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This sounds similar to the (in)famous Dissenter comment functionality. What are the differences?
by phoe-krk 7y ago
This sounds similar to the (in)famous Dissenter comment functionality. What are the differences?
- netsharc 7y agoIn the 90's there was a Windows program that offered the same functionality, called uTOK: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html . IIRC it acted as a HTTP proxy to see which URLs you were fetching. Ah, the good old days where neo-nazis weren't everywhere online...
- quickthrower2 7y agoSounds like there is a graveyard of these things. I remember Google Sidebar. It might be called Sidewiki actually...
- SquareWheel 7y agoGoogle Sidewiki is what I was thinking of, too. And as I recall, people were not a fan. Giving up control of your website to these anonymous, semi-invisible comments seems like a bad idea. The description calling content moderation "orwellian" is also concerning. I think at this point we've all seen how twisted unmoderated comments get. If the platform is built on this premise then I can only guess how toxic such a community will become.
- Nuzzerino 7y agoIf something like this were to see wide success, that would potentially take a big use case away from Google Search, no question about that. You pretty much have to use Google Search in many cases if you want to find out what other people are saying about a given website. And if malicious comments are a problem on the platform, then that's a failure of the design of the platform rather than the idea of it. The nature of commenting as it exists now dishes out proportional exposure to those who are the loudest and most persistent, or can otherwise game the system. We've tried to solve that with human moderators (sometimes as bad as the trolls themselves), and simple voting algorithms (lowbrow meme humor gets voted to the top). It's now 2019, we're long overdue for a better way of doing things. Taking two steps backwards toward a completely unmoderated soapbox is a non-starter, and the fact that we're even having this discussion on HN is evidence that far too little effort has gone into solving these problems collectively.
- stunt 7y agoI guess StumbleUpon had comments feature too.
- nextlevelwizard 7y agoIf you see neo-nazis EVERYWHERE it might just be about you EDIT: From downvotes (without any arguments) I can only guess that there are sizable amount of people who don't know what the word nazi means.
- icebraining 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
- antupis 7y agoA probably better community.
- skrowl 7y agoIn an age where everything other than hard left speech is quickly labeled 'hate speech', I think that any censorship-free areas will quickly be judged as having a 'bad community'. Have you ever actually tried Dissenter or Gab, or are you basing the 'bad community' off of what you've heard elsewhere?
- phoe-krk 7y agoI have tried it. The public feed given to me had something about "killing all trannies", putting <n-word> back in Africa by force, climate change denial, and questioning why America doesn't yet arm everyone who isn't Muslim so the Muslim people can be shot on demand. And I seriously wish I made this all up. This place is a violent cesspool.
- bakedb3ans 7y agoThat was my experience as well. In the first six posts I saw were two by _literal_ Nazis, so I left and never came back.
- untog 7y agoI've browsed both. They are filled with hate. In fact, I just took a look on Gab's public explore page: https://gab.com/popular https://gab.com/popular within a couple of scrolls found a rant about "Corey Booker's tranny abortions", and a reference to a "lispy Mexican faggot". Most other posts are either pro-Trump memes or anti-immigration rants, and there are plenty of those on Facebook and Twitter. I get it: the sales pitch here is that you come to Gab to hear interesting thoughts are are censored by mainstream sites. But I'm not seeing a single post that made me stop and think about anything. It's mindless, hateful garbage. Even if you disagree with that and don't think it's a "bad" community I still question what would ever make it an interesting or worthwhile community. Because I'm seeing nothing.
- skrowl 7y agoDissenter is pretty great for commenting on things that have heavy-handed censorship, like political YouTube videos. They recently created their own browser (a fork of Brave with all of the BAT sh*tcoin stuff removed) when Google and Firefox both censored their extension and it seems like it's lighter and faster than Chrome, at least in my testing.
- knd775 7y ago"censored" Relax. That's not what the word means.
- rat9988 7y agoActually it's the right context. They wanted to censor the comments.
- sascha_sl 7y agoI requested the Gab Mastodon fork code a week or so ago. Normally worded email. Nothing antagonistic there. I know how to be professional. 4 days ago, CTO of Gab calling me an "SJW" on his Gab feed. Thanks, I'll consider it a certification. From the grand wizard of Gab Tech himself. /s There's plenty of other insanely toxic content on Gab. But if you're signed up to it and don't see the issue... there's really no point discussing that with you.
- drak0n1c 7y agoDissenter was banned from Firefox a few months ago.
- stOneskull 7y agoYou can still install the extension from the dissenter website
- apostacy 7y agoDissenter is a great example of why we cannot trust Mozilla. Being able to link URLs to a message board is such basic web functionality. They clearly banned it out of a political grudge, and this is just another example of how they have zero credibility and should not be trusted.