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Mozilla to Develop Comments Platform for New York Times and Washington Post
- akilism 12y agointeresting...kind of like a news focused discourse?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- akilism 12y agoA little more info from Dan Skiner's blog http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-new-communities-with-the-new-york http://dansinker.com/post/89256288060/opennews-building-new-...
- danso 12y ago> Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a news release, “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.” So it sounds like they want to create a new social network, or at least their own form of Discourse/phpBB....why? The impetus for this seems to be the infamously dreadful comment sections of news sites...so...why not start by building a better commenting filter system? Even something that can sit atop of Disqus or any other third-party platform, and quickly sift for comments that are irrelevant, based on such heuristics as user account's signup time, the user's overall "karma", the length of comment, maybe even some configurable NLP factors to determine how relevant the content of the comment is to the overall article? This wouldn't/shouldn't have to be an auto-flag system, but merely create a priority queue of messages to be modded...which would be far more efficient than whatever system most news sites currently use. But to build a system that is basically another social network, except for news sites? That's a lot of faith in your customers to think they'll sign up for something new that is also cognitively demanding.
- a3n 12y agoWould be cool if The Times and The Post could figure out some way for their respective readers to engage each other via this new platform.
- itry 12y agoIt will take 2 years to develop this bitch? My bet: It will flop. Systems that take long to complete usually flop. Reminds me of Diaspora. The things that take off are usually created in a short time. Hacker News, Git... How long did the first version of Facebook take? Wikipedia says "Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003". Does that mean it was coded in one day? Since it was a hot-or-not type site, that could very well be. About the second version - then called "Facebook" - Wikipedia says it took less then a month to code. My most successful project ever took me one day before I launched it. My second most successful one weekend. Then years of development went into these. But only after I saw people use the core functionality.
- Crito 12y agoWhile completed projects almost always take longer (git is still under active development, Facebook obviously is still paying developers to come in every week, etc), it is probably a sign of good project planning to be able to get a functional prototype out the door in under a week. It's the difference between a project with realistic and obtainable goals and milestones, and a project with a pie-in-the-sky grand vision but no idea how to get there.
- tormeh 12y agoWell, some things are just hard, take time and can't be divided into vertical slices. That's usually not the case with web technologies, if my impression is correct, but it certainly is the case in many other disciplines.
- Crito 12y agoSure. There are certainly some things which don't lend themselves to regular achievable goals. If you were tasked with building a bridge, you'd probably be hard pressed to put out anything within the first few days, let alone a prototype. That can happen in software too, but I suspect that situations where that is the case are in the minority. This isn't fighter jet avionics, it's a glorified discussion board.
- g8oz 12y agoIt seems to me that Mozilla has over expanded and is in search of a mission. A useable browser not beholden to the latest UX fads would be a start.
- Kiro 12y agoWhat UX fads?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoThey're probably moaning about Firefox 'copying Chrome' or something. Though they're not copying Chrome; Firefox has its own distinctive style and I much prefer it to Chrome's.
- knowtheory 12y agoMozilla's mission is to promote openness on the web. It is both easy to articulate and easy to understand. Their mission is not to build a web browser for the sake of building a web browser. They build a browser to protect the web and you. This project fits in with that mission too.
- Buetol 12y agoLooks like they want to build a open-source discussion API with identity management (so people can be anonymous) and good moderation tools. So you can spin-up a forum, a comment box or even an HN-like community with the same API (ala Discourse/Disqus). I don't know if I would bet on their success (see Persona, another great idea that flopped) but, a least, there are trying something big.
- 001sky 12y agowith identity management (so people can be anonymous) love this. It will be amazing when faceless, nameless people are allowed to comment without vituperative editing/obfuscation on anything the NYT publishes--given NYT is a brand around telling people what to think. They are currently the ultimate "don't talk back" old-media platform.
- tormeh 12y agoWell, most comments on the net are utter shite. I don't blame them. Hacker News is different, but you don't have to go further than arstechnica to see the start of rapidly declining comment quality. A mainstream publication like NYT? Hats of to them if they manage an open discussion that's not just trolling, hatred, keyboard warriors and bigotry. I'll believe it when I see it. Just read the comments to The Economist. You'd think such an archetypically highbrow publication would have highbrow comments. You'd be wrong. Only niche websites have good comments. I guess some spamfilter-like technology could be applied to filter out bad ones, though. Wikipedia also has an engine to filter out bad edits. Should have lots in common.
- Crito 12y agoI find it interesting to compare "second tier" 4chan boards like /g/ (technology) to the discussion boards of other websites (like arstechnica). Typically, a place like /g/ compares very well, if not better. Sites like to blame things like the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory", but I think most of the blame lays on the site for having poor moderation.
- dec0dedab0de 12y agoThe best part of this is that Mozilla is getting money from a source other than Google.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y agoHa, I bet the main design goal of this system is to figure out how to make sure comments they don't like aren't right under the article. It's been typical that a highly upvoted and articulate top comment blows massive holes in the political agenda of a given article or oped. This is why so many of these publications have yanked comment sections altogether.
- pjc50 12y agoSometimes this is the case, and sometimes the top comment is going on about Obamacare or chemtrails or Keynsianism or global warming. Regardless of the topic of the article.
- jmdn28 12y agoCase example: The Guardian Op Ed section.
- knowtheory 12y agoOh yes. It's all a huge conspiracy. Can't let the sheep get too uppity. Baaaa. Baaaaaaa. After all that's what open source is for, right?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- knowtheory 12y agoEdit: OP was claiming that the choice of Dan Sinker to lead the project was some how an uncritical fad pick because Sinker had been on the Colbert Report (years ago) & has a popular twitter account. Which is about as unfounded a speculative ad hominem as you can get. You have no idea what you're talking about. Dan Sinker ran an indie publication for years (Punk Planet), was a journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago, and has been running the OpenNews project for 3 years during which time their fellows have launched projects like http://tabula.nerdpower.org/ http://tabula.nerdpower.org/ . He also started projects like Tacofancy (https://github.com/sinker/tacofancy https://github.com/sinker/tacofancy ).
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoSo Mozilla's a web development company for hire nowadays?
- cs702 12y agoRegardless of how successful this project ends up being, I find this to be its most interesting aspect: instead of building or buying a proprietary system, the New York Times is retaining a not-for-profit, pro-open-web organization to build what I can only assume will be a free, to-be-open-sourced platform. I like that.
- danso 12y agoThey've done this previously with DocumentCloud: http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/20083268/ http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/20083268/ Which is still active and widely used among news organizations, but is probably better known for the JavaScript libraries that were abstracted from it during development: Underscore and Backbone
- ma2rten 12y agoAlso CoffeeScript.
- knowtheory 12y agoCoffeescript was not funded by the Knight Foundation and was not developed for DocumentCloud. Jeremy started Coffeescript as a personal project in his off time while building out DocumentCloud/Backbone/Underscore.
- CodeCube 12y agoIt was still funded by them, albeit indirectly :P Actually a great example of the kinds of halo effects you can get from funding open source development
- Alupis 12y agoIs there not a comment platform that already exists? Seems strange if there isn't...
- 12y ago
- wallzz 12y agoEnabling comments in newspapers and website that have world wide reputation and high quality articles will reduce the number of pages visited by a single users, and will affect the final perception of the reader on the article that he read. witch in a long term will affect the future articles wrote by journalist making them targeting "narrow low minded" people that are the general stereotypes who comments on articles by letting their hidden violence go out through subjective violent comments. please don't do that.
- NYCHacker 12y ago$3.9m over 2 years? Give me 2 years and I'll build that for $3.8m.
- digitalboss 12y ago-3 Karma Do better. Be useful to this community.
- NYCHacker 12y agoMy point is that it's a ridiculous sum of money over a long time frame for something that's not very complicated and of questionable value. I don't care about internet points.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aikah 12y agoGood luck Moz.An exemple of what not to do is the Huffpo comment plateform. It is so horrible they are downgrading to Facebook comments(which are horrible too but at least one can follow comments without context switching). I wonder who thought comments in popups were great UX,horrible and stupid. Keep the think simple and readable.Dont over do realtime features.When I read something I dont want my eyes to be distracted with "X new comments" notifications. Dont over nest either. Limiting nesting levels is good for the discussion flow. And of course,the main job is to make moderation easy.
- jayzalowitz 12y agoHaving been a product manager at a newspaper working on a comments platform.. Good luck Mozilla
- guelo 12y agoAt first I was wondering why Mozilla would send its developers out on a consulting gig instead of working on its products. But then I see that this isn't Mozilla, it's OpenNews, which seems to be some kind of internship program funded by Knight Foundation and Mozilla. This article is misleading, almost like the NYTimes got bamboozled into thinking they were hiring Mozilla. EDIT: This comment might be confusing now that HN changed the headline, but the NYT article still says that Mozilla is the one doing the job. If I was Mozilla I would not be happy.
- knowtheory 12y agoNo. Mozilla is actually two legal entities. Mozilla the Corporation and Mozilla the Foundation (but the mantra is "One Mozilla"). The Open News team is part of Mozilla the Foundation, just the way that the Open Badges and Open Science teams are. Mozilla the Corporation is responsible for Firefox and a variety of other projects. But as ever, Open News and all of the efforts within the Foundation are very much part of Mozilla, and there is, obviously, no deception going on. The Knight Foundation, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are not stupid enough to be bamboozled in the manner that you appear to be implying. P.S. if the mods are reading this... OpenNews is developing the tools WITH the NYT and WaPo, not (just) FOR them as @dansinker notes here: https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/479645936168493057 https://twitter.com/dansinker/status/479645936168493057
- johansch 12y agoSo Mozilla is shifting (partially) to b2b consulting, then?
- wil421 12y agoI dont know if would be considered consulting for NYT or WP. It looks like they are all in a strategic partnership of some kind. The article stated in 2 years when the project is done it will then be available for download by other news agencies, this leads me to believe they are "all in it together".
- mbrubeck 12y ago
- kn0thing 12y agoHopefully they'll take advantage of reddit's open source and use our commenting system as a model.
- galago 12y agoHopefully they adopt Reddit's pattern of constant tweeking and improvement. Reddit now has a significant track record of adapting to the harsh comment environment that is the open internet, and it works surprisingly well.
- dang 12y agoI'd be interested in hearing your observations about what works surprisingly well, if you'd care to share them. Probably best at hn@ycombinator.com, so we don't pull the thread off topic.
- yawaramin 12y agoPlease, yes. They can spin up an instance of R2 and have it running a test site in less than a week. They can even have a completely open development model, a la Linux kernel, if they want.
- niix 12y agoThis is really cool. I'm excited to see how Mozilla takes on a CMS (or whatever it may be at that point).
- knowtheory 12y agoFrom my position as a fellow Knight grantee (i run DocumentCloud, and interact with many of the folks involved in this upcoming project) i'm pretty excited. The NYT and WaPo have world class developers, and the OpenNews folks are people who very clearly get both the web and the news. And a project like this serves some concrete needs including one that DocumentCloud itself would benefit from. If this project ends up tackling part of the single sign on problem for news organizations, integration with 3rd party tools & platforms like DocumentCloud becomes a lot easier. Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post upload documents to our site, and then embed on their pages. Rather than requiring their users to login to DocumentCloud as well as the host site, we'd love to be able to have a standard way (that has buy-in from news sites) to authenticate users, especially if it's one that allows us to feed back moderation and the like back to the host organization.
- humannature 12y ago"world class developers" seriously? You think a world class developer would choose WaPo over Google or Facebook?
- icedbergs 12y agoIt's interesting you say that the NYT has world-class developers, because it seemed like (from the leaked memo a few weeks back) that the digital side is kind of a mess right now - but maybe that's a direction vs. talent problem.
- CamperBob2 12y agoGoing by their iOS apps, it's damned hard to argue that NYT has world-class dev talent. (I could be blaming the talent for the sins of management, of course.)
- knowtheory 12y agoYeah, if you read the innovation report there's a breakout box that specifically highlights a number of their development talent. To name but a few: Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript), Mike Bostock (D3), Amanda Cox (creator of a lot of the NYT's great data visualizations), Kevin Quealy (Amanda's partner in vis), Gregor Aisch (wrote much of DataWrapper), and until recently David Nolen (aka Swannodette of Clojure & Clojurescript fame) all work for the NYT. I haven't done a detailed read-through of the innovation report, but Niemanlab's writeup comports with my sense of the state of digital journalism (and the Niemanlab folks are quite good): http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i... Key to many of the problems that orgs like the NYT have are not a lack of prestige or ability to attract top tier talent. The problem news orgs have are organizational and structural, which are partially a matter of leadership and priorities. Anyway, irrespective of any of that, the NYT does innovative things with data and visualization before anybody else in journalism, or hell even visualization in general, does (not to say that they're the only ones pushing the state of the art).
- nsxwolf 12y agoBetter idea - turn off comments.
- r00fus 12y agoIf the moderation tools aren't strong, I'd agree.
- cabbeer 12y agoOnline commenting is something I'm secretly passionate about. “The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one to one pattern. And television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one to many pattern. The Internet gives us the many to many pattern.” Think of how awesome it would be if we figured out how to refine communicating/ commenting online. Does anyone know if it's possible to contribute to this project?
- dpeck 12y agoDiscourse seems like it'd be a good candidate and let everyone win http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/
- rplnt 12y agoIs there some example of embedded discourse? As a general discussion forum it's quite bad, but seems ideal for this kind of stuff (as an alternative to disqus). Additionally, are there providers of discourse, either paid or ad-powered, so people don't have to take care of it?
- alxndr 12y ago> "As a general discussion forum it's quite bad" I'd be curious to hear what makes it so bad.
- rplnt 12y agoIt's flat.
- dpeck 12y agoIts creators would say thats a feature.
- rplnt 12y agoI've read some reasoning about that when they introduced the product... and it wasn't convincing (something about keeping discussion on topic I believe?). I really think their reason is ease of design, implementation, maintenance and scalability.
- dpeck 12y agoI dunno, I think they actually believe it, and they do have some experience from the SO days. Threading has its place, but creates sub-discussions, something that is understandable to want to avoid if your vision is for more inclusive conversation. That said, in higher traffic forums I see this approach being a nightmare to keep up with, and will read like a schizophrenic journal.
- tmsh 12y agoI find it interesting and old-school that people still assume the best way to create software is via the capital-new-project-investment system instead of the strengthen-existing systems. The latter approach takes advantage of the millions of people and the free, evolutionary market (i.e., selecting from github or the best out there, forking, etc. - like with say KHTML). The former approach is one or two people thinking they can outperform the filtering, evolutionary processes in all that (sometimes they can, but it strikes me as old school in the sense of maybe capitalism is old school in the sense of single large investments of capital).
- jqm 12y agoI think it is fantastic that Mozilla is getting funding. That being said I have some reservations about browser maker in bed with news organization. While I perceive no immediate danger, I guess I feel platform should be independent of propaganda.
- asadotzler 12y agoMozilla has never been just a browser maker. We exist to make the Web better for people, and browsers are one of the products we build to do that. We also build other products and do other things that make the Web better for the world. This program, as part of the Mozilla+Knight OpenNews initiative, is a good example of how we are more than a browser maker.
- jqm 12y agoSure. I use Thunderbird as well and love it and I am aware you are involved with other projects. But....no matter what else you do, you are a browser maker. And, I have some reservations about your involvement with news organizations that are sometimes used to push governmental (or other) positions. The concerns are not large, (after all the same type of concerns could exist with Google involvement). Nor is it necessarily my decision and I'll probably continue to use Firefox up to the point it welcomes me with "Hello Citizen...for your protection your surfing habits and posting opinions will be reported to the Ministry of Attitudinal Correction". I'm just pointing out a potential conflict and minor concern. Hopefully it does not grow larger.
- Lennie 12y agoWhat is great about this is better diversity in their funding.
- malandrew 12y agoPlease please please use Mozilla Persona as the login mechanism. Pretty please.
- Lennie 12y agoThey are definitely looking at it and talking to Persona developers.
- malandrew 12y agoThe biggest question mark in this whole thing is how they are going to raise the level of discourse around articles via smart moderation features. News sites are often a race to the bottom in terms of comment quality where all the trolls kill off any meaningful discourse. A while ago when this very problem for news sites was discussed on an HN thread, someone posted a pertinent question "Why should the discussion of an article occur in the same place as the article itself?". The point that person was making is that all the aggregator sites like HN and Reddit for example, have done a good job providing a forum for commenting on content posted elsewhere (like the NYTimes and WaPo). With that in mind, how would one turn this splintering into manageable communities into a feature. There needs to be a way where there is automatic segmenting based on quality of commentary. Maybe like a Major leagues, minor leagues and troll leagues, where there are two or three simultaneous threads going on. People who've never commented before and have no karma end up in the minor leagues by default. If they get upvoted enough their, their comments go to the major leagues. Likewise, if their comments get downvoted enough it ends up in the troll leagues, where the trolls can quibble among one another. The hardest part is going to be establishing a culture that reinforces high quality content like here on HN. I can't even begin to see how you build something like that overnight. It takes weeks to months of slow stable growth with really good people to establish a high quality commentary culture that is self policing without using their moderation powers for censorship. I have no earthly idea how you create a feature that promotes the same in a community where hundreds to thousands of commenters are going to show up on day one. Maybe you could launch the comment system as a private beta feature where entry into the private beta is based on posting a really high quality comment and that good enough comments get inducted into the thread so that current private beta people can comment. Once you've posted enough such high quality comments, you get general access to participate. Then, like on HN, you eventually earn the right to upvote comments and one day, with enough points, the right to downvote comments.
- snowwrestler 12y agoI don't know if you're referring to my comments, but I've made that point here a few times. Great comments come from great communities. Building a great online community is hard; online forums and social media platforms have succeeded far beyond any content website I can think of. So: the technology of a commenting system is the least hard part. The challenge is social: why would people come to the WashingtonPost or NYTimes to build human relationships? I don't think people relate to newspapers that way. In contrast, social media and forums are optimized around enabling human relationships. So I think the wave of the future for content publishers is to optimize their integration with those existing communities. Otherwise they are basically trying to compete with them directly--in addition to producing great content. Good luck with that.
- BorisMelnik 12y agoMy hope and wish for this project that it will turn into an open-source, non-profit comment system able to be deployed and plugged into any and all web apps. Kind of like what Google+ is trying to do (with comments, YouTube) but not so evil.
- walterbell 12y agoIs this project going to interoperate with W3C web annotation efforts, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ ? How about interoperability with crowdsourced Linked Data for events, people, places and times? NYU has a project: http://pleiades.stoa.org/ http://pleiades.stoa.org/ for ancient history, but the concepts apply to journalistic fact-checking.
- alexvoda 12y agoAny idea where can one check the status, participate in discussions and contribute to this project?