12 ms·
Talk: An open-source commenting platform focused on better conversation
- cloud_thrasher 7y agoCoral Talk is a Vox Media endeavor.
- Fellshard 7y agoThat certainly puts a very different angle on how this will be used, and what use cases it's targeted towards. From prior experience, Vox outlets are extremely stringent about what they permit in their comments: specifically, only people who agree or can extend the arguments of a given article further are preserved; or quibbles about minor details. No true discussion is allowed outside the article's bubble.
- andrepd 7y agoSource? Those are pretty serious accusations.
- ggm 7y agoFunny, I don't see these as accusations, I see these as curated engagement. The upside is there, if you know up-front its the basis of the engagement. If its applied retrospectively it sucks, for a number of people. But curation is not always bad. "it depends"
- Noos 7y agoThere's no "engagement." It just ends up with banal "I agree" posts that add nothing to the article. And it doesn't add many to them, Polygon's comment sections tend to be tiny and not worth reading, for example. You get better news and engagement on reddit.
- Fellshard 7y agoThey used to be larger, and I believe that restrictive, inconsistent moderation drove people away, but that's merely a guess of one probable cause.
- Fellshard 7y agoPersonal anecdote. Vox itself removed comments after a time, probably because this bubble could not reasonably be preserved in response to the majority of their articles. The Verge is somewhat more open, depending on the topic and whether it is technical or political in nature. Polygon's Ben Kuchera is a caustically aggressive moderator, and is the primary one I saw behaving in this manner, in addition to antagonizing commenters who disagreed with an article's premise; doubly so if he himself wrote the article.
- wmf 7y agoSince it's decentralized, maybe someone could create an alt-right instance that allows only the highest-quality and most ideologically-correct comments. Then we could see how long it would take for Vox to distance themselves from the project.
- camdenlock 7y agoIsn’t this what Vox and friends already do, just with s/alt-right/leftism/ ?
- Fellshard 7y agoI believe that is their point.
- jp_sc 7y agoTheir license says the copyright of the project belongs to Mozilla. How weird. https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/master/LICENSE
- Fellshard 7y agohttps://scroll.blog/2019/02/25/scrolls-new-collaboration-with-mozilla/ https://scroll.blog/2019/02/25/scrolls-new-collaboration-wit... With this recent product that is also closely integrated with Vox properties, I'd say this is a deeply concerning move how closely the two are becoming entangled.
- camdenlock 7y agoIndeed. Some creepy language on the Scroll site, e.g. “With Scroll, journalists get paid to report the stories important to democracy [...]” These Vox-alikes seem to fancy themselves arbiters of meaning with regard to “journalism” and “democracy”. Anything which disagrees with their personal definitions must be “alt-right”...
- ianbicking 7y agoIt started as a Mozilla Foundation project, and then Vox Media took it over.
- KajMagnus 7y agoWhy didn't Mozilla continue leading the project? (If you happen to know) Here's a blog post about the change: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/22/the-coral-project-is-moving-to-vox-media/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/22/the-coral-project-i... It writes: "After 3.5 years at Mozilla, the time is right for Coral software to move further into the journalism space, and grow with the support of an organization grounded in that industry", and "... The Coral Project will receive the backing of a large company ...". — However, Vox could back the project, also if it was still led my Mozilla, right. Still unclear to me why Mozilla didn't want to continue leading the project? Maybe Talk was too different from other things Mozilla does, and maybe it cost money and didn't bring any revenue?
- sittingnut 7y agonon recognition of subjectivity of terms like "journalist", "annoying", "off topic", etc., used in description, don't bode well for success of this project.
- hnarn 7y agoThe term "journalist" is no more subjective than "author" (literature) or "programmer". As with many things, the line is normally drawn where people start to making (wholly or partyly) a living from the activity or not, i.e. whether they are professionals.
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y agoThose words can have different meanings in different contexts; one can be talking about jobs and say "I'm a journalist", and mean that they earn their income through journalistm. One can also, in a conversation about hobbies, say "I'm a programmer", and imply only that they enjoy the act of programming and do it in their free time. I think it's dangerous to set hard requirements for such labels, specially ones like "journalist". It's not a given that journalism is considered worth protecting and, while in most western countries there's a sort of public agreement that "journalists" deserve protection, this often seems to be associated more to the word "journalist" than the act of journalism itself, and taking that label away from someone may also leave them defenseless, as they no longer "deserve" the protection of a "journalist".
- naasking 7y ago> The term "journalist" is no more subjective than "author" (literature) or "programmer". It's more contentious than that. Journalists supposedly deal with "facts", but there's often considerable disagreement over facts or their interpretation. No matter your political persuasion, I'm sure there are "journalists" making a living on this, as per your definition, but who operate on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you and from whom you'd want very badly to strip that title of legitimacy.
- adamsea 7y ago
- a3n 7y agoThe bullet list seems to describe Twitter. I've wondered why most publishers of comments don't just give up and say "comment on Twitter." Not that I would like that, but still ...
- hanniabu 7y agoIt would be interesting to have a commenting system powered by Twitter where each article/post has a Twitter post with the article name and link so others not finding this post through your website can still comment, and the replies to this Twitter post can be pulled into you article/post and listed as comments.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y agoThat lasts until twitter changes their api or tos. Then all your comments are gone.
- tduberne 7y agoThat is possible using bridgy and webmentions: https://brid.gy/about#how https://brid.gy/about#how Here an example: https://nicolas-hoizey.com/2017/07/so-long-disqus-hello-webmentions.html https://nicolas-hoizey.com/2017/07/so-long-disqus-hello-webm... The missing part is the creation of the initial tweet in your idea, but that should be easy to automate.
- KajMagnus 7y ago> the replies to this Twitter post can be pulled into you article/post and listed as comments I think that wouldn't work because of copyright and Terms of Use. Probably somewhere in Twitter's ToU there's something that says you cannot copy Twitter discussions and add to your own website. — If you study Twitter's ToU, probably the people who post to Twitter, never gave you permission to include their tweets on your blog. I like the idea, and would want to do sth simiar, but just linking to tweets, instead of "downloading" them to the blog. And the blog author could write a summary of what the Twitter discussion is about (what sub topic related to the blog post, the Twitter discussion discusses), next to the link. I'd also like to automatically find and link to discussions at HN and Reddit and Mastodon (in a commenting system I'm developing, seem my profile)
- brighter2morrow 7y agoIt took a few clicks to find the license so here it is: Apache v2. Not bad, I've been looking at open source social network software recently and unfortunately all the widely used ones are AGPL3. I get the benefits but I could find anything reasonably of remotely similar quality that was even GPL3.
- protomyth 7y agoYou also probably want to read their Talk Platform Acceptable Use Policy https://coralproject.net/acceptable-use-policy/ https://coralproject.net/acceptable-use-policy/
- brighter2morrow 7y agoThanks, I assumed something like that for their instance of the platform, but the code is there to launch an independent instance of the platform, if desired.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoDo you have particular uses for open source social network software for which the AGPL would be a problem for your usage?
- brighter2morrow 7y agoYes, I wanted to add automated moderation policies (including but not limited to word filters) to improve conversation on a platform I was considering building, but as I understand it all the algorithms to implement the policies would have to be published with the rest of the site under AGPL
- KajMagnus 7y agoWhy would the rest of the site have to be published under AGPL? I'm thinking other parts of the site aren't the same "work" as the conversation platform? Is the reason possibly AGPL Javascript? Maybe then server side code, could be AGPL, and Javascript instead e.g. MIT? However don't one typically place a blog commenting system in an iframe. Then personally I think you wouldn't have to release the website that embeds the blog comments iframes, under AGPL? And a discussion forum, one places on a sub domain, on a separate server? Also separate from your main website? Background: I'm developing AGPL discussion software that you can also embed in an iframe, for blog comments. https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments. What are your thoughts about using sth like that, if the code that creates the iframe is MIT or Apache2, and the code that runs inside the iframe is AGPL?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- shib71 7y agoThe copy implies very strongly that comments can be a respected part of the article as a whole, and by implication - of journalism. My experience in the past has been that comments are not taken seriously by the publisher, seemingly just added to tick the "social" checkbox. But to make a commitment to the dialogue an article can generate seems like a positive development for journalism.
- rtpg 7y agoThough comments are always hard, places like the NY Times have a lot of content in the comments section. Moderation helps a lot I imagine. And some of it is kinda trash, but they'd still be better replacements for Bret Stephen's 100th "Democrats should listen to me, a person who will never vote for a Dem, on what to do" article
- cybersnowflake 7y agoTLDR: Looks like stripped down run of the mill commenting system with things taken out or rearranged mostly with little common thread other than to make it more difficult to follow or connect, with typical buzzword woke commentary. Not sure how revolutionary this is when theres already tons of commenting systems that don't do any of the things theyre afraid of by virtue of being older, floating around. Pretty subpar even by the standards of HN/Slashdot vaporware.
- KajMagnus 7y agoSeems the project isn't being so actively developed any longer? https://github.com/coralproject/talk/graphs/contributors https://github.com/coralproject/talk/graphs/contributors Why is that? (In the summer of 2018 and onwards, 90%? 95%? of the GitHub activity abruptly disappeared) Two other open source blog commenting system that are being actively developed are Commento https://commento.io https://commento.io and Talkyard https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments (I'm developing it).
- ryacko 7y agoIt has implemented all the design goals and the code has reached stable?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wyattjoh 7y agoWe’re doing all the development under the next branch, a big rewrite to typescript :)
- KajMagnus 7y agoOk :- ) Thanks for the reply. Curious about the new features / benefits / things you'll add, is there any roadmap? (didn't find in GitHub or the blog) (If you're doing more things than moving to Typescript. Typescript is great b.t.w. :- ))
- wyattjoh 7y agoWe're working on a more public roadmap, but the move to Typescript also allowed us to switch out Apollo on the client side with Relay as well as some other pretty significant improvements to the software as a whole (as you said, TS is pretty great :) )
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
- theon144 7y agoThe focus on "identifying journalists", muting "annoying" voices, the "RESPECT" button and pushing specific comments to the top by featuring them kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth... And I would be the last to argue that comment sections below news articles are anything but a cesspool - they're notoriously bad! But I'm just not sure a control model this heavy handed and lip-servicey is the right approach.
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y agoSame. Reading "Five Myths of Community Design" on the same site [1] left me kind of wondering if they really built a service people would want to use. Personally, I've always thought the "like" model of modern online interaction is broken, but my idea about fixing it would be to add "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons, but only display the sum the two as a measure of engagement. [1] https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-design-day-one/#myth1 https://coralproject.net/blog/five-myths-of-community-design...
- jdavis703 7y agoYou need more than agree and disagree to measure engagement, otherwise you're just measuring polarization. For example you might want to measure several reactions such as: interesting, funny, angering and sad.
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y agoI believe that if the social currency is interactions instead of specifically positive interactions, as well as with the shift from "dislike" to "disagree" (something less associated with negative emotions) this would discourage engaging at all with strongly offensive content, effectively just starving it of attention. Of course this is just a theory; until someone implements it and evaluates the result, I may well be completely wrong and maybe it'd even have the oposite effect.
- mgkimsal 7y agoa "thanks" button would go a long way to bringing some outward civility to many discussions. 'like' just doesn't have the same weight.
- Mindwipe 7y agoOh look, an AUP that explicitly discriminates against sex workers and sexual minorities! I'm shocked.
- USNetizen 7y agoSo....like Disqus but open source then?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- olah_1 7y ago>In our study of gender nonbinary people of color, women of color, and online commentary, participants talked about having to constantly run a cost-benefit analysis on participation in any online conversations, based on the likelihood that they would be attacked, merely for participation. 4chan solved this problem a decade ago. Put your content before your identity rather than the other way around. In many spaces today, being a straight white man is far more inflammatory than being a non-binary person of color. This is especially true in the open-source community. The solution is to stop pushing your identity onto people when it's completely irrelevant. I'm not saying hide who you are. But it's simply not relevant to the vast majority of discussions.
- adamsea 7y agoYou are literally saying “hide who you are, whenever I decide that who you are does not matter.” EDIT: OP literally says: “ I'm not saying hide who you are. But it's simply not relevant to the vast majority of discussions.” Again, who gets to make that decision? Who gets to set the criteria for making that decision?
- olah_1 7y ago>Again, who gets to make that decision? Who gets to set the criteria for making that decision? The people you're talking to. These are all just social mores, but you are the one that deals with the fallout. There's pushback on identity first discourse because it's often seen as distasteful.
- lapnitnelav 7y agoExactly, the main thing about 4ch and the likes is that you can't satiate your need for validation through likes / upvotes and a profile. Much like what Instagram is trying now (hiding other people's likes count) or this very platform, doing away with those metrics should help foster better conversations.
- adamsea 7y ago> you can't satiate your need for validation through likes / upvotes and a profile. The concern mentioned in the excerpt from TFA was a perception by the people it spoke to that they had to self-censor in order not to be personally attacked in online discussion. You make a good point but it seems like it is about something other than what the TFA excerpt describes. TFA quoted by OP: > participants talked about having to constantly run a cost-benefit analysis on participation in any online conversations, based on the likelihood that they would be attacked, merely for participation.
- whydoineedone 7y agoit's censorship and controlling thought and debate but honestly, I think we need some of that in the US right now. too many conspiracy theories and stupid ideas are afloat, flooding the entire nation in a pool of garbage. it will be heavy handed but overall for the good of the country's stability