their contributions and online identities. Publishers will then be able to collect and use this content for other forms of storytelling and spark ongoing discussions by providing readers with targeted content and notifications.” The project is being funded by Knights Foundation.
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Remember the comment bar plugin Google had for Firefox back before the Chrome days? It let you comment on ANY webpage? Anyone who had the plugin could see you comment. Side Wiki or something? I can't recall the name.
Yeah, this sounds a little like that.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Web browser maker decides to create a disqus competitor, instead of working on their web browser.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Single sign-on is a fine thing. But let's encourage people to run their own message bases, because I'm tired of having to figure out which domains I need to permit scripts from, and because I don't really want one company aggregating all my comments without even having to work for them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is probably the "least bad" one I've seen. It would be nice if multiple ratings could be applied to a post, ("+1 funny, +1 insightful, -1 Troll") but it is fairly good at reducing the trolls and flamage.
Best Slashdot Co
Such systems already exist. There is one from Facebook, another one from Disqus, and many more. They always use this to track users across websites (since it's usually some sort of iFrame, if you stay logged on, you can track users over different websites) and sell the information to third parties. I wonder if Mozilla wants to get into that system or not. I'd be surprised (and disappointed) if they did.
Will this system support the moderation (a.k.a. censorship) of comments?
I can't see mainstream media corporations adopting it if it does not support the editing or removal of commentary they disagree with.
But does supporting such functionality conflict with Mozilla's mission and the Mozilla Manifesto? Can Mozilla really claim to stand for openness and freedom while simultaneously creating a system that supports overt and indisputable censorship?
So decentralisation of commenting, with a unified account?
Sounds a lot like Disqus to me, which most people thoroughly hate.
At a time when news organizations are shuttering their comment sections?
One news agency after another are realizing that comments actually *hurt* readership because there are enough asshole commenters out there posting crap, that it's actually turning off readers from their service entirely.
Well, the core of Firefox was written more than 10 years ago, and while it didn't necessarily have to be that way, the truth is that it has simply not kept up. Just getting Firefox to optimally use a modern multi-core processor is considered a massive effort. It is time for Mozilla to close down Firefox development (like they did with Thunderbird). Or at the very least, fork Chrome - it's been done before and it will give them instant parity with all modern web browsers.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
You've never been to reddit. That commenting system is close to perfect. It does it's job, and it's scaleable.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Shhhh! 1st rule of usenet, and all that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Will it look up your voting record by scavenging your computer? Will you automatically make electronic transfers to the charity of Mozilla's choice when you use it? Will the mob form up at your house if you haven't voted for ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdot does. Mark someone as a foe. Gone.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Within the past 18 months along with the whole web site. It's gotten really JS heavy and the comments section (which is only allowed to fill the right 1/3 of the browser window), which makes it really painful to use and browse the comments.
I liked the older system which had the comments on the bottom of the news story instead of on the side.
It's may not be practical, but it would almost be nice to see an IMDB style comments section for every story the way IMDB has one for every cast member and every film/show entry. If IMDB can make it scale to ~8.8 million personalities and titles I would think the NY Times could. At 500 stories/day it would take them 48 years to hit IMDB scale.
The Fine Summary states that the sponsor is the Knights Foundation. But the story makes reference to the Knight Foundation.
Knights Foundation: does good works with London juvies.
Knight Foundation: does good works with news organizations.
/. eds: Please review and fix or clarify.
Will
the System comments you! ... sorry... had to....
It's the Internet. "People" hate everything.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Disqus already exists and it's terrible.
Most forums do have that. It's called an ignore list. They've had such a feature since forever ago.
Likewise I have been trying to find or remember this tool.
I though it a very interesting idea. What happened to it?
That's all I really want. The media seems to think that news is crowdsourcing common opinion. This will not add value to Firefox or the NYT.
You can set a karma modifier for foes and for friends; if you set your foes to have -6 karma, then they're going to be at -1 forever to your view and thus not show up. I know there's at least one Slashdot user who sets their friends to +1 karma, and their foes to +6 so as to not mod them up by mistake, which strikes me as a pretty backwards way of doing things.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
1: meh... It is the web... it's what people do on the web, make new things. 2: It's not twitter. There are a lot of people who would think that's a definite positive.
As long as it doesn't want access to all your personal information from any and all networks you might belong to, sure why not. But really, it's probably just a way for Mozilla and the others involved to cash in on data mining. It's interesting only in who is doing it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
...which is precisely why I don't (and won't) use such commenting systems. Single sign-on is a terrible idea.
This. Disqus is horrible. Even if it worked right, it would still be horrible.
A number of things, but the three worst, in my view, are that it is very often extremely slow to load (and sometimes fails to load at all), it requires me to allow Disqus to run Javascript, and it involves a third party (Disqus) sitting between me and the blog -- which means that I have to allow myself to be tracked across multiple websites just so I can make a comment.
Sites that use Disqus are sites that don't allow comments as far as I'm concerned.
"So decentralisation of commenting, with a unified account?"
Never. People want their 8 dozen sockpuppets.
Now I can flame them for abandoning their perfectly secure old sync method in favor of a "simpler" but much less secure username and password scheme.
To their credit, the move was widely praised on "tech sites"(1) as a welcome change.
(1): "tech sites" - Websites created or managed by hipsters with iPads that know what a partition is and wear NERD t-shirts. They also reformat their mom's computer from time to time. See: slashdot, arstechnica
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I would love to have more modern version of Usenet. A simple news and commenting protocol that can be implemented in a web browser or a dedicated client alike. Something that is ubiquitous as RSS feeds. I have a client that aggregates all the latest articles from my favorite sites and and then can go in and browse comments in a tree like structure. I would have the ability to mark individual stories and even sub-threads to follow or know what comments I have read or have yet to read. Hell, I doubt that something like that would really be that hard to hack into RSS or design from scratch in XML.
Personally, I miss the early days of the internet where everything had a tool, and there was a tool for everything. There were programs and protocols galore: HTTP, Gopher, Usenet, Email, FTP, IRC, Archie / Veronica, Telnet for BBSes. Most of them are dead or so niche to be included only for "legacy compatibility". Now there is just HTTP to rule them all and shit is boring.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
"The most ambitious aim of the project is to create a feature that would efficiently highlight the most relevant and pertinent reader comments on an article, perhaps through word-recognition software."
The object of the game is to get a complete load of bollocks accepted as the most relevant and pertinent reader comment on as many articles as possible. Extra points for the front page and headline articles.
It also works horribly on mobile sites with nested comments basically being a huge vertical stacking of one word. And putting it into landscape mode does not make it scale to fit.
Give less control to readers and allow the screaming angry retarded mob to reinforce itself by rabidly banning the 1% of people who don't agree with them.
Sure, people 'hate' everything. But Disqus doesn't have much going for it, other than being cross-site. Only one level of thread indentation, the frequent downtime, how it ties in with Twitter and Facebook is both a positive and a negative, etc.
While I generally support Mozilla's endeavors, as one of the last bastion of noob-to-guru accessible, Free/open source, secure and most important privacy respecting software around, this has me worried. The statement about "Publishers will then be able to collect and use this content for other forms of storytelling and spark ongoing discussions by providing readers with targeted content and notifications." could mean yet another data mining and targeted advertising opportunity, for instance.
The only way I could see any value in this for users is if it adheres to privacy-respecting principles. We've seen a handful of alternatives on the net, such as Disqus, but ultimately these tend to centralize personal information, not much different than 'log in via Facebook, Google etc.." . We don't need any more of this; I give up convenience all the time and create a variety individual site accounts specifically to avoid someone being able to see and profile all the sites upon which I comment.
Now, giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that this endeavour is built out of their "Persona" project ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... ) , which seems to be the best SSO type option I've seen on the web, at least in theory. It requires only an email address, doesn't disseminate personal information all around the web or allow for site-owners / third parties to mine your data, and what little information that passes through Mozilla is under their privacy policy which is very reasonable. Mozilla has shown in the past, especially with Sync, that there are ways to provide convenience to users while protecting their privacy, so I'd like to think that Persona could very well do the same. However, I am worried that this project, funded by third party grants and media giants, may have other interests in mind. If this is the case, I'd prefer that Mozilla not sully themselves by getting involved.
I suppose time will tell. I can only hope Mozilla has the fortitude to make the decisions that put user intent and privacy before the whinging financial desires of data miners and trackers.
Personally, I miss the early days of the internet where everything had a tool, and there was a tool for everything. There were programs and protocols galore: HTTP, Gopher, Usenet, Email, FTP, IRC, Archie / Veronica, Telnet for BBSes. Most of them are dead or so niche to be included only for "legacy compatibility". Now there is just HTTP to rule them all and shit is boring.
Boy, I miss that about the Internet too, where you had open protocols and then people chose their own interface to use it. Everyone was happy! Now you have a mish-mash of proprietary protocols on websites using interfaces that are, for the most part, inferior to many of the programs that we used 15 years ago. Use whatever interface the end user likes the most. How revolutionary!
What I want is a 'foe' system that cuts out not only the foe's posts but the entire comment tree started by them.
I've found kill-files are somewhat useless when well-intentioned troll-feeders reply and I end up seeing the troll's nonsense in the first place.
There's a San Francisco 501(c)(3) working on this stuff: hypothes.is
My own (nontrivial) browsing is definitely not CPU-bound. I've never said "wow my browser keeps using 100% of a cpu, if only it could utilize the other cores too!"
On my laptop with an Atom N450 (single core, dual SMT) CPU, when I go to Cracked.com in the morning and open the four new articles of the day in tabs, Firefox is CPU-bound for tens of seconds. I see the CPU usage pegging at 50%, which represents one of the two virtual cores in use.
It exists - sort of - and it's pretty cool. Check out www.squte.com. It's a web overlay to Usenet, permitting modding up and down and a lot more. Written by a guy who really loves Usenet but recognizes that it needs a web interface that provides the functionality people coming from systems like Reddit or Slashdot would expect.
It's pretty commendable, really. GIve it a look.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Slashdot Beta is not the answer. It is regression to the failing standard of the average blog post as set by Google and Facebook and all those sites the OP is suggesting needs improvement. As long as it is the site owners who want to be in control of discussions, we may not progress very far, but if they are really interesting is sparking discussion then they must introduce features of older discussion forums and features of USENET, meaning user-settable topics, context quoting, and forking of subthreads. Context quoting with percentage reply to quote rule is easy to do and can be done now in blogs that adopt Markdown and use a perl or javascript program to enforce the ratio. Longer topic lines with some kind of context threading is only a little more difficult.
The key is user control of context and that is exactly the feature missing in the major blogs and social media sites. That make it easy for marketers to mine posts but it is damaging to discussion and is why in the area of social activism social media is so shallow, dealing only with simple impulsive issues that have no long-term sustainability. In order to sustain a discussion or an issue with any complexity something more complex than social media blogs needs to be done. Even something as straight forward as USENET discussion forums on a web interface would be a big step in this direction. I am talking about the text-based forums. The abuses of the binary groups could be solved by only allowing links.
It is important to realize why discussions don't really effectively take place on sites like Google+ and Facebook, and why even Google Groups is a poor interface to the USENET groups it ports to. The reason is the blog model that does not support the complexity needed for a real discussion.
This is the main reason why I oppose Slashdot Beta, because it weakens the complexity needed for discussion to go any where and the reason Dice is pushing it is for the marketing opportunity presented by what is more of a blog-like structure. Maybe marketers and business people aren't smart enough to deal with contextual discussions, but I'll tell you what, the future of democratic institutions may depend on there being extensive discussions. like have occurred on Slashdot, and that business people who want to "simplify" things may reveal how tyrannical and anti-democratic they truly are, The blog my have been adopted innocently because of the ease of web coding to get blocks of text from Javascript textareas, but it could have been more sinister than that in the scale of the social media sites, an intentional desire to dumb-down discourse in the world for political control. Death to blogs!
No. It's the exact opposite. With Disqus, all discussion is stored centrally, on the Disqus servers.
Got anything to back up that cynicism?
I'm not convinced Mozilla are sellouts.
http://www.palemoon.org/