9 ms·

I don't think content creators should be in the business of providing a "platform" to anyone but themselves. Ideally, commenting should be decentralized: if you

• zatertip 5y ago
  Always refreshing to come to the technobro website to get the technobro take on how to solve a social problem with technical means.
  • qbasic_forever 5y ago
    What they're describing is precisely the model most bloggers wanted for comments in the early days of blogging (late 90s & early 2000s). Trackbacks, pingbacks, etc. and other protocols were devised to allow bloggers to reply to each other with posts and aggregate them all together. It's not some 'technobro' solution, it's a way to publish content without incurring all of the real costs of also publishing (and managing) discussion forums or comment sections. It unfortunately never really took off because Facebook came in and became the defacto platform for people to post and comment on things--essentially becoming a giant ad-funded discussion forum moderated by Facebook staff and volunteers.
    • gerikson 5y ago
      Comment sections on big WP and Movable type blogs were a thing when Facebook was still growing. The march has been towards continued centralization. Disqus offered to offload busywork for bloggers - spam, identification etc. The "indieweb" is trying to bring back pingbacks etc.
    • JoshTriplett 5y ago
      trackbacks and pingbacks stopped working because they drowned in spam.
    • jdgoesmarching 5y ago
      We’re quibbling over made-up semantics, but I’d say proposing the utopian vision of the early 2000s internet falls squarely into technobro territory.
• swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
  How do you filter 'polite' from impolite comments? Sarcasm can be thinly veiled. Hateful comments can sound genuinely nice to a ML algorithm, but taken literally can paint people in a bad light. As for the real issue the article talks about, most misinformation comes from people bringing up things that nobody asked about. Nobody asked if the world is flat, nobody asked about vaccines. Nobody asks about race, but online video game lobbies are always harping on the issue. How do you filter out people who are clever enough trolls to game algorithmic filters?
• duxup 5y ago
  Everyone is supposed to write or run some sort of browser filter for 'polite'? How does that work?
  • kebman 5y ago
    A friend of mine already invented a similar filter with the Informed Individual app. It's a filter based app where you can make purchases with filters that align with your own philosophy. So let's say you've got Celiac disease, and you just put on that filter to avoid foods that could hurt you. But it goes further. Say you're an avid environmentalist, and you could employ the filter of your organization for foods to avoid for political or environmental reasons.
  • cousin_it 5y ago
    My filter would probably be something like "reorder comments by personalized pagerank of their authors, computed over comment likes, with me as the root".
• prometheus76 5y ago
  Shouldn't you have written a post on your blog about the article, instead of posting here? And did you mark that post as "polite", so that my "polite" filter will grab it? It's a good thing I trust your tagging implicitly.
• lhorie 5y ago
  Blog pingbacks already exist for ages. The point of comment sections is to provide a convenient avenue for discussion close to the source. The problem, IMHO, is commenters seem to have become too entitled and forgot that comment sections are inherently "my house, my rules" spaces. It's a bit like shirts: yes you can take yours off, but not in my store. For the most part people are fine with that, and those who are not are seen as petulant and escorted out. I don't see the problem with bloggers purging their comment sections of even mildly off-topic banter; and they're certainly well justified to kick out trolls.
  • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    A good example. What being entitled means is quite subjective. What’s the problem with not wearing a shirt? What women wear nowadays would be considered indecent to the point of being illegal 100 years ago, but a man without a shirt is a big no-no.
    • xboxnolifes 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if it's subjective.
      • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
        Of course it matters. Whether something is subjective or not has nothing to do with whether something is reasonable or not.
  • baby 5y ago
    Had not heard of blog pingback in like a decade. These were awful and I’m glad we got rid of them :D
    • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      Who is this "we" you speak of? Joking, mostly, but webmentions are still a thing and getting a touch more popular in some of my circles. I know not everyone liked them even back when they were new, but -- with the proviso that they need to be checked for spam just like conventional comments -- I generally found them to be have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all but the rarest (and usually most actively moderated!) comment sections. The effort in setting up a blog capable of receiving pingbacks/webmentions isn't that high, but it's higher than drive-by trolls and cranks are likely to want to put in.
• mdoms 5y ago
  > if you want to see a filtered view of comments on someone's post (for example, only polite comments), run a filter in your browser, tuned to show you only polite comments Getting real "a miracle occurs"[0] vibes here. [0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpallan/4633000725 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpallan/4633000725
• o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
  Although I have never published a blog, I sometimes thought about how I might do it if I did. The "comments" could be treated like "letters" (to the editor). Comments could be treated as submissions, subject to prior approval before publication in the next "issue" of the blog. The author of the blog (editor) would receive a copy of each comment, then decide whether to publish it. Human curation. (Of course the blog author could use automation to assist the review.) In sum, I would treat the blog similar to a pre-internet, printed publication. From what I have seen this is how we achieve some degree of quality control. (Most "content" on today's web is garbage.) However one thing I never liked about "letters to the editor" is that rarely are submissions published in their entirety or original form. Editors like to edit. As such, I would allow the public to publish, without prior approval, an ed25519 hash of their submitted comment on the blog. Then if after review the comment is published, they can claim attribution, and readers can be certain that the blog author did not edit the comment. If spammers or other people want to try to stuff obvious or hidden messages into ed25519 hashes, I think that would entertaining. There should be a bar that those submitting comments have to meet if they want to see their comment published. The blog author sets that bar. This is a service to the readers.
  • a1369209993 5y ago
    > ed25519 hash Ed25519 is a public key (usually signature) system, not a hash function. You're probably thinking of either a ed25519 signature, or a (for example) sha512 hash.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
      s/hash/signature/ Sloppy terminology. Apologies. For example, here's the 64-bit signature for the comment above: e3b2b607891e364b0c80df9fe926a5aed125d8f4a0f2f4c58b58b87b92884e634bb614f13cad372f074158c035eb382535b6d33d9ba10d7d59843a17dee5720e Here's the 32-bit public key: bf9fae774061bb6f5deea9380ccdf11263071bc256c1bd0947572f0a3dcc3806 The blog author could allow commenters to publish their keys and signatures. If the author later publishes their comment, the reader can verify 1. it has not been edited (a hash would also suffice for this) and 2. it was signed with the commenter's published key (presumably by the commenter).
• syshum 5y ago
  Someone tried that once, it was banned by everyone because it could not be controlled or censored to the level people want such a system to be, thus why things have to be centralized because control is more important
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Ideally, commenting should be done on sites like Reddit and HN. Someone posts an article, you have a Reddit link-post with comments, an HN link-post with comments, a lobste.rs link-post with comments, etc. Everyone's own blog post is a bit too decentralized, there isn't really a discussion. Comment filtering would be nice, but hard to implement, especially with context. Digg/reddit-based sites have their own community and (tbh) echo-chamber. So people form interesting discussions and respectful disagreements, instead of "hot takes" and flame wars. Heck, if the trolls want they can create their own site, where they bash random articles. But nobody else has to pay attention to their awful comments.
  • twobitshifter 5y ago
    All you really need is a newsreader or email thread with catchup
• ta2163 5y ago
  Dissenter attempted this, and was quickly deplatformed.
• crazygringo 5y ago
  So... how am I going to see the aggregate of all comments from all sites on that story? Is the story site responsible for managing pingbacks? What if they don't? Or a third-party aggregator? But what's their business model? Why would people want to pollute their own site with seemingly random one-line comments on stories entirely unrelated to the rest of their own site, that nobody wants to read out of context? How are people going to upvote comments so I can read the best ones first? How will this system prevent it from turning into 99.99% spam comments on everything? The idea of decentralized commenting is great, but in practice it seems to fall apart completely.
  • CaptArmchair 5y ago
    I think neither model provides a catch-all solution. Whatever mode of interaction with an audience fits best hinges entirely on a myriad of factors, both technical and non-technical. Human communication, whether digital or analog, is a continuum. You could have a discussion via snail mail letters, online mailing lists, letters published in a paper, blogs who publish as if corresponding through letters, pamphlets and manifests, digital forums are a lot like message walls where people tack on strings of post-its, sites such as HN or Reddit are ultimately aggregators of links - numeric identifiers - turning them in catalogues of sort of content elsewhere,... and then there's the myriad of news sites churning out a continuous stream of succinct missives about any topic under the sun like a ticker tape, or a news strip. There's two aspects to comments. There's the technical aspect of a HTML form, processing submissions, compiling a list of submissions, and then integrating those as an assembly into a larger context: below an blog post, an article, a link, a video, a piece of audio,... There's the content, published information, itself. That is, the origin item as first put out there by an original publisher, and then the ensuing flurry of opinions, additions, corrections, jokes, nonsense, unsolicited self promotions, and so on. The complex interaction between those aspects, medium and message, has been the subject of fields such as communication theory and media studies. Most famously by Marshall McLuhan. The convenience of having a way to express semi-anonymized opinions in the digital world at every turn and corner is, paradoxically, a boon and a curse at the same time. the affordances of combining and re-combining digital technologies to provide (new) modes of interaction between audience and the stage, tends to be at odds with what actually happens on the stage, what is being said in the fray and how it is being said. The biggest pitfall in a discussion like this is losing sight of this intangible, abstract complexity, while reducing the modalities to plain technicalities and sterile theorizing over network models and effects. Your questions may be relevant and important to you, but they they only carry value in the eye of the beholder. It's perfectly valid to promote as well as disparage the upvote/downvote system because of it's perceived advantages and disadvantages. It's also perfectly valid to completely do away with comments entirely as one might feel that they add little value to their outlet and tend to become a burden to moderate / manage. (Tangentially, this is also why I take an interest in the Smol Web movement which tends to focus on self-publishing and content proper: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...) At the end of the day, there's a shared responsibility and it is not merely limited to the implementation of a particular policy or technology, but rather on a moral level: how each of us chooses to approach and treat others and what they bring to the table. And that's what really matters in all of this. Moderation is an intrinsic part of governing a community of people. Which is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish by any measure. Being mindful about the drivers and motives that underpin online governance helps understand the decision making process that leads to preferring one way of doing things over another.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  If you come up with a way to accurately filter polite comments then you can either 1) make lots of money turning it into a product or 2) watch it go obsolete as people modify their word choice and sentence structure to say equally awful things in different ways. That aside, it doesn't seem like stomping on anything to say "I want productive conversations only and it's my property so I decide what is productive" The idea that anyone should be able to say whatever they want on someone else's always seemed extremely entitled to me. The idea that no one should say anything except on their own site seems to be an extreme limitation on free expression.